This is the end

The year 2000​ has come and gone; we survived the Maya apocalypse of 2012. Portents of our demise now come most often in the form of UN climate reports, the Doomsday Clock or the pronouncements of epidemiologists. These predictions reveal not only the fragility of our existence, but also our capacity to bring about potentially catastrophic changes to life on earth. Yet humanity’s concern for the end of the world is nothing new.

In ancient Greek, ‘apocalypse’ simply meant ‘revelation’. Our modern, colloquial notion of apocalypse takes its name from ancient Jewish and Christian traditions, in particular the books of Daniel and Revelation, which predict a fundamental transformation of the world, including an end of time and of death. The end of times was often viewed positively, as a defeat of evil and a reward for the righteous. In Daniel, the dead will be resurrected to eternal life or eternal disgrace; Revelation foretells the Last Judgment and the creation of a new earth and a new heaven, without suffering and death. As a matter of scholarship, however, the ‘apocalyptic’ is a distinctly modern category, applied at different times by different scholars to a range of ancient Jewish, Christian, Babylonian and Egyptian texts.

Daniel and Revelation have their place in the Bible, but apocalypse has rarely been canonical. This is especially true of Egyptian apocalyptic literature. The Oracle of the Potter survives only in fragmentary copies of what is probably a Greek translation of an Egyptian original. The potter’s predictions are clearly directed against the Greeks who ruled Egypt during the last centuries BCE, whom he calls the ‘girdle-wearers’. He foretells in gruesome detail the destruction and depopulation of Alexandria, the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied corpses pervading the city. His oracle is both a political prophecy about the rejection of foreign rule, and an ecological one: the land of Egypt will tear Alexandria down to its foundations and turn it into a ‘drying place’ for fish.

Greek and Roman literature has sometimes been thought immune from apocalypse, or outright opposed to it: Rome was after all known as the eternal city. But in Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star argues that Greeks and Romans were, in fact, pioneering and often deeply pessimistic thinkers about the long-term future of humanity. In contrast to Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts, they do not often imagine the survival of humanity, much less a new transcendent world and an eternal reward for the righteous. (As Star is the first to admit, scholars of Jewish and Christian apocalypse may find his texts do not always satisfy their criteria for the apocalyptic.) Apocalypse for the Greeks and Romans was not a call to prepare for a heavenly kingdom, but closer to its modern, colloquial sense and part of a broader philosophical effort to improve life in the present.

Star identifies more than twenty Greek and Roman authors who engaged with the end of the world. They include Virgil and Horace, but also less well-known figures such as Nemesius of Emesa, a late antique Christian philosopher interested in Stoic doctrine. Marcus Aurelius wrote near the middle of his Meditations: ‘Very soon, everything in existence will be changed; and it will either be vaporised, if the nature of the universe is one, or it will be scattered.’ Plato’s myth of Atlantis – the maritime civilisation destroyed in a flood – is an example of the way the world has been and will be shaped by terrestrial disasters. These accounts of collapse, by turns ecological and proto-Malthusian, capricious and inevitable, may seem strikingly modern, but they emerge from belief systems very different from our own. And there is no single apocalyptic view among Greeks and Romans, who often disagreed among themselves about how, whether and when the world would end.

Hesiod’s poem Works and Days is among the oldest explorations of apocalyptic ideas to emerge from the Mediterranean basin. Composed around 700 BCE, it includes a history of humanity, beginning with the ‘golden race’ who lived without sorrow, toil or old age. Hesiod’s time, and presumably ours too, is the fifth generation (the ‘iron race’), who live in a constant state of misery and must work to feed themselves. ‘If only I did not have to live among the fifth men,’ Hesiod laments, ‘but could have either died first or been born afterwards!’ Hesiod’s account has often been read as a narrative of decline, but it also tells of cycles of destruction and rebirth, as each generation is replaced by the next. Ours is not immune – Zeus will destroy it too – though the poem doesn’t say how this will happen or what will come next. In effect, Hesiod leaves us with the possibility that, after five eras, humanity will perish – a teleological vision of the arc of human history that might be described less as a ‘revelation’ than a catastrophe.

More than half a millennium later, Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe expounded a stunningly modern theory of the cosmos, which attributed the observable phenomena of the world to the workings of two elements: atoms, literally ‘that which cannot be divided’, and ‘void’. Lucretius was a first-century BCE Roman follower of the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus, whose ideas could be hard to swallow: Lucretius at one point compares his poetry to honey smeared on a cup to sweeten the bitter medicine of Epicurean philosophy. He is sometimes considered a proto-atheist, but he didn’t deny the existence of the gods; he simply believed that they too were made of atoms. Paradoxically, and perhaps impudently, he wrote in the metre of Greek and Roman epic, the most divinely inflected of poetic forms.

Religion is a constant target in his poem: people are ‘crushed by its burden’, liable to be ‘cowed by fables of the gods/or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar’, and led to commit ‘deeds both impious and criminal’ under its influence. Reading Lucretius can, at its worst, feel like being badgered by a pushy salesperson, who keeps giving you items to try on until you buy one. But at its best, it can be, as Lucretius himself puts it, like ‘breaking apart/the bolts of nature’s gates’ to ‘throw them open … advancing onwards far/beyond the flaming ramparts of the world’ (the translation is Ronald Melville’s). One of Lucretius’ gifts is to make the invisible visible, by revealing the secret workings of the universe.

A central argument of his materialist philosophy is that death is nothing to us. Rather than promising a cosy afterlife, he seeks to persuade his readers that at the end of their lives the atomic matter they are made of will simply dissolve. After death, there is nothing – no pain, no joy, no family, no fear, no mind, no perception. ‘So when you see a man resent his fate,’ he says, ‘he’s pitying himself.’ He is no more sanguine about the rest of the universe. We can see the earth growing old, decaying and, finally, perishing like the human body:

… Even now the world’s great age is broken
And earth worn out scarce bears small animals,
…
We wear out oxen, wear out the strength of farmers,
Wear down the ploughshare in fields that can scarce feed us,
So do they now grudge their fruits and multiply our toil.

As Star observes, Lucretius reconfigures Hesiod’s narrative of human decline, replacing the age of iron with its implement, the plough. But instead of crediting the current state of affairs to Zeus, as Hesiod did, Lucretius chalks it up to the consequences of human activity and old age, which ‘slowly breaks’ all vitality ‘and melts into decay’. The earth, like all resources, is finite. The golden age is not a sign of human piety, but rather reflects the advantages of a younger, more fertile world. The flipside of being freed from religion is to be bound instead by the inexorable processes of nature and decline.

Lucretius believed that understanding these realities would produce calm. Sometimes you get the impression he’s testing your equanimity. On the Nature of the Universe contains two other accounts of the universe’s demise, one counterfactual, one predictive, both terrifying. The counterfactual comes near the start of the poem as part of a biting refutation of the ‘fools’ who think the universe is composed of four elements. They cannot be right, Lucretius says, because if they were ‘the ramparts of the world/would burst asunder and like flying flames/rush headlong scattered through the empty void.’ Since we are not undergoing an apocalypse, the fools must be wrong. Near the end of the poem, however, he suggests that this stability might itself be an illusion. ‘Perhaps the facts themselves/will bring belief,’ he says, ‘and in a little time/the earth with mighty movements torn apart/you will see, and all the world convulsed with shocks.’ He follows this with three hundred lines of poetic proof that the world is mortal. The ‘mighty members of the world’ are engaged in ‘unrighteous war’, he concludes. They must finally exhaust themselves. Indeed, not only will the world end; it has already been created and destroyed. How could there be such prodigious innovation in art, music and philosophy if the world weren’t new? And why could the Romans not remember history before Thebes and the Trojan War, if not because the world was comparatively young?

For all this, it’s hard to escape the sense that Lucretius is prevaricating about when the apocalypse will come. As often as he hints that his readers may themselves witness the world’s collapse, he offers a reminder that the earth’s youth argues against imminent catastrophe. But whether the end comes soon or in the distant future, Lucretius is certain it will come. ‘The door of death,’ he writes, ‘is never closed/To sky and sun and earth and sea’s deep waters./No. It stands open, and with vast gaping mouth/It waits for them.’ Indeed, the ‘door of death’ lies open at the conclusion of the poem, where Lucretius depicts, in harrowing detail, the Athenian plague of 430 BCE, which infected almost all the city’s population and killed perhaps a quarter. Lucretius’ ending is so abrupt, so stark and so opposed to his mantra that ‘death is nothing to us’ that some readers have believed the poem is unfinished:

They placed their own kin on the funeral pyres
Of others, and with frenzied cries set light to them,
And often in the fighting that ensued
They shed much blood rather than leave the bodies.

Strictly speaking this is not an apocalypse – the world will continue – but there is not a single Athenian, he writes a few lines earlier, ‘whom neither plague nor death nor grief had touched’. The only thing we can control is how we respond to and learn from cataclysmic events.

On the Nature of the Universe was written during the last years of the Roman Republic; even as Lucretius contemplated the motions of the atoms, Roman institutions were collapsing around him. He is one of a spate of writers – among them Cicero, Horace and Virgil – who contemplated the end of the world in the demise of the Republic. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue was written around 40 BCE, following a particularly bad stretch of civil war. Virgil calls on his readers (in Guy Lee’s translation) to witness the cataclysmic events that will mark the change from an age of iron to one of gold:

Now the last age of Cumae’s prophecy has come;
The great succession of centuries is born afresh.
…
A new begetting now descends from heaven’s height.
O chaste Lucina, look with blessing on the boy
Whose birth will end the iron race at last and raise
A golden through the world.

It ends:

Look at the cosmos trembling in its massive round,
Lands and the expanse of ocean and the sky profound;
Look how they all are full of joy at the age to come!

The poem has long been understood by Christian readers as predicting the birth of Christ, but it is deeply immersed in its Roman context and draws on a panoply of apocalyptic images from Stoic beliefs about the cyclical destruction and rebirth of the universe to Hesiod’s anthropogony. In contrast to his sources, however, Virgil focuses on the coming golden age, transforming images of eschatological finality – ‘the cosmos trembling in its massive round’ – into hope for the future.

Afew decades​ later, Seneca lived through another period of Roman unrest, the reign of the emperor Nero. He had tangled with two of Nero’s predecessors, Caligula and Claudius, who had both tried and failed to get rid of him, through an attempt to put him to death (Caligula) and exile to Corsica (Claudius). Seneca’s life was marked by contradictions. On the one hand, he was a savvy political operator, who proclaimed that a new golden age had arrived with the new emperor Nero (coincidentally or not, a former pupil of his). On the other, he was a Stoic philosopher and tragedian, seeking the best way to practise virtue and emotional moderation. Star is more interested in the Stoic Seneca, though the two sides can be hard to disentangle. In both his prose writing and his tragedies, he grappled with the end of the world.

Stoics believed the universe undergoes an infinite cycle of destruction and rebirth, which ends (and begins) with an all-consuming fire, the ekpyrosis. Orthodox Stoics held that each cycle happens in precisely the same way. But rather than suggesting that humanity was trapped in a meaningless loop, this knowledge allowed them to view the universe and their own lives with emotional detachment. Apocalypse and golden age become, on such a model, impossible to tease apart; as Star puts it, ‘there is no other author in Greek and Latin literature for whom the poles of a golden age and apocalypse are as central and reoccurring.’

In his Consolation to Marcia, written after the death of her young son, Seneca imagines his friend Marcia’s father, the Roman historian Cremutius Cordus, addressing her from heaven. According to Tacitus, Cordus was executed by Tiberius in 25 CE for praising Brutus and Cassius in his histories; in his final speech, he proclaimed that though he might be killed, he would be remembered. Now, perhaps fifteen years later, he offers his daughter a surprising comfort: the world will end. Time will ‘cast all things down and take them away’, crushing mountains, draining the sea, causing earthquakes, dragging cities into fissures of the earth, drowning the world in floods that kill every animal, and burning ‘all mortal things with great fires’. Finally, as if that weren’t enough, ‘these things will destroy themselves with their own power, and stars will crash into stars and whatever now shines with flammable material in its proper place will burn together in one fire.’ Even the souls of the dead will be destroyed. Cordus’ approach is unorthodox, but Gareth Williams has described Seneca as providing in his writing a ‘cosmic viewpoint’ that emphasises our ‘minuscule place’ in the universe. Cordus reveals that he has found a new perspective. Instead of standing up for his right to free expression, he considers it trivial ‘to write about the deeds of one age that were done in the furthest part of the universe by the smallest number of people’. He presents his knowledge of the end of the world as the final and most profound secret of the universe to be revealed.

Stoics may have believed the world would end in fire, but Seneca loved a flood. In Natural Questions, written around 65 CE, he offers his longest and most elaborate vision of one. Stories of floods go back to Genesis and Gilgamesh, and Ovid tells one in his Metamorphoses, but unlike them Seneca imagines that no one will survive. The deluge is a web of paradoxes and contradictions: it is a revolution, a product of the laws of nature that is characterised by lawlessness, licence and absence of limits. Although Seneca emphasises that it could come quickly, he lingers on its effects: human beings are left to huddle on mountaintops, starving to death, as their dwellings are swept away. Although it will purify the world, the flood is not a moral reckoning or a punishment. Yet it will produce perfect Stoics: ‘There was no place for fear as they were struck with amazement; nor indeed was there place for sadness. In fact, this emotion loses its power in those who are so wretched that they are beyond feeling their evil.’

It isn’t entirely clear how this flood relates to Stoic doctrine (and Seneca’s perfect Stoics are decidedly not philosophers). It may be one of the many signs of coming ekpyrosis or perhaps Seneca believed, contrary to Stoic orthodoxy, that the world would end in both fire and flood. Yet his flood raises an important question: how should we react to such depictions of suffering? Earlier in Natural Questions, Seneca chastises Romans for taking delight in the death of a mullet, which in its final moments of life turns red, then pale blue.

Apocalypse is not a matter for aesthetic pleasure. It’s serious business. Star suggests that Seneca believed total destruction was the only way to save human­ity – and that it was coming soon. At one point, he urges his readers to observe the waves crashing on the shore to prepare themselves for the coming deluge. It isn’t hard to see Seneca’s meditations on human an­nihilation in dialogue with his own worsening political reality; his tragedies engage even more explicitly with the connections between tyranny and apocalypse. Not long after the publication of Natural Questions, Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself. This time he could not escape. His nephew Lucan started his poem The Civil War by juxta­posing praise of Nero with a simile that compared Roman civil war to the end of the world. Time and again, apocalypse and pol­itical unrest go hand in hand.

It’s worth reading Seneca and Lucan alongside the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John, which was probably composed around 100 CE. John casts Nero, infamous for burning Jewish followers of Jesus alive, as a seven-headed beast, who is defeated when he is thrown into a lake of fire. The book is not only a theological prophecy of a new transcendent reality, but also an act of political resistance. It wasn’t just Nero (or Rome) that attracted such predictions. The Sibylline Oracles are a series of Judaeo-Christian prophecies apparently delivered from the mouths of pagan seers. They were probably composed (and adapted) over several centuries, and collected in the sixth or seventh century CE. The most famous predicts the destruction of Rome and a period of happiness after its demise. The Book of Daniel is directed against Antiochus IV, the Macedonian-Greek ruler of the Seleucid empire.

The Book of Revelation, Daniel and the Oracle of the Potter all saw apocalypse as a tool of resistance and a means of limiting imperial power. The texts on which Star focuses by and large seek to subsume the apocalyptic into the establishment, incorporating apocalypse into cyclical patterns of destruction and regeneration. His book makes a persuasive case for pagan Greek and Roman interest in the end of the world. Yet it also points to the challenges posed by disciplinary boundaries to a proper understanding of the religious and apocalyptic traditions of the Mediterranean basin. We must hope that Star will write a sequel that puts them into dialogue.

He sees his book not only as an exploration of ancient history, but as a work that speaks to the present. As Frank Kermode put it in The Sense of an Ending, people are born in medias res and ‘also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems’. I was once asked in an interview what I, a classicist, should say to a science denier. I flubbed the question. What I should have done, I now realise, is reject its premise. The Greeks and Romans can’t persuade us to believe in the rational scientific order any more than Stephen Hawking can. But they can help us confront an uncertain future, whether we view it with Stoic distance or Epicurean calm.