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This discussion reopens the file on Plethon's purported stay in Ottoman territory in order to trace the origins of the Plethonean belief in sectarianism as a vehicle for attaining Utopian sociopolitical ends. In the first part, possible approaches to Plethon's alleged study with the mysterious mentor Elissaios are considered. In the second part, an argument is presented that in both the changing Ottoman Empire and the disintegrating Byzantine Empire esoteric societies contemporaneously developed a potentially antinomian role. Just like Plethon's 'brothers', the 'Brethren of Purity' of al-Bistami, Sheikh Bedreddin and Borkluce Mustafa opted for sectarianism in order to recover a supraconfessional religious law and construe a novel political identity. This indicates the probability of a common nexus between Rumelia, the Peloponnese and the Aegean spanning confessional lines and utilizing sect as the vehicle of utopianism. Around 1451/2 in a letter to the civil officer Oises, Gennadios Scholarios described a pagan circle operating in the Peloponnese that assumed the form of a religious 'brotherhood': phratria. 1 Interestingly, the intellectual star of Mistra, Gemistos Plethon, author of a notorious underground book entitled Treatise on the Laws (henceforth Nomoi) on the revival of polytheism and the ideally just constitution, is not explicitly associated with this group-though to all appearances Plethon's arch-enemy Scholarios kept an eye on his * I am grateful to Cornell H. Fleischer (Chicago) for his advice on Ottoman sects and Islamic mysticism. Peter Garnsey (Cambridge), Anthony Kaldellis (Ohio) and George Koutzakiotis (Athens) discussed my ideas with me and commented on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 Schol. Ad Raulem Oesem IV.477.2. Works by Scholarios are quoted according to the edition of L. Petit, X. Siderides and M. Jugie (eds.), Oeuvres completes de George Scholarios, 8 vols. (Paris 1928-36). The most comprehensive study of Gennadios Scholarios is by M.-H. Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400vers 1472): un intellectuel orthodoxe face a la disparition de I'empire Byzantin (Paris 2008), offering a discussion of the clash between Scholarios and Plethon on 177-92. For the dating of Scholarios' works I am following the suggestions by Blanchet, 482-7. See also C. Livanos, Greek tradition and Latin influence in the work of George Scholarios (Piscaway, NJ 2006).

This paper focuses on the late antique conception of time, eternity and perpetual duration and examines the relation between these concepts and Plato's cosmology. By exploring the controversy between pagan philosophers (Proclus, Ammonius, Simplicius, Olympiodorus) and Christian writers (Aeneas of Gaza, Zacharias of Mytilene, Philoponus) in respect to the interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, I argue that the Neoplatonic doctrine of the perpetuity (αιδóτηζ) of the world derives from a) the intellectual paradigm presupposed by the conceptual framework of late antiquity and b) the commentators' principal concern for a coherent conception of Platonic cosmology essentially free from internal contradictions.

with Gnosticism and Manicheism) with their equally distinctive treatments of such notions as 'evil', 'sin', 'ascent', and the like. C. Steel concludes the collection fi ttingly, with an illustration of the former, demonstrating Proclus' continuation of a tradition of philosophical 'veneration of the earth' wherein in fact for Proclus 'the earth is a divine living being' (p. 266).

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