ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Stoic theory of Creation, because it is one of the least defined parts of the system. According to the theory of the great year creation is not single work, but a recurring event; and therefore in one sense history of the universe has neither beginning nor end. The doctrine of conflagration was not maintained by all Stoic teachers with equal conviction. Zeno treated it with fulness in his book 'on the universe120'; and Cleanthes and Chrysippus both assert that the whole universe is destined to change into fire, returning to that from which, as from a seed, it has sprung. The phenomena of earth and heaven combined, in the general opinion of intelligent men, to show the existence of a 'world-order' or 'universe10'. The Stoics accepted this conception in their physics from Heraclitus, who had declared that 'neither god nor man created this world-order', as in their ethics from Diogenes, the 'citizen of the universe'.
