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Ages and Historical Periods are two of this atlas's structural sections, marking out spans of time rather than beliefs or beings, and they meet at exactly one point: a doctrine of endless cosmic destruction and rebirth, founded in the very period the bridge names.

Fire Without End

The Stoic cosmic cycle, or ekpyrosis, is the Hellenistic Stoic doctrine that the entire cosmos periodically dissolves into a universal conflagration and is then reborn in an identical or near identical form, repeating without end. Ancient Stoics from Zeno and Chrysippus onward held that this cycle was governed by the divine, rational fire the Stoics called Logos, identified with Zeus, which alone survives each conflagration to reconstitute the following world.

Founded in the Period It Describes

The Hellenistic Period runs from the death of Alexander the Great to the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt, a span in which Greek language and culture spread across the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East and mixed with local religions, producing new cults such as Serapis, ruler worship of Hellenistic kings, and the codified system of horoscopic astrology. The connection is drawn directly rather than by inference: Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early Hellenistic Period, and its physical doctrine of cosmic cycles was elaborated across that period by his successors, chiefly Chrysippus. The doctrine and the age it is filed under share the same three centuries, one more of the new systems the period's own description says its mixing of cultures produced.

Where To Read More

• Stoic Cosmic CycleCosmological AgeThe doctrine whose only bridge in the atlas runs to the period it was founded in
• Hellenistic PeriodThe period itself, where Zeno founded Stoicism and Chrysippus elaborated the cycle doctrine