The Eternal Return: we live, we die, we live again

The Eternal Return ensures that we always come back to this particular moment in history. The notion that time recurs and we return to the same moments in time has been present in European philosophy since Pythagoras and was an important aspect of Stoic philosophy. We live, we die, we live again. The Eternal Return is certainly also a cultural phenomenon, which stipulates that the human ages will return, moving through cycles of ups and downs. The sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe have proposed a theory of generations and temporal cycles in the book "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny." They propose that four archetypal generations are born in each saeculum (a natural century, c. 85 years). Of these archetypal generations, the hero generation is the one that oversee the restructuring of society after it has unraveled and been through a crisis. In this episode, I investigate this concept of turnings, cycles, and generations in context of Germanic, Roman, and Hunnic peoples in ancient Europe, and offer some thoughts on what the ancient saecula mean for us today.