For the Vikings, it is Ragnarök. For the Aztecs, it comes with a blackened sun and the slaying of Huitzilopochtli for Zoroastrians, it is referred to as Frashokereti and requires a terrific war and molten metal coursing across the Earth. Christians have a entire bunch of tips, but it is commonly accepted to involve items like destruction and devastation, dried-up rivers, and zombie Roman emperors.

The facts might alter, but the common gist is the identical: one particular day, the planet as we know it will come to an finish. It is an concept that goes back about as far as human civilization itself – and one particular that is distressingly ubiquitous in the contemporary planet, as well – so you could anticipate that coming up with an Apocalypse myth is anything that is just baked into the human psyche somehow.

But of course, human imagination could under no circumstances be so very simple. For some civilizations and traditions, there is no terrific Finish Occasions prediction – and to come across an instance or two, we do not even want to appear that far.

Regardless of becoming typically believed of nowadays as the birthplace of considerably of contemporary Western society – and the society in which the apocalypse-pleased mythology of Christianity 1st got a foothold – Ancient Rome did not definitely appear to have predicted some massive “end of the planet.”

“The common assumption in Roman society was that the city and its empire would be about forever,” writes Martin Goodman, Professor of Jewish Research at the University of Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Research, in his 2007 book, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. “Many thousands of honorific texts and epitaphs showed an expectation amongst ordinary Romans that their descendants, or other individuals with whom they had after been connected, would study the words in hundreds of years’ time.”

A lot more pressing for the apparently rather self-absorbed Romans was the finish of Rome. The city’s foundational myth – the tale of Romulus and Remus and their milky wolf mother – essentially came with an expiration date: Rome would final for 120 years ahead of its eventual fall, according to a legend involving twelve prophetic birds of prey.

To be fair, there have been some Roman philosophers – the Stoics – who did assume that this downfall would come from some universal catastrophe, massive sufficient to finish every thing in existence. But the factor about certain predictions is that they have a tendency to be self-limiting. 

“One hundred and twenty years right after the regular founding of Rome, it became apparent that the twelve eagles noticed by Romulus did not signify 120 years of historical life for the city,” writes Peter J Holliday, professor emeritus of art history at California State University, Extended Beach – and so steadily, the Roman psyche moved away from the concept of an imminent all-consuming universal apocalypse, and additional towards a sort of generalized low-level anxiousness stemming from the continuous threats faced by the city and empire.

In truth, though Roman mythology as a entire lacks a unifying apocalypse myth, there have been rather a couple of thinkers who thought of what the Finish of All the things could appear like: “There is a extended and underappreciated tradition of Greek and Roman believed about the finish of the planet that stretches from Hesiod to the literature of the Roman Empire,” notes Christopher Star, a professor of classics at Middlebury College, in his 2021 book Apocalypse and Golden Age: The Finish of the Globe in Greek and Roman Believed.

But just due to the fact they believed about it, does not imply our Greek and Roman forebears had an apocalypse myth as we would recognize it, Star clarified. “[The tradition] precedes and then runs parallel with the additional familiar tradition of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature,” he explains. But “Greek and Roman texts are in lots of techniques quite different… [their] accounts are element of bigger debates and believed experiments about the future.”

Roman thinkers have been absolutely conscious of tips like these of the Stoics, or their rival philosophers the Epicureans, each of whom anticipated some sort of an finish to the universe. For the Stoics, the Finish was believed to come as ekpyrosis – the returning of the universe into its most standard type: a divine, all-consuming fire. The Epicureans, meanwhile, had a philosophy that might appear weirdly familiar to our contemporary eyes: for them, the universe was constructed up of atoms, and ultimately, that is what it will return to – just a disorderly scattering of infinitesimal and indivisible pieces of matter floating by means of the void.

Having said that, neither of these tips have been taken as gospel in any sense of the word: they have been abstract hypotheses, independent of human action, and apparently not worth devoting considerably time pondering about. “There is not a single extant text by a pagan Greek or Roman writer that is totally devoted to describing the finish of the planet,” points out Star.

As a contemporary comparison, take into consideration how we assume nowadays about the inevitable heat death of the universe: yeah, it’ll occur, but we’re not certain how and there’s practically nothing we can do about it, so why be concerned?

In the finish, it merely wasn’t anything they appear to have taken as well seriously. “There is proof that the finish of the planet came to be anything of a clichéd joke amongst Greeks and Romans,” Star writes. “A fragment survives of an unknown Greek tragedy […] that reads ‘After I am dead let earth be mixed with fire. I do not care for myself, for all is properly with my affairs.’”