Victor Davis Hanson
I wrote The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation out of curiosity as to why on rare conditions wars don’t just end in the capitulation of the defeated, the occupation or annexation of its homelands, or the victors’ demands to pay reparations or fines.*
Rather, they sometimes cease only with the complete erasure of the civilization, language, religion, and soon even the memory of the vanquished. There are occasional cases of such annihilation from antiquity—Philip II’s obliteration of Olynthus or the Athenians’ destruction of the Melians—and a few from later times (the disappearance of the Incas by Pizarro and the Spanish or the two-centuries-long Indian wars that resulted in the destruction of Native American civilization as an autonomous culture.
But I was more interested in large civilizations that came abruptly to an end through war, within a day, a month, or two to three years. I chose four examples in The End of Everything—the eradication of the classical Thebans by the Macedonian Alexander the Great (335 BC), the flattening and disappearance of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus and the Romans (149–146 BC), the Ottoman destruction of Byzantine civilization and absorption of Constantinople (May 29, 1453), and the Spanish destruction of the Aztecs and their capital at Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés.
In the next five Ultras, I will briefly summarize some portions of the book’s contents and four case studies in our Ultra readings, ending with the epilogue that suggests that even now (or especially now?) the inconceivable can become the all too real. What will follow are not excerpts from the book, but summaries designed for Ultra readers.
I note in the aftermath chapter of the book, that while human nature and its precivilizational savagery (cf. October 7) have not changed much, the delivery systems of destruction—nuclear, biological, chemical, and artificial intelligence (?)—have become ever more lethal and increasingly not so controllable. And that should terrify us given the Alexanders, Scipios, and Mehmets in our contemporary midst.
But for now, what commonalities did all these targeted, doomed civilizations and their destroyers share?
Here is a sampling of a few of the many delusions discussed in the book that helped to obliterate the losers.
First, the defeated were in a state of denial about the exact status of their own vulnerability and insidious and ongoing decline that were apparent to their conquerors but not to themselves. Thebes was the most hallowed Greek city of myth and legend (Antigone, Oedipus, and Cadmus) and forty years earlier of unchallenged preeminence among the city-states under the great liberator Epaminondas.
But Thebes of the past was not Thebes of the present. Its walls were not as invincible as the “seven-gated” Thebes of the Athenian stage. It had lost the terrible battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) to Philip and Alexander just three years earlier, and it was racked by internal divisions.
Carthage was similar. After two prior lost wars, it was reduced to a commercial city without an empire, a sort of Singapore—rich, lavish, but militarily largely impotent. Its walls had never been breached. But then again, no army had ever landed, 80,000 strong, much less one like the Romans.
The Constantinople of 1453 was hardly the city of even a century earlier, much less the million-person citadel and bulwark of Christendom, Hellenism, and Western Civilization, since the time of its founder Constantine the Great, and its later renaissance under Justinian. It had stood indomitable and unassailable for a millennium. Its land walls, the Byzantines bragged, had never been overwhelmed (the Fourth Crusaders came in on the seaside).
Ditto the Venetian-like city of Tenochtitlán. It may have been the capital of a four-million-person Aztec empire. But the Aztecs struggled with increasingly dissident subjects and an array of enemies, even prior to the 1519 arrival of the Spanish in Mexico.
Second, the doomed believed that allies, friends, and compatriots would surely appear at the eleventh hour and save their iconic cities. Would not the Spartans and Athenians save Greece’s most hallowed city? (Not if it meant their own destruction.)
Would not the Macedonians attack the Romans to the rear and relieve the pressure off the besieged in Africa? (But why die for Carthage?)
Would not a Christian fleet, perhaps led by the invincible Venetians, sail up the Dardanelles and at the last-minute swarm the Ottoman besiegers from the rear? (But why would self-interested Roman Catholics die for what they considered were Eastern Orthodox apostates?)
Would not the vast armies of the Aztec Empire throng to the capital to wipe out Cortés’s pitiful force in a common alliance of indigenous Mexica against these white strangers and their Tlaxcalan stooges? (But why help a murderous regime that yearly sacrificed hundreds of the youth of allied cities?)
Third, in all these cases, the soon-to-be erased had no idea of either the genius or murderousness of their attackers. Was not Alexander the Great tutored by Aristotle? And how could a distant Macedonian army reach Thebes quickly, much less build siege engines ex nihilo to take down the city?
Did not Scipio Aemilianus have the renowned historian Polybius at his side and wasn’t he a student of Homer?
Wasn’t it true that Mehmet II bragged of his vast library and surely would not wish to wipe out a kindred storehouse of great literature and science?
Did not Cortés express promises of friendship, and would not his wonderous technology be put to good use as a new partner to further enhance the mystical capital on the lake?
So, the targeted clung to the inconceivable, when the terrible and very likely stared them in the face.
Next: Target Thebes
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The End of Everything. History Becomes Now? Part One: Why Are Civilizations Erased? appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.