2. Aristotle.
The general idea of cyclical history is
repeated by Aristotle, but
only in passing, as if it was
so generally accepted that it needed no
support. He
flatly says in the Metaphysics (1074b.
11) that the arts
and sciences have been lost and regained many times;
in the Politics (1264a. 1) that all ideas of any
value
have already been discovered and tried; and in De
caelo
(270b. 19) that the same doctrines have been
discovered
innumerable times. But he gives no account of how
and why men lost their acquired knowledge, no story
of
cataclysmic destruction of races or nations. Nor does
he attempt to connect
the periodic recurrence of ideas
with any set of cosmic cycles. In the Meteorologica
(352a. 32) he does mention Deucalion's
Deluge, but
limits its extent to the Greek world, though later
(352b-353a) he speaks of geological changes as occur-
ring at all times, but not in identical cycles. In the
Politics (1269a. 3) he accepts the theory of
cataclysms
as possibly true and that of primitive men as either
born
of the earth or survivors from some catastrophe.
In the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Problemata (910a. 35) the
Deluge is again
mentioned. Aristotle apparently dealt
with periodic catastrophes in his
lost work On Philoso-
phy (frag. 8) in which he also described the rebirth
of
civilization after the Deluge. But none of this is
precise and we have no
speculations about the length
of cycles nor about the similarities of their
details.
Aristotle's works do, however, show how widely ac-
cepted was the idea of periodic cataclysms
and the
periodic rediscovery of the arts and sciences.
Aristotle is also responsible for the idea (which was
to be developed by
Polybius) of the degeneration of
forms of government. There are, he says in
his Politics
(Book III, Ch. 7, 1279a. 23ff., and
1279b. 1ff.), three
kinds of good government: the rule of one man, Mon-
archy; of a few, Aristocracy; and of many,
Consti-
tutional Democracy.
Corresponding to these are three
forms of bad government; tyranny, which is
govern-
ment in the interest of the
ruler; oligarchy, in the
interest of the rich; democracy, in the interest
of the
needy. But he is careful to point out that the number
of people
in the governing body is not so important
as wealth. Government by the rich
is an oligarchy even
if the rich are numerous; government by the poor
is
a democracy even if the poor are few. So far nothing
has been said
about historical changes in governmental
forms. But later (1286b. 7) he
points out that the first
governments were monarchical. They degenerated
into
oligarchies, then into tyrannies, and finally into de-
mocracies. But Aristotle does not say that
monarchies
will arise anew out of democracies. The process is not
eternal, though one suspects that after a flood or con-
flagration the kind of government that will arise
will
again be monarchical.
