greek-cosmologyWe're still mapping where this idea was first discussed. Key passages and related ideas below.
The Great Year (Cosmic Cycle)
When every star wheels home to its starting place, time begins again — and you are born to live the very same life, down to this sentence.
The Great Year is the vast span after which all the heavenly bodies, each moving at its own pace, return at once to the same arrangement they began in. Plato called this the "perfect year," when the cosmos completes one full turn. The Stoics gave it a startling twist: at the close of each Great Year the universe dissolves into fire, then is reborn identical in every detail, so that the same people live the same lives in an endless recurrence.
Key passages(10)
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Placita Philosophorum · Pseudo-Plutarch
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Historical Library · Diodorus Siculus
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Vitae philosophorum · Diogenes Laertius
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Jewish Antiquities · Flavius Josephus
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