Earlier Stoics had theorized that flames would cause the world’s end, the fiery cosmic exhalations they called ekpyroseis. But Seneca, in Natural Questions, imagined, as he had before in Consolation to Marcia, a universal flood. With grim foreboding, he notes that water is everywhere on earth—collecting in every hollow, flowing down every mountain, pooling beneath every acre of ground. “Nature has put moisture everywhere—so that, when she wishes, she can attack us from all sides,” he writes in Natural Questions. In a special-effects spectacular, he imagines each source breaking its bounds,
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