This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself predicates the _negation of time_ (of direction). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, _polar and not periodic_ in structure—in the last analysis, of such stuff as myths are made of—whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia. But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the Classical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. _Inevitably_, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but a term.[3] For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their broadly- conceived operations of astronomy and their exact measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became _intimately_ a part of him. What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic- Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory. In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a decree by which all who propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment (εἰσαγγελία). This last was an act of the deepest symbolic significance, expressive of the determination of the Classical soul to banish distance, in every aspect, from its world-consciousness.