1. Cicero, On The Nature of The Gods, 1.36, 1.39, 2.45, 2.118 (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
Tagged with subjects: • Conflagration • Stoicism, conflagration • conflagration • conflagration (ekpyrosis), in Stoicism • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Engberg-Pedersen (2010) 21; Inwood and Warren (2020) 114; Long (2006) 124, 130, 271; Long (2019) 79, 82; Wynne (2019) 125
| 1.36. "Lastly, Balbus, I come to your Stoic school. Zeno\'s view is that the law of nature is divine, and that its function is to command what is right and to forbid the opposite. How he makes out this law to be alive passes our comprehension; yet we undoubtedly expect god to be a living being. In another passage however Zeno declares that the aether is god — if there is any meaning in a god without sensation, a form of deity that never presents itself to us when we offer up our prayers and supplications and make our vows. And in other books again he holds the view that a \'reason\' which pervades all nature is possessed of divine power. He likewise attributes the same powers to the stars, or at another time to the years, the months and the seasons. Again, in his interpretation of Hesiod\'s Theogony (or Origin of the Gods) he does away with the customary and received ideas of the gods altogether, for he does not reckon either Jupiter, Juno or Vesta as gods, or any being that bears a personal name, but teaches that these names have been assigned allegorically to dumb and lifeless things.
1.39. Chrysippus, who is deemed to be the most skilful interpreter of the Stoic dreams, musters an enormous mob of unknown gods — so utterly unknown that even imagination cannot guess at their form and nature, although our mind appears capable of visualizing anything; for he says that divine power resides in reason, and in the soul and mind of the universe; he calls the world itself a god, and also the all‑pervading world-soul, and again the guiding principle of that soul, which operates in the intellect and reason, and the common and all‑embracing nature of things; beside this, the fire that I previously termed aether; and also the power of Fate, and the Necessity that governs future events; and also all fluid and soluble substances, such as water, earth, air, the sun, moon and stars, and the all‑embracing unity of things; and even those human beings who have attained immortality.
2.45. "It remains for us to consider the qualities of the divine nature; and on this subject nothing is more difficult than to divert the eye of the mind from following the practice of bodily sight. This difficulty has caused both uneducated people generally and those philosophers who resemble the uneducated to be unable to conceive of the immortal gods without setting before themselves the form of men: a shallow mode of thought which Cotta has exposed and which therefore calls for no discussion from me. But assuming that we have a definite and preconceived idea of a deity as, first, a living being, and secondly, a being unsurpassed in excellence by anything else in the whole of nature, I can see nothing that satisfies this preconception or idea of ours more fully than, first, the judgement that this world, which must necessarily be the most excellent of all things, is itself a living being and a god.
2.118. But the stars are of a fiery substance, and for this reason they are nourished by the vapours of the earth, the sea and the waters, which are raised up by the sun out of the fields which it warms and out of the waters; and when nourished and renewed by these vapours the stars and the whole aether shed them back again, and then once more draw them up from the same source, with the loss of none of their matter, or only of an extremely small part which is consumed by the fire of the stars and the flame of the aether. As a consequence of this, so our school believe, though it used to be said that Panaetius questioned the doctrine, there will ultimately occur a conflagration of the whole while, because when the moisture has been used up neither can the earth be nourished nor will the air continue to flow, being unable to rise upward after it has drunk up all the water; thus nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being and a god, once again a new world may be created and the ordered universe be restored as before. ''. None |
|
2. None, None, nan (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
Tagged with subjects: • confidence, conflagration • conflagration • fire, conflagration
Found in books: Graver (2007) 224; Long (2019) 153, 154
|
3. Philo of Alexandria, On The Eternity of The World, 48-51, 76 (1st cent. BCE - missingth cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • conflagration • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Long (2006) 125, 270; Long (2019) 153
| 48. Therefore Chrysippus, the most celebrated philosopher of that sect, in his treatise about Increase, utters some such prodigious assertions as these, and after he has prefaced his doctrines with the assertion that it is impossible for two makers of a species to exist in the same substance, he proceeds, "Let it be granted for the sake of argument and speculation that there is one person entire and sound, and another wanting one foot from his birth, and that the sound man is called Dion and the cripple Theon, and afterwards that Dion also loses one of his feet, then if the question were asked which had been spoiled, it would be more natural to say this of Theon;" but this is the assertion of one who delights in paradox rather than in truth, '49. for how could it be said that he who had suffered no mutilation whatever, namely Theon, was taken off, and that Dion, who had lost a foot, was not injured? Very appropriately, he will reply, for Dion, who had had his foot cut off, falls back upon the original imperfection of Theon, and there cannot be two specific differences in the same subject, therefore it follows of necessity that Dion must remain, and that Theon must be taken off-- "So are we slain by arrows winged With our own Feathers," as the tragic poet says. For any one, copying the form of this argument and adapting it to the entire world, may prove in the clearest manner that providence itself is liable to corruption. 50. Consider the matter thus: let the world be the subject of our argument, as Dion was just now, for it is perfect, and let the soul of the world take the place of Theon, who was imperfect, since a part is less than the whole; and as the foot was cut off from Dion, so also let everything which resembles a body be cut off from the world; 51. therefore it is necessary to say that the world has not been destroyed though its body has been taken away, just as Dion was not destroyed by having his foot cut off, but the soul of the world it is that has perished, like Theon, who suffered no artificial mutilation, for the world also receded to a lesser substance when all of it that resembled a body was taken away. And the soul was destroyed because there could not be two specific differences affecting the same and since it is imperishable it follows of necessity that the world also must be imperishable. X.
76. But some of those who used to hold a different opinion, being overpowered by truth, have changed their doctrine; for beauty has a power which is very attractive, and the truth is beyond all things beautiful, as falsehood on the contrary is enormously ugly; therefore Boethus, and Posidonius, and Panaetius, men of great learning in the Stoic doctrines, as if seized with a sudden inspiration, abandoning all the stories about conflagrations and regeneration, have come over to the more divine doctrine of the incorruptibility of the world; '. None |
|
4. Seneca The Younger, Letters, 9.16 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • conflagration (ekpyrosis), in Stoicism • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Engberg-Pedersen (2010) 21; Long (2006) 270
| 9.16. People may say: "But what sort of existence will the wise man have, if he be left friendless when thrown into prison, or when stranded in some foreign nation, or when delayed on a long voyage, or when cast upon a lonely shore?" His life will be like that of Jupiter, who, amid the dissolution of the world, when the gods are confounded together and Nature rests for a space from her work, can retire into himself and give himself over to his own thoughts.10 In some such way as this the sage will act; he will retreat into himself, and live with himself. ''. None |
|
5. None, None, nan (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • conflagration (ekpurōsis), Stoic concept of • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Kazantzidis (2021) 171; Long (2006) 264
|
6. None, None, nan (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • conflagration • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Jedan (2009) 178; Long (2006) 123, 272; Long (2019) 79
|
7. None, None, nan (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • Conflagration • conflagration • conflagration/ ekpyrosis • cosmic conflagration
Found in books: Frede and Laks (2001) 224; Inwood and Warren (2020) 114; Long (2006) 124, 266, 268; Long (2019) 77
|
8. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of The Philosophers, 7.135-7.136, 7.156-7.157 (3rd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • Conflagration • confidence, conflagration • conflagration • cosmic conflagration • fire, conflagration
Found in books: Graver (2007) 224, 225; Inwood and Warren (2020) 114, 136; Jedan (2009) 14; Long (2006) 266; Long (2019) 82, 153
| 7.135. Body is defined by Apollodorus in his Physics as that which is extended in three dimensions, length, breadth, and depth. This is also called solid body. But surface is the extremity of a solid body, or that which has length and breadth only without depth. That surface exists not only in our thought but also in reality is maintained by Posidonius in the third book of his Celestial Phenomena. A line is the extremity of a surface or length without breadth, or that which has length alone. A point is the extremity of a line, the smallest possible mark or dot.God is one and the same with Reason, Fate, and Zeus; he is also called by many other names. 7.136. In the beginning he was by himself; he transformed the whole of substance through air into water, and just as in animal generation the seed has a moist vehicle, so in cosmic moisture God, who is the seminal reason of the universe, remains behind in the moisture as such an agent, adapting matter to himself with a view to the next stage of creation. Thereupon he created first of all the four elements, fire, water, air, earth. They are discussed by Zeno in his treatise On the Whole, by Chrysippus in the first book of his Physics, and by Archedemus in a work On Elements. An element is defined as that from which particular things first come to be at their birth and into which they are finally resolved.
7.156. And there are five terrestrial zones: first, the northern zone which is beyond the arctic circle, uninhabitable because of the cold; second, a temperate zone; a third, uninhabitable because of great heats, called the torrid zone; fourth, a counter-temperate zone; fifth, the southern zone, uninhabitable because of its cold.Nature in their view is an artistically working fire, going on its way to create; which is equivalent to a fiery, creative, or fashioning breath. And the soul is a nature capable of perception. And they regard it as the breath of life, congenital with us; from which they infer first that it is a body and secondly that it survives death. Yet it is perishable, though the soul of the universe, of which the individual souls of animals are parts, is indestructible. 7.157. Zeno of Citium and Antipater, in their treatises De anima, and Posidonius define the soul as a warm breath; for by this we become animate and this enables us to move. Cleanthes indeed holds that all souls continue to exist until the general conflagration; but Chrysippus says that only the souls of the wise do so.They count eight parts of the soul: the five senses, the generative power in us, our power of speech, and that of reasoning. They hold that we see when the light between the visual organ and the object stretches in the form of a cone: so Chrysippus in the second book of his Physics and Apollodorus. The apex of the cone in the air is at the eye, the base at the object seen. Thus the thing seen is reported to us by the medium of the air stretching out towards it, as if by a stick.''. None |
|
9. None, None, nan (3rd cent. CE - 4th cent. CE)
Tagged with subjects: • Conflagration • Eternal recurrence after conflagration (Stoic), Comfort or dismay from recurrence? • Eternal recurrence after conflagration (Stoic), Resignation from end of cosmos • confidence, conflagration • conflagration • cosmic conflagration • fire, conflagration
Found in books: Graver (2007) 225; Inwood and Warren (2020) 136; Long (2006) 272; Long (2019) 82, 153; Sorabji (2000) 242
|
10. None, None, nan
Tagged with subjects: • Conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) • conflagration • conflagration/ ekpyrosis
Found in books: Frede and Laks (2001) 224; Frey and Levison (2014) 45; Jedan (2009) 14; Long (2019) 82, 153
|
