cosmology
The Great Year (Cosmic Cycle)
μέγας ἐνιαυτός
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.
Where this idea shows up
6 Greek sourcesWhere to read it
- De Iside et Osiride120 CEPlutarch· Chaeronea
- De Fato120 CEPseudo-Plutarch· Chaeronea