c432 METON Athenian astronomer, who establishes the Sun-Moon-Earth cycle of 19 years and which will be named after him. Thus is created a new calendar which replaces the ancient lunisolar cycle of eight years, called the ‘Octaeteris’, and which has been used up to this time. (15. 46)
The new ‘Metonic’ Lunisolar cycle of 6,940 days (19 solar years) is found to be almost equivalent to 235 synodic lunar months. The use of this calendric cycle facilitates the intercalation of a 13th lunar month into the Greek calendar which normally consisted of only 12 lunar months or 354 days, not quite enough to fill that year based on a Solar year. (102).
EUKTEMON as a Greek astronomer, re-establishes the Solstice and Equinoctial points of the calendar year and in so doing, discovers the unequal length of the seasons. Euktemon constructes a tropical calendar based upon the Summer Solstice at one degree of the constellation Cancer. What is to become the regular zodiac of the Ecliptic will appear later at a future date. (46)
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Democritus
c430 DEMOCRITUS (c460-370 BCE) Greek philosopher, born at Abdera in Thrace travelled in the East. He wrote many physical, mathematical, ethical and musical works, but only fragments will survive into the future. Following on from Leucippus, Democritus constructed a complex system in purely materialistic terms, in which the world is composed exclusively of uncaused and immutable material atoms; a unitary changeless substance of infinite variety in expression. (19)Democritus ‘Atomic System’ assumes an infinite multitude of everlasting atoms, from whose random combinations springs an infinite number of successive world-orders in which there is law but not design. His system, derived from Leucippus, will be developed further by Epicurus and Lucretius.
According to Democritus exoteric teachings, man died, his soul perished but matter remained. As a consequence of this new thinking, mythology and self-animated substances will become abolished from intellectual concepts. (19)
c425 DIOTIMA/Deotyma is known as the wise woman of Mantinean, Greece, who taught Socrates about love. She also showed him the system of ‘dialetic’ or dialogue as a method of teaching. This method Socrates will develop further as his own teaching aid and become famous for.
c420 SOCRATES (469-399 BCE) Legend says that the oracle at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi claimed Socrates to be the wisest of all men. His school or movement, began the first ethical period in the search for knowledge of self, of what is right and wrong, and what constitutes the soul. He believed in submerging the individual to the interests of the state. Socratic philosophy comes to us through the dialogues of his student, Plato, whose work ‘Phaedo’, is a discourse upon the immortality of the soul. In his search for what is good and virtuous, Socrates developed further the ‘dialetical’ form of argument. It is discussion based on investigation and opinion and which is aimed at revealing a man’s fundamental ignorance and so freeing him to make a better effort at the search for truth and knowledge. (6.19)
Deotyma [muse of Socrates]
by Josef Simmler 1855
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