77. Herakleitos spoke also of a longer period, which is identified with the “Great Year,” and is variously described as lasting 18,000 and 10,800 years.[397] We have no definite statement, however, of what process Herakleitos supposed to take place in the Great Year. We have seen that the period of 36,000 years was, in all probability, Babylonian, and was that of the revolution which produces the precession of the equinoxes.[398] Now 18,000 years is just half that period, a fact which may be connected with Herakleitos’s way of dividing all cycles into an “upward and downward path” It is not at all likely, however, that Herakleitos, who held with Xenophanes that the sun was “new every day,” would trouble himself about the precession of the equinoxes, and we seem forced to assume that he gave some new application to the traditional period. The Stoics, or some of them, held that the Great Year was the period between one world-conflagration and the next. They were careful, however, to make it a good deal longer than Herakleitos did, and, in any case, we are not entitled without more ado to credit him with the theory of a general conflagration.[399] We must try first, if possible, to interpret the Great Year on the analogy of the shorter periods discussed already. Footnote 397: Aet. ii. 32, 3, Ἡράκλειτος ἐκ μυρίων ὀκτακισχιλίων ἐνιαυτῶν ἡλιακῶν (τὸν μέγαν ἐνιαυτὸν εἶναι). Censorinus, _de die nat._ 11, Heraclitus et Linus, XDCCC. Footnote 398: See Introd. § XII. p. 25, _n._ 39. Footnote 399: For the Stoic doctrine, cf. Nemesios, _de nat. hom._ 38 (R. P. 503). Mr. Adam allowed that no destruction of the world or conflagration marked the end of Plato’s year, but he declined to draw what seems to me the natural inference that the connexion between the two things belongs to a later age, and should not, therefore, be ascribed to Herakleitos in the absence of any evidence that he did so connect them. Nevertheless, his treatment of these questions in the second volume of his edition of the _Republic_, pp. 302 sqq., must form the basis of all further discussion on the subject. It has certainly helped me to put the view which he rejects (p. 303, n. 9) in what I hope will be found a more convincing form.