Plato posits that the world will exist for eternity, but that human development will be continually hindered due to periodic terrestrial catastrophes. Illustration: Photograph: Getty Images/Frame: Ibrahim Rayintakath View image in fullscreen Plato posits that the world will exist for eternity, but that human development will be continually hindered due to periodic terrestrial catastrophes. Illustration: Photograph: Getty Images/Frame: Ibrahim Rayintakath Memento mori: a series about death Well actually How to face the end of the world – according to Plato and the Stoics Fearing future catastrophe is nothing new – ancient Greek and Roman philosophers all visualized the apocalypse
Do your feelings of existential dread extend beyond your own personal mortality? Do they include fears about the survival of our culture and institutions, our species, nonhuman life and the Earth itself? Do you feel like there’s nothing that can help to wrap your head around the biggest problem we face: the end of the world as we know it?
Apocalyptic expectations are on the rise. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey , 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the end times.
Yet the feeling that the world is coming to an end is nothing new. Anticipating and preparing for the end of the world is an ancient practice. In fact, many of the ways in which we envision future catastrophes can be traced back to the ancient Mediterranean world.
Greek and Roman authors set up their accounts of the end of the world as the product of reason rather than divine revelation – the product of the rational study of the laws of nature that govern the universe. They saw the end of the world as an inevitability and typically saw the aftermath, if there was one, as a repeat of the cycle of human development. The main piece of wisdom they seek to provide is how to face catastrophe without fear.
Read more This is particularly true of the Epicureans and Stoics. Their goal is to meet all events up to and including the end of the world with equanimity. The Roman poet Horace offers a summation of this ideal in his Odes: the “righteous and resolute man” will remain “undaunted even if the sky should fall and the ruins strike his head”.
These ancient texts do not explicitly offer solutions or means of avoidance, and as Horace makes clear, they can envision the end of the world as the ultimate test of masculine endurance. Yet they also provide an understanding of the long perspective of human history, and how humanity relates to cosmological and geological history. Unlike our doomsday prepperism, their form of preparation did not require any building projects or financial expenditures; rather, they encouraged preparation that was psychological, epistemological and ecological. This required one to study nature in order to understand its workings and the place of humanity within it.
My new book, How to Face the End of the World , offers several passages from ancient Greek and Roman authors about the end of the world in the original Greek and Latin, along with my translation and introduction. The collection begins with a passage from the archaic Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days. The other texts are by ancient philosophers: Plato, Lucretius and Seneca. Each developed different scenarios for how the world could end, but all posited that the end would come from the forces of nature, rather than the wrath of the gods.
Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of world destruction, as wel…