What with the threat of global warming and nuclear war, the new year might start with a big bang. The Greeks were preoccupied with this possibility as well and called it the apocalypse (apokalupsis), meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revelation’. It has a long history behind it.
The Greek farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) introduced the idea of a sequence of five ages – golden, silver, bronze, heroic, iron, each worse than the other – repeated five times and ending in total destruction.
In his magnificent On the Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), who was an atomist, described how a world made of atoms would slowly decay and crumble into ruin – which he thought nature was doing in his own time – but would then renew itself. The evidence? Consider the world before Homer. The Romans knew nothing whatever about it. Why not? Because it had decayed and disappeared but then been renewed in the rise of Greece and Rome. QED. Even so, he asserted, the world’s ultimate destruction was inevitable because it would run out of the food on which it survived and ‘be beaten down by the deadly bombardment of particles’ (the rediscovery of this poem in ad 1417 was to play a crucial part in the much later development of modern atomism).
The Stoic younger Seneca (d. AD 65) believed the cosmos underwent an eternal cycle of destruction and renewal and envisaged the end coming ‘suddenly, with tremendous violence’ owing to an increasing imbalance in nature, especially between land and sea. As the end drew near, winter would dominate a world where summer was no more, and even the sun and the stars would fail. Finally, flood and earthquake would bury the human race in a single day in one gigantic cataclysm.
But the wise man would look with equanimity on it all and, like Jupiter, he would retire into himself with his own thoughts. Indeed, he might even decide to hurl himself into the cataclysm, because he knew that the ‘cosmic conflagration’ would see the rebirth of the world anew.
Well, we can only wait and see. Or not see.
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