The end is near and virtually everywhere, with doomsday scenarios coming at us fast and furious. Every day, it seems, another scientist, researcher or tech guru predicts a new deadly pandemic, climate catastrophe, extinction-level asteroid or rogue artificial intelligence that will snuff out humanity.
It’s no surprise that Americans are plagued by existential dread. A 2022 survey by Pew Research Center found that nearly four in 10 of us believe we’re living in the end times; among some Christian denominations, the proportion rises to three in four. Video streaming services offer scads of movies and shows set in postapocalyptic worlds. For a subject so depressing and grim, we can’t seem to get enough of it.
But, as Christopher Star points out, modern Americans are by no means the world’s first generation of doomscrollers. In a new collection he edited and translated, How to Face the End of the World: An Ancient Guide for Apocalyptic Times, the 53-year-old classics professor at Middlebury College taps the works of Plato, Lucretius, Seneca, and other ancient philosophers and writers for strategies to cope with the cataclysm, whether it happens as a sudden conflagration or a gradual decay.
“If you prefer to think of time as moving in great cycles of creation and destruction, or ever had feelings of déjà vu, the Stoics are for you,” Star writes in his introduction. By contrast, Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet, suggested that humans have the power to avoid the world’s destruction by living a just life.
Even ancients who believed the end times were inevitable still found benefit in thinking about the prospect. “Exploring the end of the world serves a deeper philosophical and therapeutic purpose,” Star writes. He suggests that exploration provides us with the psychological tools for facing calamities on any scale.
Star directs the college’s Axinn Center for the Humanities and has written a study of classical notions of the apocalypse as well as books on Nero and Seneca. Seven Days talked to him about the new collection, which is designed for general readers but also includes the original Greek and Latin.
Why is the end of days such a recurring theme in human history?
People have been expecting the end of the world for at least 3,000 years in various ways and various cultures. My focus is mostly on how ancient philosophers thought about it. There’s also a lot of work being done by neuroscientists, including one popular book called Your Brain Is a Time Machine [by Dean Buonomano], about how future thinking has helped humans, from planning crops to planting trees and tracking game to such minor things as how we catch a glass that falls off a table. The human brain likes to think about the future and envision scenarios, from minor ones to worst-case scenarios. It’s not just doom and gloom and “There’s nothing we can do about it.” It’s about planning for all possibilities.
Have you come across any cultures that don’t have apocalyptic stories?
No. What’s interesting about the apocalyptic stories, at least from Jewish and Christian and some Greek and Roman traditions, is this idea that it’s going to happen soon. The stories in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions have this idea of cosmic cycles that take hundreds of thousands of years. “Yes, there are these cycles, but don’t worry about them, because this isn’t something we’re going to witness in our lifetime.”
Lucretius says maybe we’ll see the end of the world. In more modern times, we have the Doomsday Clock and people like William Miller [1782-1849], who predicted the exact day that Jesus was going to come back. Then there was the big mistake with the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. All of that can be traced back to Western apocalyptic traditions.
Did the ancient Greeks and Romans believe that Hades, the realm of the dead, would also be destroyed?
It depends on who you read. Generally, the philosophers would think that Hades is sort of a myth. But sometimes in the more poetic texts, you get this idea that death will also come to an end, which has an interesting parallel to the Book of Revelation, where a similar claim is made. Plato has this odd passage where he says people will rise from the ground like some sort of proto-zombie apocalypse. But generally, there isn’t much on what’s going to happen to the people who are already dead.
Should any of these apocalyptic stories be read as metaphors and not literal predictions?
Plato is pretty clear that this is an intellectual exercise. But he says in his dialogues that floods and fires have wiped out humanity before. In his view, it is plausible to think that maybe human progress has been knocked back in the past and maybe it will continue to be in the future.
The Stoics were big on metaphorical accounts, but they did think that there would be a literal conflagration. The Epicureans thought the world was just atoms and void and everything breaks apart, human beings die, and our planet dies as well. So, they thought it was literal.
Plato has this odd passage where he says people will rise from the ground like some sort of proto-zombie apocalypse.
Christopher Star
Of the writers and philosophers you feature in the book, is there one whose views resonate with you?
The main authors that I treat are Plato; Lucretius, who’s an Epicurean writing during the Roman period; and Seneca, who is a Stoic philosopher writing during the Roman period. In the ancient world, they thought that the world would just keep happening over and over again. The Epicureans just come out and say that we’re all going to die and our planet has an end date. In a sense, they’re right about that. We now know that the sun eventually is going to start swallowing Venus and Mercury. It’s in billions of years, but they were on to something. For the Epicureans, especially, there is no divine cause behind things. It’s just the nature of the universe.
Plato is interesting because he talks about cyclical catastrophes from nature — fires and floods and disease, these forces that push back human development. Plato makes clear that humans [will] lose writing, arts and technology, but he also paints a more positive picture. He’s one of the first people to think about what the postapocalyptic world would be like. He says humans would be happy to see other survivors, unlike most of the [apocalypse] stories we have today, where it’s all about fighting, scarcity and cannibalism.
Are you a prepper?
No. There was that show “Doomsday Preppers,” which I actually haven’t watched, but I’ve shown clips in one of my classes. What I have been thinking about is all the psychological preparation — not for the end of the world, but [for] catastrophes and crises — and this idea of foresight. There is a lot [of merit] to the mental preparation of thinking about the future, what could happen and what could not. That’s about as far as I go — and about as far as the ancients went as well. They weren’t building bunkers and compounds and things like that.
Why do these stories endure?
Because they do give you this idea of preparation for tribulations that could come. Hopefully, we can get through this to the other side and rebuild the world better. I have a young child, so by default I have hope for the future. There’s an interesting book called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse [by Athena Aktipis], an evolutionary psychologist who basically says that you can prep all you want, have a go bag and build a bunker. But if you’re not psychologically prepared for catastrophe, then you can forget everything else.
What one piece of advice should readers take from the ancients?
To understand the value of time and, particularly, the importance of the present. There’s a reason why Carpe diem, “Seize the day,” is a Latin phrase that many still know and use. We don’t know how many days have been allotted to us, and we don’t know if tomorrow will bring with it a major crisis that may not end the world but [will] end the world as we know it. We have control over the present.
Thinking about future catastrophe helps [us] to understand this point. By imagining the worst-possible case, other crises might seem more manageable. As we say when something goes wrong, “It’s not the end of the world.”
Finally, we should remember the overall track record for prophecies of doom. They typically do not come true. And if the worst does come, throughout history humans have proved to be adept at building new worlds out of catastrophe. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Doom Scrolls | A new anthology from Middlebury College professor Christopher Star offers ancient advice on prepping for the apocalypse”
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
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