In an age laced with doom and gloom where civilisational collapse, be it from climate change, shrinking population (or overpopulation) or nuclear war, it might be salutary to look at other civilisations in history that have disappeared. Where Victor Davis Hanson’s How Everything Ends is different from similar books such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse is that Hanson is particularly concerned with civilisations that came to violent ends.
The book’s subtitle, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, gives it the air of an airport bookshop tell-it-all, but The End of Everything excels first and foremost as a magisterial history of four cataclysmic military defeats, two from antiquity (Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes in 335 BCE and the Roman defeat of Carthage in the third Punic war two centuries later) and two from the premodern period (the Ottomans’ conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan to Cortés’s Spanish expedition in 1521).
Hanson, both a classicist and a military historian, lays out the historical context for each of the momentous sieges that led to four great civilisations being practically wiped off the face of the earth. The four cases share some similarities without being completely alike. Thebes – along with Corinth, Athens and Sparta, one of the four great centres of early Hellenic civilisation – made the fatal mistake of overreach in fomenting an uprising against the Macedonian empire of Alexander, thinking he had been killed in battle in Illyria. Alexander was already incensed at the Thebans for their impudent insurrection three years previously, which delayed Macedon’s Persian campaign, so he didn’t hold back when Thebes fell.
The three other cases, Hanson shows, were also motivated by an intense hatred – the festering resentment among Roman citizens at the depredations wrought by Hannibal’s invasion in the second Punic war pushed Scipio Aemilianus to brook no surrender when Rome indirectly provoked Carthage into starting a third war. The Ottomans under Mehmet II coveted what was then the most prestigious city in Christendom, which had been made more vulnerable by the gradual loss of much of its outlying empire. Cortés’s conquistadors were supposedly motivated to destroy Aztec civilisation despite having a much smaller, though technologically superior, army, out of rage at the Aztec’s ritual sacrifice and cannibalising of some of his men captured in battle, though more avaricious imperial motives were also clearly at play.
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In each case, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle was overcome, and there were decisive moments where things might have gone another way – the Carthaginians missed an opportunity to destroy the Roman fleet when they took it by surprise, while Constantinople might have resisted had the Genoese mercenaries defending it not retreated when their talismanic commander Giovanni Giustiniani was wounded. Hanson also ventures that the Aztecs missed their chance to save their civilisation when they failed to kill Cortés and his small band of Spaniards rather than capture them for ritual sacrifice.
Hanson writes elegantly and uses an impressive range of documentation, both ancient and contemporary, with due consideration given to different perspectives. His accounts of the battles are also, given his pretty right-wing politics, mercifully free from tendentiousness. He also weighs up other genocides in history and forced displacements that ended centuries-long presences in geographical regions, arguing that, while devastating, they did not have the existential implications his other cases had.
The book’s sole weakness is the theoretical argument that is its ostensible selling point: the lessons for contemporary societies to draw from the histories that Hanson has spent 250 pages recounting in such vivid detail. His warning for the contemporary world is nations should not underestimate how much their enemies hate them, and he outlines some of the likely scenarios in an epilogue. These include Japan and South Korea (and even the west coast of the United States) at risk of nuclear annihilation by North Korea, Greece at risk of Turkish attack (in an echo of the Fall of Byzantium), Israel threatened by Iran.
It is not that Hanson’s argument is in itself refutable – it is simply mounted in far too cursory a fashion here to have much force, with illustrative examples plucked almost at random from internet news searches. A clearer delineation is needed of how his four case studies, each so far in the past, are relevant to a globalised technologically advanced world of economic interconnectedness. But as far as recommending the book goes, this weak conclusion scarcely matters: the splendour and thoroughness of Hanson’s account of those four historical case studies alone makes The End of Everything a compulsively readable book and a must for anyone with an interest in ancient and premodern history.
