Christopher Star - Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought

Apocalypse and Golden Age

The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought

Christopher Star

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Star, Christopher, author.

Title: Apocalypse and golden age : the end of the world in Greek and Roman thought / Christopher Star.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021006367 | ISBN 9781421441634 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421441641 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: End of the world in literature. | Greek literatureHistory and criticism. | Latin literatureHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PA3013 .S728 2021 | DDC 880.09dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006367

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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I am very grateful to several colleagues, friends, and family members for support and help in completing this book. At Johns Hopkins University Press, Matt McAdam showed interest in this project even while still inchoate and Catherine Goldstead saw it through to publication. It has been a pleasure to work with them and the staff at the Press. I am particularly grateful to the readers they assembled for providing excellent and timely feedback. Joanne Haines improved the text considerably with her skills as copy editor.

The members of the Middlebury College classics department, Jane Chaplin, Randall Ganiban, Pavlos Sfyroeras, and Marc Witkin, have given me the freedom to work on this book and related endeavors for several years. At Middlebury, I have also benefited from discussions with members of several iterations of the Humanities Manuscript Exchange. I am very fortunate to be directing the inaugural Humanities Research Seminar. I owe a debt of thanks to the directors of the Middlebury Humanities Center, Febe Armanios and Marion Wells, and to the members of the seminar, Ian Barrow, Enrique Garcia, Rebecca Mitchell, Patricia Saldarriaga, Erin Sassin, and Spring Ulmer. I also must thank my students, particularly those who have taken my class, Apocalypse When? Reason and Revelation in the Ancient World. Car Staveley-OCarroll deserves special mention for continuing research into this topic and for helping point the way to new avenues. Hailey Culhane provided invaluable research assistance when I was just getting started.

Earlier versions of portions of this book were delivered at Amherst College, Harvard University, Middlebury College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of WalesTrinity St. David. I am grateful to the organizers of these events and to the members of the audience for questions and comments. I regret that invitations to conferences at Wellesley College, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Lisbon had to be postponed. For advice and encouragement, I thank Antony Augoustakis, Francesca Romana Berno, John Collins, Jonathan Griffiths, Victor Nuovo, Alison McQueen, Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Price, Robert Schine, Christopher van den Berg, Katharina Volk, Gareth Williams, and Larry Yarbrough. David Elmer, Randall Ganiban, Michle Lowrie, Christopher Trinacty, and Helen Van Noorden all read drafts of portions of this book and provided me with extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

As always, my greatest debt is to my family, especially my wife, Sarah, and our son, Jeremiah, who, when he was very young, asked me what will come after humans.

For ancient Greek and Latin authors, I have generally used the Oxford Classical Text. The Latin text of Lucan is that of A. E. Housman, M. Annaei Lucani: Belli Civilis Libri Decem (Oxford, 1958) and Senecas Natural Questions follows H. M. Hine, L. Annaei Senecae: Naturalium Questionum Libros (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1996). Passages from the Bible and Apocrypha are keyed to the New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, 5th edition, edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford, 2018). Abbreviations not listed here follow the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Apocalypse and Golden Age

Near the midpoint of his Meditations, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote the following vision of the future: Very soon, everything in existence will be changed; and it will either be vaporized, if the nature of the universe is one, or it will be scattered ( , , 6.4). For centuries, the reign of Marcus Aurelius has been seen as one of the major turning points in world history. Edward Gibbon famously declared that his principate fell within the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.

Revelation, likely composed in the 90s CE, states in the first sentence that this apocalypse was given to John so that God may reveal to his slaves what must happen quickly (Rev. 1:1). Perhaps suggesting the speed with which the change will come, Marcuss vision of the end is remarkably brief. It is a single sentence, and not an entire book, like Daniel and Revelation.

Marcuss eschatology is part of a larger text. The Meditations is not solely devoted to describing the end of the world. Marcuss vision of the end of the world, subsumed as it is within a larger, non-apocalyptic text, is typical of Greek and Roman authors. There is not a single extant text by a pagan Greek or Roman writer that is entirely devoted to describing the end of the world. As spiritual exercises, these writings were likely only intended for Marcus himself. Thus, his prediction about the end of the world may be unique among ancient eschatology in that the emperor did not write it for the enlightenment of anyone else. The visions of the end that Marcus gives are not unprecedented, however. They would have been familiar and understandable to anyone who had studied ancient philosophy.