Do your feelings of existential dread extend beyond your own personal mortality? Do they include fears about the survival of our culture and institutions, our species, nonhuman life and the Earth itself? Do you feel like there's nothing that can help to wrap your head around the biggest problem we face: the end of the world as we know it?

Apocalyptic expectations are on the rise. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the end times.

Yet the feeling that the world is coming to an end is nothing new. Anticipating and preparing for the end of the world is an ancient practice. In fact, many of the ways in which we envision future catastrophes can be traced back to the ancient Mediterranean world.

Greek and Roman authors set up their accounts of the end of the world as the product of reason rather than divine revelation – the product of the rational study of the laws of nature that govern the universe. They saw the end of the world as an inevitability and typically saw the aftermath, if there was one, as a repeat of the cycle of human development. The main piece of wisdom they seek to provide is how to face catastrophe without fear.

This is particularly true of the Epicureans and Stoics. Their goal is to meet all events up to and including the end of the world with equanimity. The Roman poet Horace offers a summation of this ideal in his Odes: the "righteous and resolute man" will remain "undaunted even if the sky should fall and the ruins strike his head".

These ancient texts do not explicitly offer solutions or means of avoidance, and as Horace makes clear, they can envision the end of the world as the ultimate test of masculine endurance. Yet they also provide an understanding of the long perspective of human history, and how humanity relates to cosmological and geological history. Unlike our doomsday prepperism, their form of preparation did not require any building projects or financial expenditures; rather, they encouraged preparation that was psychological, epistemological and ecological. This required one to study nature in order to understand its workings and the place of humanity within it.

My new book, How to Face the End of the World, offers several passages from ancient Greek and Roman authors about the end of the world in the original Greek and Latin, along with my translation and introduction. The collection begins with a passage from the archaic Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days. The other texts are by ancient philosophers: Plato, Lucretius and Seneca. Each developed different scenarios for how the world could end, but all posited that the end would come from the forces of nature, rather than the wrath of the gods.

Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of world destruction, as well as Jewish and Christian apocalypses, tap into what is likely an underlying psychological truth about these types of stories. They are a means to understand the future, and to realize the hidden natural and divine forces at work in the cosmos. Their power to reveal ultimate truths and to prepare us to face the future may explain why stories about the end of the world are found across cultures and why they have persisted from the ancient world to today.

Hesiod (ca 700BC) is the classical world's intellectual forefather for envisioning the end of humanity. One of Hesiod's most famous stories is the myth of the metallic races. It traces the succession of humanity from the ideal time of the primordial "golden race" to the present "iron race".

Hesiod predicts that at some point in the future, Zeus will destroy the current iron race. He enigmatically makes no mention of what will happen after this destruction. His silence served as an impetus for later authors to imagine different scenarios, ranging from a continuation of the cycle and a return to the Golden Age, to the end of humanity and the world itself.

Also contained in Hesiod's account is the suggestion that humans can avoid Zeus's wrath by honoring the gods and living a just and simple life. The prophecy of doom is not a fixed certainty, but rather a warning of what could happen.

Plato (420sBC–347BC) is perhaps most famous today for the portrayal of his hero, Socrates, and for the political philosophy of the Republic. Less well known is that he invented the story of Atlantis, which serves as part of his theory of cyclical global catastrophes.

In his dialogues Timaeus and the Laws, Plato posits that the world will exist for eternity, but that human development will be continually hindered due to periodic terrestrial catastrophes. In short, the world does not end, but advanced societies do.

With his stories, Plato appears to be testing the imagination of his audience. In the Laws, it seems clear that he is engaging in a thought experiment about how human society might rebuild after a global catastrophe. Unlike the violent post-apocalyptic narratives of today, Plato imagines that the survivors would live in peace and work together.

Epicurus and Lucretius

Epicurus (341BC–270BC) believed that the goal of life is pleasure and freedom from disturbance. For Epicurus and his followers, there was a strong connection between ethics and physics. In other words, understanding the nature of the universe was linked to living a good life.

Epicurus theorized that the cosmos consisted of atoms and void, as opposed to the other elements of earth, air, fire and water; that the gods existed, but did not care for humans. As a result, death was nothing to us – simply the dissolution of atoms back into the void. There was no punishment or reward to expect in the afterlife.

Very little of Epicurus's work survives from the reported 300 volumes he composed, but a brief account of how worlds end is preserved in one of his letters: "A world is an encasement of a heaven, which contains stars and an earth and all phenomena and is separated from the infinite; it ends with a boundary that is either thin or thick and when this boundary breaks apart everything within it will be ruined."

Epicurus's most famous disciple was the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus (ca 98BC–ca 55BC). One key way in which Lucretius departs from and develops Epicurus's teachings can be seen in his accounts of the end of the world. Lucretius offers two scenarios: slow, gradual decay, or one sudden day of destruction.

When we come to Stoic cosmology, we seem to leave the realm of plausibility and have to abandon our deep-seated notions of time's arrow moving in one direction. But if you prefer to think of time as moving in great cycles of creation and destruction, or ever had the feeling of deja vu, the Stoics are for you.

Founded by Zeno of Citium (ca 334BC–ca 262BC) in Athens during the late fourth century BC, the Stoics argued that "creative fire" was the primal building block of the cosmos. Eventually this fire would consume everything and then the cosmos would be reborn, events known as the (conflagration) and (restoration).

Only brief fragments and reports, some of them hostile, remain of the early Stoics on this theory. Some Stoics even rejected the idea of cyclical conflagrations. There are no detailed accounts of how the conflagration would unfold or how humans should prepare for it in the fragments that survive of the early Stoics. Most likely, it was believed to lie in the distant future.

The Stoic perspective on the end of the world changed during the Roman period. For example, as part of his daily practice of ethical philosophy, the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote a brief reminder to himself in his Meditations that the end will come very quickly.

The most detailed Stoic accounts of the end of the world survive in the works of Seneca the Younger (ca 4BC–AD65). Among Greek and Roman authors, Seneca had the greatest interest in the end of the world. He wrote about it throughout his career, exploring different apocalyptic scenarios in several of his philosophical works, as well as one of his plays, the Thyestes.

Although Seneca's descriptions of destruction go into great detail, he is not solely focused on the catastrophe itself. Rather, exploring the end of the world serves a deeper philosophical and therapeutic purpose. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics closely connected the study of ethics and physics. Understanding nature's cycles could help one to live a better life by understanding that death is a part of nature, both for the individual and for our world.

In his Natural QuestionsSeneca also considers how people would react when experiencing a global catastrophe. Seneca states that the destruction is close at hand, so perhaps his interest in human reactions to catastrophe was part of his own psychological preparation for the event.

What is the wisdom provided by these Greek and Roman authors? How might their visions of the end of the world help us today, if at all? On one level, we can see the origins of several narratives and ideas that are still very much alive today: the myth of decline from the Golden Age, Plato's story of Atlantis, the Epicurean theory of total planetary destruction, as well as the Stoic theory of eternal return. Overall, however, it may simply seem depressing to read account after account of the end of the world.

Nevertheless, there may be value in envisioning the various forms that future global catastrophes could take. In 2020, a group of scholars published a piece arguing that morbid curiosity and exposure to apocalyptic and similarly frightening narratives can provide psychological tools and resilience when real catastrophes hit.

One of the members of the team, the literary scholar Mathias Clasen, wrote that mental time travel, the ability to imagine possible futures, has been important for human development. Apocalyptic narratives serve a key purpose in that they allow humans to imagine and plan for the "worst-case scenario".

Other scholars, such as philosopher Hans Jonas, have urged us to accept that the odds are high that catastrophe awaits us in the future. We should not only envision the future as catastrophe but wager that the future will be bad rather than good. Yet this is not simply a prediction of doom and despair. As the contemporary philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek noted in Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future?, perhaps envisioning the future catastrophe as inevitable is paradoxically the way to avoid it.

Ancient philosophers might be best known for writing lengthy tomes. They did not compose works summarizing their theories of the end of the world but rather included them within larger philosophical arguments on nature, ethics and politics. But there also was the tradition of distilling ideas into a short work, or enchiridion, that one could keep close to hand – the literal meaning of the word. We can perhaps let the ancient Greek and Roman apocalypses discussed here and collected in my book serve as a low-stakes method of doomsday prepping.

• Christopher Star is professor of classics and director of the Axinn Center for the Humanities at Middlebury College. His books include Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought