The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation, Victor Davis Hanson.  Basic Books, 2024.  287 pp.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book is a macabre warning to an aging America as it closes in on its 250th birthday.  The warning comes in the form of a graphic depiction of the hideousness of war and the terrifying state of those who suffer ignominious defeat. 

However different the four societies described in the book were, be they Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, or Aztecs, each was blinded by the illusion of invincibility.  Hanson shows that such an illusion is so persistent that even as the conquered were being slaughtered, they continued to think: “It cannot happen here.”

Thebes, the 4th century B.C. Greek city-state, sat confidently among the constellation of other Greek city-states.  Thebans felt such confidence because of “their impressive military, the justness of their cause, the sympathy of their allies and their city’s hallowed reputation as an icon of eternal Hellenic culture,” as distinguished Professor of Classics Hanson writes. 

Indeed, both Alexander the Great and his father, Philip, admired the great Theban general, Epaminondas. But Thebes was too cocky to return that respect.  Though how could they have missed the threat posed by Alexander and his lethal Macedonian phalanx which he had used to conquer 1,500 other Greek city states?! 

Since Thebes had sided with the Persian invaders in the fifth century B.C. Persian War, Alexander’s scheme to take Thebes gave her “allies” an opportunity for revenge as well as profit from her defeat.  As Hanson notes, this case is “thematic in our study of doomed states,” showing how “allies” pile on to destroy their former friends.

Hanson notes that no deus ex machina descended to save Thebes just as it didn’t with the other doomed polities described in the book.  Regardless, their respective fates were sealed because of their weak military, their naivete, their long decline, and the military genius and resources of their attackers.

Everyone has heard, “Carthage must be destroyed,” the imperative with which Cato the Elder ended his Roman Senate speeches.   In Hanson’s chapter on the destruction of Carthage, “The Wages of Vengeance”, he shows the scar tissue that the Romans had built up in their dealings with Carthage that was reflected in Cato’s compulsive plea.

Despite their two previous Punic wars with Rome, the Carthaginians felt secure in their north African enclave.  As descendants of the Phoenicians living in what is now modern Tunisia, the Carthaginians had developed a trading empire in competition with Rome.  Consequently, Hannibal and his elephants in 218 BC scaled the Alps, descended into Italy, and won battles there.  The most stunning was at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC in southern Italy.  The first day casualties of that bloodbath were close to 70,000, which rivals the slaughter of the British on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916!

The loss at Cannae terrorized the Romans so much that, among other rituals, they buried four people alive as a sacrifice to their gods in the hope of saving their own skins.  Capitalizing on such fear, Rome sent an army to north Africa, which forced Hannibal home where he suffered a humiliating defeat.  Nonetheless, it took 14 more years to level Carthage.

Many years ago, an old Armenian man told me that since Constantinople fell on “Black Tuesday”, May 29, 1453, he often takes a few moments to reflect and pray on Tuesdays in remembrance of that catastrophe.  So, the loss of the Byzantine seat of Orthodox Christianity with its grandest church in Christendom, the Hagia Sophia, still lingers in memory in distant times and distant lands. 

Famed historian, Edward Gibbon, describes the scene after the Turkish Muslims had scaled and breeched the walls surrounding Constantinople, chasing the terrified survivors “from every part of the capital as they flowed into the church of St. Sophia: within an hour, the sanctuary, the choir, the nave, the galleries were filled with priests, monks and religious virgins,” their hope for being rescued being founded on the legend of angelic intervention.  Meanwhile the doors to the church were broken open and the Turks, encountering no resistance, began selecting the youngest, prettiest, and most prosperous looking women and boys for their prurient and profitable purposes.                                                                    

Certainly, Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos saw the huge army besieging his city and he also must have noted his own pitiful, defensive force.   Apparently though, “Constantinople had looked to its past more than to the awful present,” as Hanson soberly remarks.

Constantinople had survived previous attacks with its fifteen foot thick walls and its ninety towers that were each sixty feet high!  But when Giovanni Giustiniani, the leader responsible for Constantinople’s survival during the siege, was seriously wounded, the resistance collapsed and with it a millennium of Byzantine civilization.

The fall of Constantinople finalized Muslim control of the Levant, forcing Europe to go west in order to go east to trade with China and India.   On the way east, the Europeans ran into the Americas.

The first adventurers into what is now Mexico were the Spanish conquistadores who in 1521 “encountered a wonderous empire -- one confident, warlike and antithetical to Catholic Spanish imperialism in almost every way imaginable,” as Hanson writes.   And as he continues, “the Aztecs could never fathom a man like Hernan Cortes, who was quite willing to annihilate them.”  And in the process, Cortes and his men had about as many cliffhangers as Indiana Jones!

Cortes at age 34 was a faceless functionary, yet he turned out to be a military genius equal to Alexander as well as a cunning negotiator.  That the Aztecs were overcome because they were expecting the promised return of the god, Quetzalcoatl, is dismissed by scholars.  Though certainly, the mystery and shock of seeing Spanish cavalrymen on horses, equipped with thunderous guns and sharp-edged swords were reason enough to deify the invading Spaniards.  But soon the Aztecs saw that the Spaniards hungered for food and sex while imploring the Aztecs to abandon human sacrifice and accept the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Central Mexico had hundreds of villages some of which Cortes and his men fought their way through, though eventually forming alliances with them against the hated Aztecs.  Then the Spaniards reached Tenochtitlan, a magnificent city built on Lake Texcoco with its rich soil and its islands connected by bridges and causeways reminiscent of Venice.  But overlooking this were the ninety-foot-high stone pyramids where human sacrifices and cannibalism took place.  Thus, the invaders alternately lusted for the gold the Aztecs displayed while also being repulsed by their abhorrent practices.

Montezuma II saw the threat posed by the interlopers while his nephew Cacama urged that the Spaniards be welcomed.  But it became increasingly clear that the Spanish were a threat.  Then, in Cortes’s absence, his savvy but reckless lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, became so incensed by the Aztecs’ bloody rituals that he ordered an attack on them. 

The combat was brutal though the Aztecs in their need to have victims to sacrifice, preferred capturing the Spanish, which seems benign enough.  But Cortes’s men were terrorized when the Aztecs ripped out the hearts of their captured comrades in plain sight on the platforms atop their pyramids and threw their bodies to the ravenous dogs below.

Despite these unnerving episodes, Cortes was able to rally his frightened men.  As celebrated military historian Hanson observes, “Historians have long argued over the mystery of how a small Spanish force – beaten and near capitulation, rebuilt an extensive native alliance and obliterated an empire of four million subjects.”

Hanson’s tone in The End Of Everything may seem detached and pitiless considering the brutality described in the book.   But his tone suggests how we, in contrast to the examples in the book, should unsparingly evaluate ourselves if we are to survive.   For people’s fears and hopes are like gravity in their consistency and predictability.  In that sense, Victor Davis Hanson is more Isaac Newton as opposed to the progressives, who dream “that money, education, and better intentions could arrest the gory arch of history,” as he wrote in one of his previous twenty-seven books.  Ignoring reality destroyed the four societies shown in the compelling narrative of this book.   May such blindness not be visited on us!