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Concept of The Ages Before The Twentieth Century

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Bianca
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« on: September 26, 2007, 11:44:50 am »








The Argument that Plato knew of the Great Year and Therefore Precession: The above is not an easy paragraph to interpret. However, in the twentieth century a number of commentators looked at paragraph 546 and decided that in the mathematics of the latter part of that paragraph Plato was thinking of the number 36 000. Therefore, they argued, Plato knew of the rate of precession and, hence, must have known of the Great Year.

This genesis of this idea seems to go back to the Adam's edition of Plato's Republic [Cambridge University Press, 1926], in which a calculation indicating that Plato meant 36 000 years in paragraph 546 is presented. The steps of the argument then appear to be as follows:

1: Ptolemy [c 130 - 170 AD], in Al Magest, tells us that two centuries after Plato, Hipparchos [c 190 to 120 BC] defined the precessional rate as one degree per hundred years.

2: Hence 36 000 years [100 x 360] would be the Greek view of the length of a Great Year [if indeed they had such a concept.]

3: Plato's mathematics in paragraph 456 also gives 36 000 years.

4: Hence, Plato must have been aware of the length of the Great Year and the movement of the Equinoxes two centuries before Ptolemy.

5: Some commentators have taken the thesis another step: they argue that as Plato had knowledge of the Great Year, he must have understood the concept of precession, and that perhaps this knowledge even pre-dated Plato.

6: The argument for the knowledge pre-dating Plato is that Greek observational astronomy in Plato's time probably was not yet accurate enough to measure the rate of precession. Hence, it is argued, the knowledge must have come from elsewhere. [And the Babylonians, whilst the originators of much else in astrology, do not appear to have possessed the concept.] As Plato was the first to mention Atlantis in the written record, some commentators have argued that perhaps the knowledge came from there.
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