very funny to discover that there is a number Plato appears to have made up and had Socrates spout randomly as the correct period for a birth (in the course of explaining how eugenics-powered best-humans could accidentally give birth to merely honorable ones by having children with the wrong frequency) with no notation of what unit it's in, and due to a combination of math being unreliable, translation of ancient Greek word problems being difficult, and the sincere possibility he was just fucking with people, we have an entire scholarly rabbit hole based around figuring out exactly what the number was. Schleiermacher, an 18th-19th century Prussian philosopher, stopped translating Plato for a decade while trying to figure it out. a small majority appear to think it works out to 216 but other suggested values range from 1,728 to 760,000.
wait, is this what Douglas Adams was riffing on
Schleiermacher, an 18th-19th century Prussian philosopher, stopped translating Plato for a decade while trying to figure it out.
relatable tbh