The End of Thebes: Alexander's Vengeance

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is a special edition because Victor's book was published on May 7th.

We're going to talk about some of the chapters in that book.

And we'll be looking this time at the introduction, and then we'll go into the chapter on Thebes.

It is called The End of Everything and about the total annihilation of not just cities

or

armies, but their culture as as well.

And so he's chosen four

incidents of this: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenak Chitlin.

And all three of the civilizations of those cities were destroyed absolutely.

So that's what we're talking about.

And we're going to go into the first chapter and Thebes today.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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For those who haven't

don't know Victor very well, he is an author and scholar, both philologist and classicist, and he's written extensively on warfare and modern politics as well.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And we welcome one and all to this special edition.

So Victor, we're going to have a look at your

opening of the book that you're writing.

It's just a fascinating book in the sense that, of course, me, like probably a lot of readers,

are thinking, well, can this happen to the United States?

But we'll probably hold that question off till later.

I wanted to look at the opening of the book, and you try to give a sense of

why even write about this subject.

And I get the feeling that the book is as much a warning as it is a study of sudden reversal and collapse.

And I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.

From your book, The End of Everything, which is a pretty imposing book.

But you know, I noticed if you would give me a second just to read the opening, you have an interesting statement here.

You say, naivete, hubris, flawed assessment of relative strengths and weaknesses, the loss of deterrence, new military technologies and tactics, totalitarian ideologies, and a retreat to fantasy can all explain why these usually rare catastrophic events nevertheless keep recurring.

And you go into examples there.

But I was wondering about what it is that got you interested in this subject.

Well,

I didn't plan on it.

The book is called The End of Everything, and the subtitle is How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

It comes out May 7th from BASIC Books.

And it was part of a larger project I did with BASIC where I wrote

two books on contemporary topics, The Case for Trump and The Dying Citizen, and then I was contracted to to do two on historical topics.

I did the Second World Wars, and this is the second one, The End of Everything.

I was

curious that when you read historians, ancient and modern,

they usually assume that when you lose a war,

there are terms given, or you're conquered, or you're enslaved, but there's not an existential end to everything.

So, Germany, Japan, and Italy lose and lose completely, unconditionally, and yet they're here today.

What do I mean by they, their infrastructure, there is a physical place called Japan or Germany or Italy, their language or civilization.

And we have the genocide, a horrific holocaust that destroyed half of European Jewry, but not all of it.

The Jews being an indomitable people, survive somewhat.

There are Jews today in Israel, about 10 million, maybe I should say given the Arab population and vision populations, perhaps 8 to 9 million.

And then there's another 8 to 9 million in the Jewish diaspora.

Same is true of the Armenians.

There is an Armenian genocide.

The Turks, in two successive genocides, tried to wipe out the the Turks that were in their domain in the Ottoman Empire and then again with the rise of the modern

Turkish government.

But they survived.

There is an entity called Armenia.

So I could go on, but sometimes it happens.

I was curious to see when, why, and where.

It's obvious that you can have little tiny places, the island of Milos in the ancient world, or the little city-state of Skione or Tironi.

These were small states, maybe of 4,000 or 5,000 people, and they were up against these huge empires, empires like the Athenians, for example.

But what about a large people and a famous people and

a long civilization?

So

I went through antiquity and modern history, and it turns out to be very rare

that defeat leads to annihilation.

You think of Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar.

Yes, he destroyed ancient Gaul, but there were still people who spoke Gaulish, and they were the predecessors of modern-day

modern-day French nation.

But in these cases, and I selected four, there was about 10 or 20 you could select, but one was the classical city-state of Thebes that Alexander the Great wiped out in 335.

Of course, the more famous, larger case of Carthage in 146 BC that was completely wiped out by Scipio Aemilianus.

And then I looked at the sad end of Christian, Greek-speaking, and Hellenic peoples in Asia Minor that were wiped out as an identifiable entity by the Ottomans in 1453.

And then, of course,

the

almost surreal extinction of the Aztec Empire and the Aztec people by Hernán Cortez,

who

landed in Veracruz and then between 1521 and 1519 wiped them out.

And

in any case, my point is,

what was the common denominator?

What

was the mentality of the

conqueror, the attacker, the aggressor, and what were the mentalities of the defenders that allowed the unthinkable to be

actual?

Before you go on, Victor, could I ask you, because the subtitle of your book is How Wars Descend into Annihilation, what do you mean by annihilation?

That's a good question.

In the introduction, I try to distinguish what I mean by annihilation.

Annihilation is

the destruction of the entire people as a collective.

I'm not saying there's not a few people who flee, but they are no longer identifiable as a people.

There are Nahutul-speaking people after the destruction of the Aztec, but there's nobody who says, I'm an Aztec

after Cortez wiped them out.

There's people today in Mexico, three to six million people, who speak a non-Spanish language, but they're not Aztecs.

So there's the destruction of the culture, the civilization, and the people for all practical purposes.

So

after,

to take one example, after 146,

when

the supposedly unreachable walls of Carthage are

blasted through by the Romans,

and the 500,000 people are wiped out, there's 50,000 survivors that are enslaved,

there are no more people who say they're Carthaginian.

And their language, Punic, is scattered.

Even Augustine, oh, 600 years later, said he found found remnants of people who could still speak Punic.

But for the

most part,

there is no more Punic culture, no more Punic literature, no more Punic

language, and there is not a physical space of Carthage.

It's completely raised.

I know there's something called Carthago Noah.

That's the new Roman city founded by Julius Caesar

about 44 BC.

But remember, all of these states are located on strategic spaces.

Constantinople is right on the Bosphorus, and it connects the Bosphorus, the Darnells, and the Black Sea, and the Golden Horn.

And then you have Carthage that sits on a promontory that sticks out from Tunisia,

and it's the closest place of Africa to Europe.

Thebes is

a nexus where it can connect Athens.

There's a road from Athens.

It goes up to the sanctuary at Delphi and is the capital of Boeotia and this huge farming, about

1,000 square miles of fertile farmland.

So these will be reoccupied, but not under the same auspices.

They'll be gone.

In the case of Thebes, that's a dialect of a Greek language Boeotian.

There are no more Thebans after the destruction.

There is no more

somebody who says, I am a classical Theban.

They don't exist.

The city is raised to the ground.

The only city of the four that I looked at that wasn't raised was ancient Constantinople.

And when the Muslims or the Ottomans and Mehmet the Sultan took it

in 1453,

they did not destroy the city.

Now, why didn't they destroy the city?

They didn't destroy the city because they changed the DNA of the city.

They ethnically cleansed everybody out of the city.

They enslaved the population or killed them off.

And there weren't a lot of Byzantines left in Constantinople.

That's why one of the reasons it fell, which I discuss in the chapter.

But they felt, well, Haggia Sophia, we want to get rid of it, the greatest cathedral in Christendom for a thousand years, but we can turn it into a mosque.

The palace of the emperor we can use as the headquarters of the sultan.

And the aqueducts are the most sophisticated, and the cisterns are the most sophisticated in the world.

And the tripartite Theodesan walls are the most impregnable in the world.

So they used all of those infrastructure.

They just completely blanked out memory, knowledge of the people who built it, and just sort of, like a parasitical force, took it over.

That was, by the way, the earlier idea of Cortez when he went into Tenochtitlan.

He looked at this city in the lake in 1521 and he thought, I can use this, get rid of the Aztecs and use them or use them in slave labor.

But of course, it was impossible to take the city without destroying it, or so he thought.

So I wanted to ask, does it only happen or predominantly happen when there is a central capital city that can be taken, destroyed, and then the culture of that and then everything around it changed.

Well, there's certainly this idea that

this culture that the attacker focuses on is like an octopus.

If you cut off the head or a snake, the tentacles or the body fall apart.

So you can't defeat Carthage without taking the capital at Carthage.

But, and this is one of the themes of the book, all of these

case studies are in decline.

In other words, they have visions of glory and grandeur still, and they don't realize how vulnerable they are.

Thebes is nominally still the head of the Boeotian League, but it has more people probably that hate it and will join at least the Thespians and the Thisbians and others, the Plataeans, will join Alexander the Great.

And in the case of Carthage, there are Punic settlements and villages, some of which will help them, but they're just minuscule and scattered compared to the former empire.

The same thing about Constantinople.

It was the Byzantine Empire.

I have 20 million people.

It stretched at one point all the way from Tunisia to Egypt to Iraq

to

Italy.

It had three-quarters of the old Roman Empire.

But by a thousand years later,

basically Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire were just the walls of the city and some outlying rural districts.

So one of the reasons that this erasure can take place is that these countries are in decline or these empires or these peoples are in decline.

And they have no real appraisal that they are so vulnerable because they live among the infrastructure of their great-great-great-great-grandparents that were

unconquerable.

So if you're you're a Carthaginian and the Romans besiege your city in 149,

you say,

these walls are more impressive than Rome's.

And my great-grandfather fought them in the First Punic War.

My grandfather fought them in the second, and they didn't take the city.

They didn't even try to take the city.

So, here we have the city, they won't be able to take it.

And did all that for Constantinople, and did all that for Thebes.

Seven-gated Thebes was the most famous fortress fortress city in mythical

and Greek folklore.

The Seven Gates of Thebes,

and this is where we have the play, The Seven Against Thebes.

It was the home of mythology, Antigone, Cadmus, Oedipus.

Nobody thought that it would fall.

Nobody thought that anybody would dare try to take.

But if you look at it

without romance, or naivete and say, what is the population of Thebes right now?

What is its hold on its former,

I don't want to say empire, but its former Boeotian League of allies?

What's its power vis-à-vis the new Macedonians that have taken over Greece?

Then you'd say, what were they thinking?

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to a break and then come back and talk about maybe general characteristics of the aggressors, and then we'll turn to Thebes specifically.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So, Victor,

the last question I have just for the general topic is:

are there general characteristics that move the aggressor to annihilate another power at all?

Or is that harder to be more?

Well,

we've been talking about the defenders, and there are commonalities, as we've seen.

They feel that they are much stronger than they really are.

They don't have an accurate and honest appraisal of their military condition.

Sort of like the Americans right now think we won World War II, we won the Cold War, we won the First Gulf War.

Of course, we are stronger than anybody.

And if you look at the actual appraisal of military strength and will to fight after Afghanistan and DEI, that's not accurate.

And that's true of the defenders.

They don't have a realistic appraisal of the danger that they're in.

They also don't have a realistic idea about the nature of the aggressors they're facing.

That's very important.

And so when the Thebans

have fought in the past and they joined the wrong side in the Persian War and they were besieged by the Athenians and the Spartans and the Free Greeks,

they surrendered.

and they had to pay some penalties and the city survived.

And the same thing that Constantinople, even when it was sacked in the Fourth Crusade by the

French Crusaders and European Crusaders, and they took it over for 70 or 80 years,

it rebounded.

They were able, the Byzantine Greek-speaking monarchy was able to take it back, and able to take it back and have a

resurgence of Byzantine power for 250 years.

But

they don't have, in these cases, at these particular times, they're not just vulnerable, but they don't have any idea what Alexander the Great is like.

He's 21 years old when he comes in 335 into Thebes, 335 B.C.

They say, oh, Philip II is dead.

We know what Philip II, his father, was like.

He took over all the Greek city-states.

And when he beat us at the Battle of Chaeronea and extinguished Greek freedom, and Alexander was just an 18-year-old kid, Yeah, he was pretty impressive, but he was 18.

And now he's fighting with all his siblings and all the lieutenants of his father to take over this huge Macedonian project that wants to go conquer Persia.

And it's got all the

Macedonian peoples under one rule.

And it's got all the Greek city-states subject to him.

But he's 21.

And there's rumors he was already been assassinated.

So let's revolt.

And he won't, you know,

he was tutored by Aristotle.

He says he's a man of letters.

His mother was from Epirus.

She's half Greek.

So even if he does come here, we can handle him.

And the same thing was true in the case of Carthage.

You know, after the second end of the third year of the siege, they say Scipio, two consuls came.

They couldn't take the city.

They tricked us into giving up our weapons, but we've rearmed.

Nobody has ever breached the walls, as I said, of Carthage.

It's a huge city.

And it's Scipio Aimilianus.

I know that he is the supposed adopted son,

actually adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, but he's not really related to him by blood.

And more importantly, he's an intellectual.

He's accompanied by the Greek historian Polybius.

Intellectuals don't kill people.

And

he was just a legate the first two years.

He didn't do much.

Now that he's in

command of the entire siege, there's no way he's going to, even if we lost, he wouldn't destroy us all.

That's the attitude.

And by the way, we paid off our fine.

We did everything the Romans wanted.

We gave them our elephants.

We turned over everything.

And they still wanted to besiege us, but they must have that in mind, that we don't pose an existential threat anymore.

We're just trying to defend ourselves.

And this philosopher general, who's now in charge, finally, is probably a good thing because we can come to terms with him if we lose.

And the same thing about Constantinople.

Constantine XI thought, you know what?

I've exchanged letters with the Ottomans.

We have

Genovese, we have Florentines, we have Venetian enclaves within the city.

Each of them has

an edict or an enabling clause from the Sultan and from us that they can do business and their windows on the west.

Why would they want to destroy Constantinople?

We've been here for a thousand years.

We've endured Arab attacks,

you know, 700 years ago.

We've dealt with the Ottoman Turks for 200 years.

They can't take the city.

And maybe we can cut a deal with Mehmet.

He's just 18, 19, 21 years old now.

We've dealt with him for three years.

Why doesn't he

make a deal?

We bought off some of his advisors.

That was the attitude.

But they had no idea who he was.

He was not like his father, just like Scipio was a killer.

His whole point,

his whole existence, his whole point of his entire reign was going to be the first person that ended the thousand-year

city of Christianity in Asia.

And he said that.

It doesn't belong here.

I mean, the Romans and the Greeks were there, of course, before the Celtic Turks, who didn't really come in until about 11 or 1,200 AD.

But it's now all of Asia Minor is mostly Muslim under control of the Sultanate.

And they have peeled away the Byzantine periphery for 200 years.

And Mehmet says, this is an eyesore.

I know that they're nice to us.

I know that they have Western ties.

We get gunpowder.

We trade with them.

We get cannon from them.

It's good for, this is a scientific repository that we tap into, but I want it gone.

They never understood that.

They had no idea.

You see, that in this period that was really only, what, a quarter century, just 20 something years after Columbus had discovered America,

they really hadn't ever seen any.

They weren't in the Caribbean.

They were deep in the interior of North America.

And they had never seen anybody before.

And unfortunately, they didn't know who the Spaniards were.

And the Spaniards had been fighting by 1521.

They had been fighting the Muslims in the Reconquista for over 300 years.

They had been fighting the Muslims of North Africa.

They had been fighting as part of the Habsburg Empire, the Northern Europeans.

They had been fighting in the Reformationists.

So the people who landed in Veracruz, in their mind, we're going to find souls and make sure they're Catholic in this cosmic war against

this aposty, apostates of

Protestantism.

We're going to get all these souls and we are going to make a new

empire and rape it, rape the continent for gold and silver so that we can use this money to restore the power of the Spanish Empire.

And it's Charles V, and he's not a dummy.

So, this is the apogee,

the pinnacle of Spanish power.

It was 1520.

And,

you know, they were, and unfortunately,

it was the fate of the Aztecs to encounter these people at just that particular moment.

And so, what I'm getting at is they don't understand that the attackers, in this case, these four people, are bloodthirsty, but more importantly, they have pretensions of philosophy.

Mehmet says that I have a great library.

I'm a Caesar.

I want to continue the Western tradition.

Scipio, as I said, has intellectuals around him.

Alexander the Great is tutored by

Aristotle.

He'll take philosophers with him to Persia.

Cortes,

he's a legal scholar.

He's a minor official of the Spanish government.

He's learned.

He speaks Latin.

Well, I want to just turn back to Thebes because you have

great opening statement, a couple of

paragraphs in, on the naivety that you're talking about.

You write, in the all too common miscalculations of the targeted, defiant Thebans looked to 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, but not to the ruthless record of Alexander the Great.

They had forgotten the superiority of the Macedonian flanks, and their leaders ignored the terror that the Macedonian occupation had instilled among some 1,500 conquered Greek city-states.

And so they died en masse.

I was most interested in that quote on them missing

the impressiveness of the military of of their attacker, the sympathy,

expecting the sympathy of their own allies, and

having so much confidence in the hallowed reputation of themselves as icons of Hellenic culture.

This episode, we're going to talk about the first example, Thebes.

And

we have to situate it.

So Philip of Macedon for 20 years has done the impossible.

He's taken warring tribes north of Greece.

And Macedon, the Macedonian language is on, you can comprehend it, but it's not quite completely Greek.

And they have an ambiguous, it's an offshoot of Hellenism.

And it's considered wild.

It has monarchy, an old archaic idea as far as the Greek city-states that are constitutional.

But this man with one eye, he's lost an eye, he's lame, he has conquered all of these tribes and he's made this empire.

And now he has gone down in 338 BC and conquered Greece at the Battle of Chaeronea.

And he's told the Greeks,

I am going to invade Persia and we're all going to get rich.

And you and you, Greeks, and Macedon are friends.

And we'll call it the, it's like a puppet league.

It was sort of like Hitler taking over Western Europe and saying that I'm going to save Western Europeans from the hordes in the east.

That's what

his angle was.

And how did he do this?

He took the Greek phalanx, who had eight-foot spears and body armor, and were citizen soldiers, and he lengthened the spear from eight to sixteen feet.

And the phalanx that he readapted, then, two things happened.

He took all of the body armor off the soldiers so they were light and could move.

And

the

pike, it's no longer a spear, it's called a sarissa in Macedonian.

It's 16 feet long, and it almost droops, so you have two hands to carry it.

But think about it.

If a phalanx is a box, and only the first three ranks can hit the enemy during the collision with an eight-foot spear, if you have a 16, you can go row four and five.

So in any killing zone, his new formation has 40% of the punch than the Greeks do.

And now these people can move and he can have directions.

They can go back, forward.

They're not burdened with 20 or 30 pounds of armor.

He doesn't care.

They're mercenary soldiers.

They're not citizens.

He hires his own people.

He pays them.

And then he makes a symphony.

And the old hoplite system, cavalry were just to protect the flanks.

There were some

light armed slingers or archers, etc., javelin throwers, but basically it was a one-time collision.

And then after it was over, they kind of, I don't say they shook hands, but

the point of contention was over, and the winner occupied the field of battle and set terms to the defeat.

Okay.

He puts heavy cavalry.

Heavy just means in the ancient world you have a spear and you have body armor.

on the horse and in the man.

And they're like punching, like a left and right hook.

And they punch a hole in the enemy they can charge infantry and they find a weak spot so if you're facing the Macedonian army the first thing that happens is they have archers javel javelin flowers and slingers they take a spot on the opposite side and they saturate it shock it then they send this heavy cavalry in and it punches a hole then this fast-moving phalanx goes at an oblique angle and punches through it and tears it apart and the shock just disintegrates everything.

The Greeks had never seen anything like that before.

Is that what they did at Chaeronea?

They did that at Chaeronea with Alexander the Great.

In fact, they had a feint.

They almost backpedaled and drew the Greeks forward, and then, as they got out of formation, Alexander blasted a hole and he came through.

And so

they should have known a little bit about it.

The second thing he did was he, Greeks didn't know how to take cities.

They were pretty much impenetrable.

But he began to use torsion catapults.

In other words, taking hair and springing this storing power, that is, muscular power, by cranking this armature back.

And so

a torsion catapult could destroy a mud brick or even easily a stone wall.

And he began to...

You can see in the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks knew how to put circumvallation walls around a city.

The Greeks did that at Syracuse.

They did it at Plataea.

But no one knew how to put a sophisticated wall around it and then use an army

to make another wall on the back end so that it couldn't be attacked from the rear and then use this artillery to smash holes in the wall and then have the phalanx blast through.

So

Philip had taken 10 or 12 Greek cities to the north, and when he took them,

if he wanted to take Olynthus, he besieged it and he wiped it out, killed everybody.

So they weren't used to this types of warfare.

So Philip dies in 336.

And nobody,

remember, there's no telegraph.

It's a long way away.

And they get rumors.

He's dead.

He's dead.

He's the guy that conquered us three years earlier.

So we're free.

And in each city, there was a debate, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos.

Should we revolt?

Because we hear he's dead.

And then somebody would say, yeah, but

he didn't just win the Battle of Chaeronea.

He had a son there, and he has Ptolemy, and he's got Cassandra.

He's got all of these old generals.

They'll come.

No, no.

So the Athenians egg everybody on.

Demosthenes, especially.

And everybody looks toward Thebes because Thebes is,

since 371, is

the most powerful city-state.

It's where Pamanondis, the Theban, had conquered Sparta, had freed the Messinian Hellots, had created democracies, had marched four times in the Peloponnese, had founded huge democratic cities at Messenia and Megalopolis and Mantinea.

and they looked toward them.

And they fought a little bit differently.

They had the sacred band, 300

professional troops, to anchor one side of the battlefield.

And more importantly,

they deepened their phalanx more than eight.

They didn't lengthen the spear, but they often fought in

25 men deep, even 50, in a way that the Greeks usually did, say, 8 to 12.

So they were very innovative, and people looked toward them.

So everybody thought, what are the Thebans going to do now that Philip is dead?

And

Demosthenes says, give them money, give them arms.

And they start in this year to

mobilize.

And they have, each city has a Macedonian guard there on its Acropolis.

These are Macedonian troops that are supposed to be eyes and ears and keep like police, occupation troops.

Well, some hotheads get in and they chase them up and they lock them up and they kill some.

And then they say, We're going to revolt, and everybody goes crazy.

So, the people from the Peloponnese are told, Thebes is leading the revolt, it's a panellinic evolt.

They won't do anything.

Alexander, we don't even know if he's alive.

Then, rumors came that he got assassinated.

And they knew that of all the children and bastard children of Philip, he was the most accomplished.

But his mother, Olympios, was out of the picture.

So, they thought that they would kill Olympias and kill him, and then he would have a different successor.

It didn't happen.

He wasn't killed.

And as soon as he heard it, he was even a greater genius than his father.

So most people would have said, well, what do I do?

My dad died.

I'm only 21 years old.

All of Greece is in revolt.

They've got more people than we do.

It's 200 miles away.

What do I do?

Not him.

No.

He said,

marshal the army and march.

And we can march 20 to 30 miles a day.

So while they're arguing what to do and they're all revolting, they think this army shows up.

And they say, what the, how did this thing get here?

And they simply said, well, he marched 25 miles a day.

So, you know, a man can march about three and a half miles with some breaks.

He marched in 10 hours.

And they're here.

day after day.

And now he comes up to me.

He says, what are you doing?

You can't revolt.

I control all of Greece.

It's now the Macedonian-Greek alliance, and you're upsetting my plan.

My dad's generals are in Persia, and they're waiting for me to take a big army and join them.

And we're going to loot Babylon, and we're going to loot the treasuries, and we're going to conquer these people and pay them back.

And you're, what are you doing?

So he had a good message.

And a lot of Greeks go, hmm, do I really want to

die fighting the Macedonians rather than join them and get rich and pay the Persians back?

And so there's a lot of unsurty.

But once the army pulls up

and starts to occupy the ground around Thebes and you can't get into the city, their envoys are down the Peloponnese and all of a sudden the Spartan and Arcadians come up and say, no, we're turning around.

We want no part of this.

So they abandon them.

The Athenians never show, and so it's the Thebans.

So why don't they have negotiations?

Alexander says to them,

I'm going to destroy your city.

I'm going to kill you.

I'm going to enslave your people.

However, all you have to do is turn over the revolutionaries, just a handful of people who thought this stupid idea up.

And you were confused.

I understand that.

You thought I was dead.

And they make a legal case and say, well, we didn't revolt against you because you were dead.

So now you're alive and we have no problem with you.

So don't get angry at us.

It's a different situation.

And he says, no,

you've got immediately to decide what you want to do.

And they decide to keep the Macedonian hostages.

They're boxed up on the Cadmea or the Acropolis, and they will not turn over the revolutionaries.

And they think, you know what?

Chaeronea was a fluke.

We're not even going to sit in the walls.

We're going to go outside the walls.

We're going to make a little wooden palisade.

We're going to put the entire army here of Thebans.

and we're much better soldiers than the Macedonians, and we're going to fight it out right in front of the city.

And that's what they do.

And they fight very well.

They kill 500 Macedonians.

That's more than any, that's more than they lost at the Battle of Granicus against the Persians.

And so it starts out for the first few hours that it seems like a good idea.

But again,

They have no idea what he's up to.

And of course, the battle goes on for a few hours, and then they start to lose, and they get pushed back, and the cavalry blast them, the Alexander's cavalry blast them, and the people flee, and some doors are left, gates are left open.

Before you know it, you've got the Macedonians running through the city and killing people door to door.

And you seem to suggest that this has

a lot to do with the decline of Thebes already before.

You state here the decline of Thebes from its once preeminent role in Greece to an unpopular head of a shaky democratic Boeotian federation ensured the erosion of the legendary flanks of their earlier renowned general and leader,

Epaminondas.

Well, Epaminondas

was killed at the Battle of Mantinea.

And

so he's been dead for all of the 50s.

He's been dead for 25 years.

And the sacred band, their cracked troops, they were wiped out to the man three years earlier at the Battle of Chaeronea.

And they were completely,

the Greeks were represented only by the Athenians and Thebans for the most part.

And they were completely defeated.

Demosthenes, the orator, threw his shield down and ran back to Athens.

So when they...

are hyping themselves up and posing as the liberators of Greece.

All of their allies are thinking, no, we're not going to get in this again.

It sounds great, but you lost at the Battle of Chaeronea.

There is no Epaminondas, he's dead.

There's nobody like him, like Pelopidas, his lieutenant, is dead.

They're gone.

Ancient history.

They're not the liberators of Greece anymore.

And

we want to cut a deal.

So they all cut deals with the Macedonians.

And they left Thebes.

And the Thebans didn't quit.

And the Thebans still thought that these people were their allies, though.

That's what gets me.

Like, didn't they know they were already turned against them before they even went to battle?

The problem was, the great city of Athens has this

silver-tongued sophist, Demosthenes, and he's a very good man.

He believes in the freedom of the Greeks, and he's talking a great game.

He was the one that said for 20 years, don't trust Philip.

He's lost his eye, he's lost his health, he'll do anything to enslave us

and don't appease him.

And then when Philip won at the Battle of Chaeronea, he fought there and he ran away and he's lucky he didn't get killed.

He was under house arrest, so to speak.

And now he's full of himself and he's telling the Athenians, we've got to aid the Thebans.

And so he sends money and he sends some weapons and the Athenians say, you know what?

We took an oath to the League of Corinth, the puppet government of Macedon, and we're not going to do something stupid and get wiped out because these people mean business.

We saw what they did up in Greece, northern Greece.

They don't just take a city, they wipe it out.

They completely demolish it.

They're going to demolish the Thebans.

There's probably only somewhere around 20 to 30,000 Thebans.

We don't know quite how many there are.

But it's not a big city-state like Athens or Corinth or Syracuse.

But it's the most famous in some ways.

It's the oldest.

It's a thousand years old.

So people are thinking, but on the other hand,

this is where all our myths are.

This is where Pentheus and Dionysus are in the Bacchae.

This is the Oedipus Rex.

This is the Antiguan.

This is the Oedipus at Colonius.

This is Heracles, supposedly,

was either born or raised in Thebes, and they have a Heraclean club on their shields.

It would be kind of like New York today.

It's in its decline.

You know, Wall Street's on its decline.

But everybody thinks of New York as the city.

And that's what they thought about Thebes.

And so they decide to fight even when they know the terms are pretty good.

They will not be wiped out.

They'll resort to the same status as the other city-states.

And then Alexander can say to everybody,

look.

I did not punish anybody, and that's why I'm magnanimous, and I want to be your friend.

But I have to be in control because you people for a thousand or a thousand years just well 500 years have been squabbling and you don't have an idea of a nation or a kingdom all you do is fight each other and you're never going to get anywhere fighting the Persians that way Persia invaded us in at Marathon at Plataea at Salamis they interfered in the Peloponnesian War they're interfering now They pay one Greek city-state off against the other, and they're rich.

All we have to do is unite and we'll go over there under my Macedonian tutelage with the Macedonian army, and we will go like a knife through butter through this decadent fat empire for the taking.

And that's his argument.

And

it's very appealing to a lot of people.

And the Thebans are saying, We're the city of Pamanondas.

We're for Greek freedom.

Everybody wants to be free.

That's why we fought Philip for 20 years.

And they say, it's over with, Thebans.

You lost.

Give it up.

And so Alexander, at this point, when they insult him and when they negotiate, they insult him and say, we're going to give you a chance to surrender.

We're not going to surrender.

And we may have to kill all the Macedonians in the city.

And so he just says, you know what?

I've had it.

And then he thinks, the second best message to the Greek city-states, rather than winning over their

confidence and their friendship and their love is to make them terrified of me.

So if I go ahead ahead with this siege, I'm not going to let them go.

I'm going to enslave all the women and children,

and I'm going to kill all of the adult males, whether it's on the battlefield or on the walls, or whether I catch them running the street, and I'm going to take the city.

And it's very hard in the ancient world to destroy a stone wall or a temple, and I'm going to knock everything over and destroy it and burn it.

And maybe the poet Pendar, who's a big fan of

his potato, I'll let his house stay.

I won't desecrate some religious sanctuaries.

A couple of women who were very brave, and I hear individual stories of good Thebans, I'll let them stay, but otherwise they're gone.

And then we're going to destroy the whole city so nobody thinks they can rebuild it.

There won't be a Thebes when I get done.

That's in his head.

And that's exactly what he does.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the consequences of the annihilation of Thebes.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is a special edition, and we are working on or looking at some of the

chapters in his new book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

Victor, we were just talking about, so Thebes is gone in Alexander's head, and also in reality he does a lot of destruction.

But I was wondering how significant is that given the culture that was there?

And you have a paragraph where you say the followers of Pythagoras had enjoyed a large cult in Thebes.

There was also a Socratic philosophical following in the city.

The Theban philosophers, Simeus and Cabes, appear and are mentioned in Socratic discourse in both Plato and Xenophon.

Krates, the Theban cynic,

was at that time a student of Diogenes of Athens, dot, dot, dot, on and on.

So this city was the center of some philosophical greats.

And the destruction, is there any significance in the destruction of it and the culture that was

born there from these particular people?

You know what I mean?

Yes, I do.

I mean, Athens, even though it's under Macedonian

subjugation, it still has the theater of Dionysus, so they still have the spring Dionysia.

They still put on plays in the great triad,

Aeschylus,

Sophocles, Euripides.

Just think of those three names.

So Aeschylus wrote a play called The Seven Against Thebes.

It's still being produced.

Sophocles wrote a trilogy,

and that was Antigone

and

Oedipus, Rex, and

Oedipus at Colonus.

And Euripides wrote a play called The Bacchae that takes place right above Thebes with the legendary king, Cadmus.

Okay, so they're still going to put those on, but what's the idea?

What's the, what's the, you know what I mean?

It'd be like singing the Star-Spangled Banner when there's no America.

Yeah.

So everybody knows what happened to Thebes, and so there's no longer any, well, yeah, let's go over to Thebes and see where Oedipus was, it's gone.

And so that shocks them.

And it has an effect of, in the most part, it stops all rebellion.

But when he invades Persia the next year, at the Battle of Granicus, there may be 20,000 Greek mercenaries.

So a lot of people who are angry at him don't think they can rebel in Greece.

They go over and hire themselves out and fight him at the Battle of Granicus, and they get pretty close to killing him at a point.

And they will fight at the Battle of Isis

as well.

So

what I'm getting at is it sent shockwaves through the Greek world.

They just didn't believe that a major city would be leveled.

And they didn't think that this, that, you know, there's a sect of, as you said, Pythagoras.

It's gone.

In the later later Socratic dialogues, the middle dialogues, there's a mention of Theban philosophers.

They're gone.

There are gravestones.

There are monuments to Apaminondas and Pelopis.

They're gone.

Philip II, when he was 15, he was a hostage.

See, Macedon was not much of anything.

It was just a rural, isolated, feuding bunch of kingdoms till he took over.

And he was taken as a hostage

and kept in Thebes during the reign, or I should say, the democratic tenure of Apaminondas.

So the irony is that he was there as a little kid and just absorbed all of this Greek culture and especially the military innovations of Apaminondas.

And then as a little teenager, that SOB went back up there and said, we need to start fighting in phalanxes.

We need to do what Apaminondas did and make them deep.

But I've got some great ideas that I've talked to people.

We're going to lengthen the spear into a pike and we're going to have heavy cavalry and we're going to make a symphony of forces, not just a one-dimensional.

So

it's catastrophic what happens.

And people had looked toward Thebes as the spiritual leader.

They thought, you know, Apaminondas took over from Athens after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War.

By 371, the Theban hegemony, it was an idealistic movement.

They freed the Hellots.

They freed 60,000 Mycenae.

They got rid of helotage, not in Laconia, but in Mycenae.

And it was,

they founded democracies all over the Peloponnese.

They emasculated.

The irony is, had they not emasculated Sparta, they would have had a powerful enemy.

They would have had, they, being Philip II, the

Macedonians would have had a powerful enemy in Sparta.

But Sparta didn't even show up at Chaerone.

It's not going to show up here at this siege.

And so

it's this first chapter I was trying to show that

there's a series of events that lead an entire people to make decisions that seem rational at the time.

We're going to liberate Greece.

We're the Thebans.

Everybody hates the Macedonians.

They're occupiers.

We're going to restore the city-state of freedom.

Philip II, the architect of this diabolical phalanx, is dead.

They have no successor.

There's even rumors that Alexander's dead.

We don't even know if they're all in chaos.

It's time to revolt.

That was sort of what they thought.

It's kind of like the,

you know, Operation Valkyrie, getting rid of Hitler.

Everybody wants to think this is a great idea, but

every assumption turns out to be false.

And so he's not dead.

They think he's dead, and he's not.

And when the rumors are confirmed that he's alive and that he's on his way,

then

all of the support for Thebes dissipates.

What I can't figure out, and what the sources

were in conflict about,

was

why didn't they negotiate?

And I think the answer is they didn't really think that he was going to kill 6,000 people

and enslave somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people and sell them off.

And then just take the

small city-states that were around Thebes, part of the Boeing, and say, hey, it's yours.

Just go in and you can take whatever you want, take the roof tiles, tear off the doors.

haul off the marble and that land, that beautiful farmhome, it's yours.

Thespians, It's yours, Plataeans.

It's yours, Thisbians.

And that's what they did.

And from what we can tell, it was pretty much, in a year or two, there was no trace of Thebes.

And then, of course,

as always happens, people

shed crocodile tears.

And every one of these cases, the destroyer of a civilization felt bad about it, supposedly.

So Alexander then, we're told, much later, is nice to Thebans, because there are some exiles, I don't know, a few hundred that have survived.

And when he encountered a Theban, he was deferential toward them.

And

he got angry at the Theban leaders and said they had made him destroy this iconic city.

And as I said later, 20 years later, one of his lieutenants after his death will try to make a lot of propaganda by saying, you should be nice to the Macedonians.

We hated Alexander as much as you did.

So even though we're in control, we're going to, we found Thebes and make up for what we did.

But it's not Thebans.

It's in the general vicinity, near or on top of the race site.

And the same thing as we'll see with Scipio.

He supposedly, when he saw everybody being killed and enslaved in the last hours of Carthage, he went up on a hill with Polybius and cried, I didn't want it to be this way.

It reminds me of the Iliad when they destroyed Ilium and Troy fell.

It's so sad.

Same thing with Metmed.

I gave three three days for my troops to rape and kill and loot.

I beheaded the megadukes.

I know I did all these terrible things.

I feel so bad about it.

It shouldn't have happened.

And then Cortez said, this was the venice of the new world.

My idea was to keep the lake and the locks and the mud wreck ticks, and I would change the Templo

major into a cathedral.

I didn't want to just destroy it, but I had to.

They were burrowed in.

And, you know, that's...

And then they all become sort of,

I don't know, ambiguous figure.

Today, if you go in Mexico and you mention Cortez, he's not a popular figure.

And Scipio Aemilianus tried to say that he was an intellectual, but most people today, if you read a modern history of Rome

or the ancient world, nobody believes the Third Punic War was a good thing.

It wasn't even a war.

It was just a siege of vengeance.

Nobody,

I say when we get to the

Constantinople chapter, I was living in Greece for over two years, and I remember on May 29th,

at about 11 o'clock, I got a knock on the door of my apartment, and the concierge was a Greek woman, and she says, Mr.

Hansen, would you come out in silence?

We're having, I come over to the lounge in the apartment.

We're having a prayer.

I thought, for what?

For Constantine XI.

Who's he?

I said, well, he got killed.

And she said, it's Black Tuesday.

It's right at the moment when

the Genovese faltered.

Custiani, he fell, and they broke through.

They didn't have to happen.

And we lost everything.

The spiritual and religious center of Hellenism.

And I said, well, what's the deal?

I didn't say it quite like that.

They said, He's been marblized.

You know that.

When they all fled into Haggia Sophia, 7,000 of them, and they barred the doors and they broke through, they prayed for the archangel to come down and save them.

And he couldn't save them, but he allowed Constantine to be turned into marble and whisked away in some chamber or somewhere.

I said, Well, what happened?

Aha, he will be reified again, refleshed, and he'll come back, and the Megala Idea will come back.

So these are really

wounds.

You know, it's so funny about bin Laden when he was giving all this Mishmash history, kind of like Putin's history when he was saying that El Andalus was still Muslim, you know, Spain, and this was terrible, Cordoba and all of this,

as if it had been Muslim from the seventh century.

And it was not European, I thought,

what are you talking about?

You've only had had Asia Minor since 1453.

This thing went back three millennia.

It was Greek speaking.

And you just ripped that whole civilization out.

So

it's a big wound, that is a wound in the Greek mind.

But

all of these were very hard to write about because,

again,

we're going to talk about the epilogue.

where I try to suggest don't laugh at this, don't think it's crazy.

It can happen again because human nature is unchanging.

And there are going to be people who say, I don't want to destroy you.

I'm your friend.

I just want you to listen to reason.

And there's going to be people who he targets.

And they're going to say, ah, he would never do that.

This is 2025 or 24.

We don't do that anymore.

This is the great...

This is the great country of Armenia or Israel will never disappear.

Don't believe

the Iranians that say they're going to nuke us.

All you people fall for that nuclear blather from Putin when he says he's going to use a tactical nuclear weapon and wipe out Ukraine.

He'd never do anything.

When Erdogan says to the Greeks, you're going to wake up one morning and missiles are going to blanket Athens, he said that about Gaza too.

And then he said something that was really,

and he's in Washington this week,

coming.

He said, they asked him about Armenia, and he said it doesn't belong here.

I.e., it's kind of like the Byzantines that say Christian nation in Asia Minor aborting Turkish-speaking peoples.

And he says, Well, we'll deal with the Armenians like our grandfathers did.

Oh, no.

And so

foreboding.

And then you think that human nature hasn't changed, and then you think of the techniques.

It's not a bunch of muscular labor stabbing people or cutting their throat or taking a crowbar and knocking over a wall.

It is AI.

It is biological weapons, COVID-type weapons, but nuclear weapons.

There's all space laser weapons.

We have the ability now

to

rapidly close the window of reflection in a war that you can take a whole people out without really contemplating the pros and cons.

It can happen very quickly.

And it was just an accident.

When I wrote the

epilogue to this, I thought, well,

I know that I was contracted to do two histories, and it probably won't sell like the other two books.

But I had no idea that as this book is coming out, and as I'm speaking right now, you've had Iran threaten Israel and say that we're going to, if you do this and this and this, we're going to take you out.

And we're going to, and you wink, nod, we have a nuclear weapon.

I don't think they do, but that's what they're trying to imply.

And we've heard Putin say that Ukraine,

he said the other day, it's not a nation.

It's just an aberration.

They're Russians.

They say they're Ukrainians, but that matter was settled years ago.

These are just fakers.

They're part of Russia.

And we're just going to reclaim them and just get rid of them, I guess.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, if I can just turn back to Thebes again, just for one moment.

It seems to me what you're saying is that their miscalculations arose from a former sense of grandeur that they hadn't lost yet, but they're in reality didn't have still.

So here's what you say right towards the end of the Thebes chapter.

You say, it would be reassuring to believe in last-minute, successful, and glorious last stands of doomed, idealistic city-states.

But usually, the fate of the vanquished can be calculated in advance and more mundanely by numerical or military inferiority, their prior and present naivete,

their long decline, their incompetence, and the sheer military genius and resources of their attackers.

Thank you.

That was quite a sum-up.

Well, any final words?

It's

they don't, I mean,

did anybody believe that the United States would be pushed out of Afghanistan by ragtag terrorists and would leave $50 billion

in munitions that would be on the terrorist open market now, and leave probably 10,000,

maybe 100,000 friendly Afghans who helped us, and maybe 1,000 U.S.

contractors, and maybe the entire NATO contingent, and just scram.

I didn't think that we'd ever do that.

I didn't think that we'd let a Chinese balloon traverse.

We're America, right?

So decline can come very quickly.

It's often a choice rather than an inevitability.

So the Thebans have this sense that

we are so important

and we were so strong and therefore we are strong and are important that they have no idea of their vulnerability.

And then when you have no idea of your vulnerability, you do stupid things.

You don't make rational calculations.

You don't think, hmm, if you were a Theban and you weren't a romantic and they were all romantics, I think, you would get on the walls and you say, there's 30,000 of them.

We only have about 12,000 combatants.

These walls are

famous, but they've got holes in them.

They're not what they think.

And we fought these people three years ago, and they slaughtered us.

And this man, Philip, the father of Alexander, has been butchering people for 20 years.

And he's conquered all of Greece.

Nobody's ever done that.

The Persians couldn't do it.

And his son is likely alive.

And his son, we saw him at Chaeronea, and he's a killer.

And he's coming.

And so,

given that,

you could say that before he came, or when you saw him out there, and you saw,

he deliberately built siege engines right in front of them.

He didn't think they were going to come out of the walls and fight.

That was stupid.

But once they came out, they thought, this is even better.

And so

they were thinking that they were Thebans that no longer existed existed anymore, and they were thinking that Alexander was somebody who he wasn't.

And

one of the messages, too, is that

intellectuals are very deadly people because they have a rational reasoning component to their evil.

In other words,

if they think they can find a reason to justify it, then therefore there must be a reason to justify it, or they wouldn't be able to justify it.

That was sort of in the Socratic dialogues.

If

I can tell you it's good to kill that person and you believe me, I couldn't persuade you unless it was good.

I'm just finding an internal truth.

And so

they had no idea who he was.

And

he meant business.

And all of these people were intellectuals.

Alexander said he was an intellectual.

Scipio said he was.

Mehmet said he was.

Cortez was reading the whole time he was there.

He was a masterful writer as well.

And these are not thugs.

They're not Genghis Khan.

They're not Attila the Hun.

Or they're not the vandals.

They know exactly what they're doing.

They know exactly how to read human nature.

They're versed in history and literature.

And they can speak and write.

in a way that can contextualize the violence that they inflict.

I mean, when you have Scipio wiping out Carthage and he's quoting the Iliad,

with Polyvius, probably the greatest historian other than Thucydides in the ancient world, sitting beside him,

and you've got Alexander, you know, with all of the.

He brings Callisthenes, the philosopher, with him, the Aristotelian philosopher and historian.

And he's got a lot of, and he's got Ptolemy, who wrote diaries, a very learned man, who's one of the great sources for all of Alexander's campaigns.

So I think that's one of the lessons that when you see

people say they're going to do something and they have the capability to do that, don't write it off as crazy.

And don't be impressed that someone reads Cicero or someone listens to Wagner or someone

meditates.

Just forget all that.

That makes them more dangerous, not less.

Yeah.

So it almost sounds like you're saying that these attackers had a culture that was equal to or superior, and they had a determination that was unstoppable in each and every case.

And they also had skills given that cultural training that they had.

And

if you had said to Alexander, you don't have to destroy the city,

the Greeks didn't do it when they took it.

When after the Battle of Plataea.

They let them go.

You don't have to do it.

It's a famous city.

It'll be bad for you.

You're a smart guy.

Scipio, you've taken over the siege.

You've wasted two years, your predecessors.

They couldn't take the city.

You don't have to do it.

Carthage is nothing.

It doesn't have an empire.

It poses no existential threat.

Why do it?

Or if you had said to Mehmet,

it makes no sense.

You have the biggest library in the Muslim world.

You're a learned man.

You read all about classical culture and history.

They're giving you everything they want.

If you want to get gunpowder or the latest design on a cannon, you just go to one of your agents in Byzantium inside the walls of Constantinople, and they'll get a Florentine or a Genovese or a Venetian to come and trade.

There's no need to do it.

And the same thing with Cortez.

You don't have to destroy the whole city.

I know that they behead, I know that they tear out hearts, they're human sacrifice, they're cannibals.

But you don't have to destroy them.

And people got very angry at them for doing that.

But who cared?

It's not the answer in their eyes, right?

They do it because they can.

They do it because they can.

Well, Victor, thank you for this discussion of your book.

I hope everybody goes out and buys a version of it because it's got some other great tales in it of Carthage and

about a better known.

I think the two best,

the two most well-known destructions, annihilations, catastrophes, genocide, whatever particular word we use is, of course, Carthage and then the destruction of

Hellenic Christianity at Constantinople.

I think everybody wants, those are the most interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thebes didn't end the Hellenic world because the

I try to make that distinction.

I'm not saying that but there is a Boeotian Theban dialect and there are because they don't have a nation see.

So you can say you wiped out an independent autonomous people even though they shared the language with other Greeks.

But it's not a Greek nation yet.

No.

Well, thank you, Victor, and thanks to our listeners.

And again, the name of the book is The End of Everything, How

Wars Descend into

Annihilation.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

I hope we can talk about ancient Carthage next time.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.