Complete Works of Philo Judaeus (Vol. 6)

According to a third, as the Stoics think, it is a certain substance extending to the ekpyrosis conflagration, either ordered or unordered, of whose motion they say time is the interval. But the present inquiry concerns the world in the first meaning, which consists of heaven and earth and the things that are in them. However, "corruption" is also said to be a change for the worse; it is also said to be the total destruction of an existing thing, which one must necessarily call "non-existent." For just as nothing comes from non-existence, so nothing is destroyed into non-existence. For it is impossible for something to come into being from that which in no way exists, and it is impossible and endless for what exists to be utterly destroyed. And the tragic poet says:

... nothing that is born dies, but being separated,
one from another, it reveals a different form.

Nor is it so foolish to ask if the world is destroyed into nothingness, but whether it admits of a change from its arrangement, having analyzed the diverse forms of elements and composites into one and the same idea, or, as in fractures and breakages, having received a total confusion.

89 §. 3. There have been three opinions regarding the subject of inquiry: some saying that the world is eternal, unbegotten, and indestructible; others, on the contrary, that it is begotten and corruptible. And there are those who, having taken from both sides—the "begotten" from the later philosophers and the "indestructible" from the earlier ones—left a mixed opinion, thinking it to be both begotten and indestructible. Democritus, therefore, and Epicurus, and the great crowd of philosophers from the Stoa, leave behind the birth and corruption of the world, though not in the same way. For some describe many worlds, the birth of which they attribute to the collisions and entanglements of atoms, and their corruption to the shocks and impacts of the things that have come to be.