Greece
The declining ages, the recurring fire, and the vision written on Patmos.
The earliest Greek account of decline is Hesiod's. In Works and Days the human past runs through races of gold, silver, bronze, the heroes, and finally iron, each worse than the last, and Hesiod places himself in the iron age with the wish that he had been born earlier or later. There is no terminal date, but there is a direction, and the scheme of numbered declining ages became one of the most portable ideas in the ancient world.
The Stoics supplied the mechanism Hesiod lacked. On their account the cosmos is periodically resolved into fire, ekpyrosis, and then reconstituted from it, in a cycle that repeats without limit; some Stoics held that the reconstituted world reproduces the previous one in every detail, so that the same lives recur. Heraclitus had already spoken of a world kindled and quenched in measure. This is eschatology without punishment or verdict: the end is a phase of a physical process, and nothing is being judged.
Greece then supplied the language and the setting for the opposite model. Revelation was written in Greek and set on Patmos, and its sealed and numbered sequence ends not in recurrence but in a new heaven and a new earth, once and for all. The Greek flood survives too, in the Deucalion story that Ovid gave its most-read form. The strands are treated in Ekpyrosis: the Stoic Conflagration, Greek Stoic Eschatology, Deucalion: The Greek Flood and Book of Revelation. Holding a repeating fire and a final unveiling in the same language is what makes the Greek material a hinge: the cyclical and the linear end both pass through it.
See also
- Ekpyrosis: the Stoic ConflagrationThe world as an ever-living fire: the cosmos periodically burns itself down to i
- Greek Stoic EschatologyThe cosmos as a breathing thing: at the Great Year's end all matter resolves int
- Deucalion: The Greek FloodThe Greek flood survivor: warned by his father Prometheus, Deucalion builds a ch
- Book of RevelationThe Christian apocalypse of John, a revealed vision of a final battle, a thousan
Further reading
- Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 106-201 (the five races) · ed. M. L. West, Hesiod: Works and Days, Clarendon Press, 1978 The earliest Greek scheme of successive declining ages.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses I (Deucalion and Pyrrha) · tr. A. D. Melville, Oxford, 1986
- Stoic testimonia on ekpyrosis, in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers · Cambridge University Press, 1987 Sections 46-52 collect the fragments on conflagration and recurrence.
- Walter Burkert, Greek Religion · Harvard University Press, 1985