The greater part of the Greek philosophers held the universe to be eternal both with respect to commencement and duration. But as to this petty portion of the world or universe, this globe of stone and earth and water, of minerals and vapors, which we inhabit, it was somewhat difficult to form an opinion; it was, however, deemed very destructible. It was even said that it had been destroyed more than once, and would be destroyed again. Every one judged of the whole world from his own particular country, as an old woman judges of all mankind from those in her own nook and neighborhood.
This idea of the end of our little world and its renovation strongly possessed the imagination of the nations under subjection to the Roman Empire, amidst the horrors of the civil wars between Cæsar and Pompey. Virgil, in his "Georgics" (i., 468), alludes to the general apprehension which rilled the minds of the common people from this cause: "Impiaque eternam timuerunt secula noctem."—"And impious men now dread eternal night."
Lucan, in the following lines, expresses himself much more explicitly:
Hos Cæsar populos, si nunc non usserit ignis
Uret cum terris, uret cum gurgite ponti.
Communis mundo superest rogus....
—PHARS. vii. v. 812, 14.
Though now thy cruelty denies a grave,
These and the world one common lot shall have;
One last appointed flame, by fate's decree,
Shall waste yon azure heavens, the earth, and sea.
—ROWE.
And Ovid, following up the observations of Lucan, says:
Esse quoque in fatis reminiscitur affore tempus,
Quo mare, quo tellus, correptaque regia cœli,
Ardent et mundi moles operosa laboret.
—MET. i. v. 256, 58.
For thus the stern, unyielding fates decree,
That earth, air, heaven, with the capacious sea,
All shall fall victims to consuming fire,
And in fierce flames the blazing world expire.
Consult Cicero himself, the philosophic Cicero. He tells us, in his book concerning the "Nature of the Gods," the best work perhaps of all antiquity, unless we make an exception in favor of his treatise on human duties, called "The Offices"; in that book, I say, he remarks:
"Ex quo eventurum nostri putant id, de quo Panœtium addubitare dicebant; ut ad extremum omnis mundus ignosceret, cum, humore consumpto, neque terra ali posset, neque remearet, aer cujus ortus, aqua omni exhausta, esse non posset; ita relinqui nihil præter ignem, a quo rursum animante ac Deo renovatio mundi fieret; atque idem ornatus oriretur."
"According to the Stoics, the whole world will eventually consist only of fire; the water being then exhausted, will leave no nourishment for the earth; and the air, which derives its existence from water, can of course no longer be supplied. Thus fire alone will remain, and this fire, reanimating everything with, as it were, god-like power and energy, will restore the world with improved beauty."
This natural philosophy of the Stoics, like that indeed of all antiquity, is not a little absurd; it shows, however, that the expectation of a general conflagration was universal.