The End of Carthage: Things We Can Learn

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is a special edition on Victor's new book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

For you who are new to the show, Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And you can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.

We are going to talk about the second chapter of the book, so Carthage, and maybe things outside of as well on Carthage, because the book is very focused on the Third Punic War between the Romans and Carthaginians.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, there's been, because it's relevant, we've had commentators and stories out there that are

connected today in our own civilization.

Recently, or at least last night, I heard a commentator say that AI will destroy us all eventually.

He was very bleak.

And we've seen things like Xi and Putin saying that nuclear weapons are not an option.

And I know we talked about that on an earlier podcast, that

they're saying that now as they are planning their own sort of shenanigans.

And then just yesterday, and we were recording this a little bit earlier, Victoria Newland said that

the United States should help to hit bases in Russia

to help the Ukraine.

So some pretty striking things that are ominous, and so too is the story of Carthage that you want to tell us.

Yeah, well, when I wrote the book, it was to investigate what is pretty rare in history, as I said in our first two sessions, that is the wartime annihilation.

We don't usually annihilate World War I, World War II, Civil War.

The losing party is not erased.

By erased, I mean their infrastructure destroyed or absorbed, their people killed or enslaved, their language, their religion, their customs and traditions fade.

And there's a lot of examples, but not a lot if you can s consider there's 7,000 years of recorded history.

Troy is the most famous.

I mentioned these mythical things in passing, but I focused on ancient Thebes, Carthage, the tragic fall of Constantinople and the end of Byzantine civilization in Asia.

And then, of course, the Cortez annihilation of the Aztecs.

But then I wrote an epilogue about could this happen again?

And basically it had two themes.

We're going to get to a whole session on it, but one is that human nature doesn't change.

I think anybody who looked at October 7th and read carefully and looked at some of the tapes and transcripts and the helmet cams of the killers,

you can see that mutilation, decapitation, incineration, torture, hostage-taking,

you name it, it's all medieval.

It's no different than what you read about what the ancients did to

a city that surrendered without terms.

So human nature hasn't changed, but the delivery systems, nuclear, bio,

chemical,

and our artificial intelligence, and you point out this a person just the other day from the United Kingdom said he was afraid in 20 years we'd blow up the world given the geometric advance of AI intelligence.

Then we have COVID-19 that killed somewhere around what, 40 or 50 million people, a gain of function virus that escaped from a biolab under the control of the PLA in Wuhan.

We've seen chemical wipe out

a lot of the Kurds in Iraq.

We could go on and on.

And there's 10 nuclear powers.

Five of them are autocratic, as we discussed the other days.

So it's imminently possible.

And when you see people make these statements, whether it's Erdogan or Putin or Chi about using nuclear weapons, the Chinese put out a really scary, you should go watch it, an eerie video about how to nuke Japan.

I think they've taken it off by now, but it's

said, if you dare intervene, we're going to destroy every person in Japan with nuclear weapons.

And then they showed Chinese planes and missiles hitting Japan.

So it was very ironic that my point is when Putin and Chi give a little communique, as we talked about before, that, oh, you can't use nuclear weapons.

Of course you can't.

Why do you have to tell us that now?

Because, you know, you want to absorb Taiwan and Ukraine, and you think the only way people can stop you is with nuclear weapons.

Which is a dilemma, isn't it?

Yeah, it sure is.

It's scary.

So, finally,

Victoria Newland, I knew Robert Kagan.

I just worship Donald Kagan, the ancient historian, the father of both Fred, who does really valuable work at the Institute of War

and

updates conflicts throughout the world in a very scholarly analytical manner.

Victoria Newland was Under Secretary of State during Obama period, and she was infamous, whether justifiably or not, I don't know, but she had that overheard cell phone when she basically

said that the United States government was going to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine that was pro-Russian and that orange revolution in the streets that apparently we sponsored.

So a lot of people

do not trust her judgment on Ukraine, but when she says that we need to give missiles with the capability of hitting deep into Russia and taking out bases with no restrictions,

what is Russia going to do about that?

Does she think right now that Russia has used its whole arsenal against Ukraine?

It hasn't.

It's used drones and some missiles and some flights.

Does she think that Russia could not wipe out Kiev with conventional missiles?

Maybe a nuclear.

It can.

Does she think during the Cuban missile crisis that John F.

Kennedy would have said to Castro, it's okay if Khrushchev gives you missiles designed to hit bases inside the United States?

Because that's exactly what he did.

And we were willing to go to nuclear war to stop that.

So it seems to me highly reckless.

And when you add into the equation that she was involved in the dissemination of the phony steel dossier at the highest level of the

lame-duck Obama administration, I don't trust her judgment.

Her father wrote a really good book called How We Die.

He was a

I think he was a physician, psychiatrist, and it was a very good book, How We Live and How We Die, How You Come Into the World and the Physical Process and What Happens When You die.

It was a bestseller, a Yale professor.

And

one of the people I was closest to in the field of classics was Donald Kagan.

We were really good friends, and I thought he was a wonderful person, not just a great scholar.

And

he has two very successful sons, Fred and Robert Kagan.

Anyway.

But you think that these modern conditions are mimicking the ancient one that you talk about in Carthage because people, because the sides have unrealistic notions of themselves.

I created a paradigm.

I didn't create it.

The examples jumped out at me that why did this happen?

And one of it was the people who were targeted, A, were in a period of decline and were not aware of it or that wanted to deny it, financial, economic, military decline.

I mean, Carthage did not have the ability to put Hannibal 18 years in Italy.

That's what he did in the Second Punic War.

And

there was a time when the Byzantine Empire, even after the Fourth Crusade when it was sacked in 1204, still had extensive holdings all over Asia and even in the Balkans.

Not in 1453

when it fell.

So there was the period of decline.

They were completely unrealistic about what type of men Scipio or Cortez or Mehmet II, the Sultan or Alexander the Great were.

And I think the third is that they had

very

unrealistic ideas of what was possible and what was practicable.

Practical,

excuse me.

Practicable.

Yes.

That's something cut out.

So we'll go back there, Robert.

3, 2, 1.

They had a very unrealistic idea of what was likely to happen

versus versus what might happen.

They thought, well, maybe we could be destroyed, but they didn't realize there was good odds that they were going to be destroyed.

They were in a series of denials.

Part of that denial entailed Spartans, the Athenians, they're going to save us from Alexander.

No.

Why die for Thebes?

The Carthaginian.

Well, Andriscos, the Macedonian firebrand, will come up to the rear of the Roman besiegers.

No.

Why die for Carthage?

Oh, the Venetians, the Genovese, the Pope has send fleets.

They're coming up the Hellespont.

They're going to save us and hit the besiegers.

No.

Why die for Orthodox Christianity if you're a Western Christian?

And maybe the Toltecs, maybe we can flip the Tlax Callans back against Cortez.

He only has 1,500 men.

No.

And so when you look at that paradigm and you apply it to these examples in the present,

Well,

Putin is bluffing.

He's just nutty.

He's 70 years old.

He has this dream, iridensis dream of restoring the Soviet Union.

Land, more land, and more land.

It's just, don't take him seriously.

He's invaded three out of the last four administrations.

Kim Jong-un.

Oh, he's crazy.

He's just an obese little boy.

No, he's not.

He's crazy, but he's not crazy.

He has ability to do a lot of damage.

And he works and he operates like a pit bull on a leash that

master is in Beijing.

Oh, Erdoyan, he's just a wayward little tyrant.

He's just blowing off steam.

No, he's a pro-Islamicist, pro-Gaza, pro-terrorist,

apostate NATO member who thinks he owns the proprietary rights to nuclear weapons based in Turkey, who has threatened serially the Armenians, the Kurds,

and the Greeks, and the Israelis.

with missiles raining down from the sky.

A 19th century solution for the Armenians, he said.

I could go on and on.

So we take these things, we better take them seriously.

That doesn't mean they're going to likely happen.

That means they can happen.

Especially if we don't look in the mirror and say the United States is in decline.

It's not faded, it's not inevitable, but it is a choice.

We have no southern border.

We are borrowing $8 trillion every three months.

We owe $36 trillion.

We are racially and ethnically and geographically torn in two.

We are deliberately not using our full panoply of gas, oil, coal, except during an election.

Then Joe Biden thinks this gooey, sticky, ugly, smelly stuff is good, and he'll release it from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that Trump filled, but which he hasn't.

I could go on, but we have no deterrence abroad.

We're still giving, by the way, we gave $11 million to the Taliban.

Thank you.

That was a reward, what, for chasing us out of their country and humiliating us and killing 13 Americans.

We also did what?

We just sent congratulations to this butcher,

the president of Iran, Rossi, that had killed thousands of people.

Did you see the chaplain in the Senate?

He gave a little service for this dead Iranian.

Yeah, condolences for him, yeah.

Yeah, we're we're trying to overthrow the elected government of Israel, and we're sending condolences to a mass murderer.

So that sends a message.

And so this is not just ancient history.

I was trying to find models or modalities that could teach us something about how these things happen, and these great cities that were preeminent ended up

disappeared.

So we'll look at Carthage today.

Yeah, so let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the Third Punic War.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

We're back.

So, Victor, on the Third Punic War, I just wanted to ask you something because it doesn't seem like the Carthaginian fate was sealed by your book when the war started out in

149 BC, I believe it was.

And

because the Romans, their whole campaign when they got to Carthage, did did not go as expected.

It's not really a war.

It was a siege.

They had fought two Punic wars over 116 years.

Rome had won both of them, but always with conditions,

not destruction of

either party.

So the conditions after the Second Punic War was get rid of Hannibal

and give up your European possessions and ask the Senate for permission if you ever want to use arms and pay a huge fine.

And And they thought the problem was solved.

From 202 to 149, basically a half century, they paid off the fine in half the time.

So they sent a diplomatic mission to look at Carthage.

They said, well, we'll make sure it's just, they said, oh my God, look at it.

There's 500,000 people.

It's lavish.

The fields are better cultivated than what we see in Italy.

They've got elephants again.

They've got catapults.

They have allies that are joining them.

The elder Cato was Carthago de Linda S.

Carthago de Linda S.

Carthage must be destroyed supposedly at the end of every speech.

And so they wanted a war and they wanted a pretext.

And they got rid of sort of peace nicks in the Roman Senate.

Scipio Nosca, a great guy, they sent him over to Greece so he wouldn't object.

And then they landed 80,000

Roman legionnaires at Utica.

Utica is only only about 15 miles away, if you go there today.

And Carthage, you know, is in the suburbs of Tunisia, Tunis.

The Roman city is there.

The ancient city, of course, was obliterated, the Punic city.

But my point is that when they got there, they said, we have a Senate thing, and you attacked some Numidian

allies of ours, and you didn't ask us permission, so we want to negotiate.

So here's what we want you to do.

Give up all your elephants,

give up your shields, your armor, your javelins, your swords, your catapults, give up your ships, and completely disarm.

And there's this huge army.

And they did.

And then once they disarmed, they said, okay, can you please leave now?

And we'll, no, no, no, no, we've got another directive from the Senate.

You have to destroy your city and move it 10 miles inland.

We don't believe you should be a sea power.

And by the way, Ostia is that far, so we live with it.

And they said, yes, but you have the Tiber River,

and we're not going to do it.

So then they stoned the diplomatic envoys who had appeased the Romans.

They brought out this nut, Hasribal,

the Beotiarch, no relation to Hannibal's brother, who was long gone.

And they went to war.

They went fanatic.

The 500,000 people got at the forges, they built catapults, new armor, they kept their cavalry, they got food from their allied cities along the coast.

And the Romans had sent to...

It's very rare in Rome to have a consular army.

That's just an army with a consul at the head of it.

Be sort of like, I don't know, Joe Biden on a horse, right?

Not anymore.

No, maybe Donald Trump on a horse.

But the consuls that year were Manilius and Censor Vinus, and they were incompetent.

Being a consul didn't mean you had military ability.

It's usually you waited your turn in the bureaucratic chain of command or cursus onorum.

In any case, it was an utter disaster for two years.

They got ill.

They were poorly supplied.

They had terrible morale.

The Carthaginians had brilliant cavalry commanders.

At night they would sortie out, attack the Roman camps, cut off their water supplies.

If the Romans tried to build a

mound over the walls, it was almost impossible.

The walls were over 30 feet high, 20 feet thick, 21

miles in circumference.

And remember, Carthage looked like a

It looked like a long corridor with a big round circle at the end.

It was with a harbor.

It was a peninsula, and it had access then

to the mainland and was being supplied.

So, the only way they were going to win is to circumscribe the city with a wall and then cut them off from the interior and then surround them with their fleet so they could not get either land or sea deliveries of supplies.

And there was a legate, Scipio.

He wasn't related to the great Africanus, but he was the adopted

grandson.

So he took the name Scipio.

And

his family had been very illustrious itself.

And he turned out to be, he's in his 30s, he turned out to be a certifiable military genius.

These people come out of nowhere, something like Cortez.

And he went back to Rome and they wanted to entrust him with command.

He told the Senate what was wrong, what he could do.

They elected him consul.

So he came back.

And within a year, he surrounded the city.

He cut it off from the mainland.

He broke through and systematically, block by block, day by day, he wiped it out.

I mean, he killed everybody in a

targeted area.

enslaved any women and children if he didn't need to kill them, smashed all the bodies.

We have gory incidents of the Romans going block by block, and if there's people falling into the road, they just went right over them.

And then he finally got up to the high point, the Acropolis, so to speak, and there were 50,000 people he enslaved.

There were some Roman prisoners that had defected.

There were 900 of them.

He just burned them all up.

They were in a temple.

Hazerbil's wife and kids were there.

He burned them up too, and Hazerbil joined the Romans and said, see, I wouldn't want to be.

I don't want to die with you.

The firebrand.

So he had defected.

And then when it was all over, Scipio sat on a hill.

We're told by Appian with his friend and colleague, Polybius, the greatest historian of the Hellenistic age.

And he quoted some passages from Homer about how poor Ilium, that is the word in Greek for Troy, was doomed to fall and he started crying.

I regret it, just like Alexander, I regret it.

Just like Cortez said, I didn't, shouldn't have destroyed it.

Just like Mehmet said, I never intended to kill everybody.

So.

Alligator tears.

Got it.

That's what happened to Carthage.

And what do I mean by destroyed?

Okay.

They leveled the ground.

First of all, they sent, it's only a day and a half's voyage back to Rome.

It's the closest point.

Tunis, the Pomateri

is Cape Bonne, is one of the closest places.

It is the closest place to Europe.

So they went back to the Senate.

They sent and said, what do we do?

And the Senate said, well, you defeated them, wipe them out, loot it, wipe it out.

So they took all the loot and sent it to the Senate, and the people just went crazy.

They were so happy that they were looted.

And then they enslaved 50,000 people, sent them back to Rome, and then they dismantled, that's hard to do with muscular labor, dismantled block by block the rubble and probably sold it off to surrounding cities and then burned the rest.

There's a tradition that they salted the earth.

I don't think there's any evidence of that.

That's a medieval fable.

It'd be very hard to salt.

Salt was expensive, and the idea you could salt it and make it on hamlet.

But they did plow it under, so there was no trace.

And then Punic as a language petered out, disappeared.

There were a few cities, not cities, but little villages that were inciliary to Carthage.

But after the mother city was destroyed, they were assimilated, integrated, integrated, and forgotten.

The topits or the religious shrines were destroyed.

Child sacrifice was very unusual in the ancient world, and it was practiced by the Carthaginian.

That faded out.

And I would say within 40 years, there was no such thing as a Carthaginian or a religion or a language, even though in the time of Augustine there were some

pockets where people still spoke Punic.

But the society itself had been wiped out.

Victor, you've been talking about the actual end of Carthage, and you have some really beautiful quotes from Roman historians.

And one of them is Appian, who wrote about the Punic Wars.

And I wanted to read one of his quotes about what happened when actually

the city was falling and being routed by the military.

It said,

so this is what Appian says, so the crashing sounds became much greater, and many corpses fell en mass amid the stones but there were some others still living particularly the old men women and young children who had hidden themselves in the innermost recesses of the houses some of them were wounded others were suffering major burns and utter uttering heartbreaking cries but there were still some others who had been pushed out and had fallen from the heights right along with the stones timber and fire and they appeared torn apart in all manner of horror, smashed and mangled.

But this was not even the end of their miseries, Appian goes on.

And so I was wondering, you start your chapter here with this passage, and it just looks like a grim

scene of carnage.

And I was wondering,

would Appian have been there?

Or

he would have written that from knowing other writers.

He was a Greek historian who lived at what Gibbon called the finest period in human history, the period of the five emperors,

Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, that hundred-year period.

So he was writing from an experience, probably, of other things he'd seen.

Well,

he wrote around 120 AD.

So he's writing

two and a half centuries after the fact.

But he had access to the historian Polybius' History,

who was an eyewitness and was, as I said, an intimate of Scipio Aemilianus.

So he had first-hand witness accounts.

He probably saw a lot of this and he wrote it.

But unfortunately, those books,

as well as some of the books of Livy, that deal with

the Third Punic War, are lost.

It wasn't as popular in antiquity because it didn't have marquee people like Hannibal.

So that massive corpus of Punic War history that Polybius popularized and was very well known, the last part of it on the third is missing.

But Appian had access to it.

So when we're reading his account written around 120 AD in Greek, he's really editorializing and editing, condensing, but basically it's the text of Polybius.

Maybe some Libby intruding.

Yeah.

And

they

often included this stuff about warfare.

They had little fear that it would dampen the Roman desire for war, I guess, to write these lurid details of what happened to the people.

Well, no, that would excite Romans, because when there was news that Carthage had fallen and the Senate was discussing what to do with it and send back the orders to Scipio, the people were demanding that it be wiped out.

So there was no, this is a

Christ has been

dead for over a century, but this is a still pre-Christian society.

And it doesn't have any innate

distaste or prohibitions of killing things.

I mean, Cicero can write a letter.

It's kind of bloody in the, you know, the arena when they butcher elephants and lions and stuff.

And Christians, but my point is that

these lurid descriptions are designed to titillate or to get interest from the reader, not to repulse them.

Although, you know, there's some historians, Tacitus, you know, when you look at, when he talks about

the revolt of the Celts in Britain,

when he has that famous line, by a revolutionary indigenous person who says, you guys make a desert and you call it peace

it's and you look at the agricola or the garmania there he has a lot of sympathy for anti-Roman revolutionary movements

is there you include it up front in your chapter is there a purpose for you to include such lurid detail up front about the war to titillate your reader

I don't think I'm titillating I think what's important that

when you're a historian and you're writing and you're footnoting that you are

taking passages from, you know, Appian or Plutarch,

it's kind of hard to write about the Third Punic War, given that Livy's history and Polybius are just

epitomies or details of what's in them, but not in total or even in part.

So you're dealing with mostly Appian's history, a little bit in Deodorus and Plutarch,

some in Plutarch.

He has a life of the elder Cato, example.

But the point I'm making is that you want to ground your reader from time to time to say, this isn't just

my opinion of what the sources say.

You don't want to just quote the sources or why write a history, but from time to time you can put a vivid description, and that gives the reader an idea of exactly what happened, and more importantly, how people thought

or felt about what happened.

And so I tried to do that from time to time.

All right.

Well, before we go to a break, I wanted to let the listeners hear a little piece because you write so beautifully about some things yourself.

And this is a description of the walls around Carthage.

You write, no Roman force had ever breached the formidable walls of Carthage.

You write,

no Roman expeditionary force in either the First or Second Punic War had even tried.

For a city that relied on its navy for preemptive defenses, its circuit was nonetheless vast, running some 23 miles.

In places, the walls were 30 feet thick, they rose over 40 feet in height, buttressed with even taller parapets and towers.

The Carthaginian ramparts likely marked the greatest fortification of the ancient world until the founding of Constantinople a half millennium later with its impregnable Theodosian walls.

But compared to the final and doomed defense of the Byzantine ramparts in 1453, Carthage had 10 times the population to defend its walls.

And I thought that was a beautiful passage to take us into our

ad, and then we'll come back and maybe you have some reflections on that.

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

We're back.

So, Victor,

the walls themselves were a massive capital outlay for the Carthaginians, and they flummoxed the Romans in the first century.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on it, especially since we have our own dilemma of a wall on our southern border.

Well,

the idea of a wall, where it's the Aurelian walls at Rome, or the most famous in antiquity, the Theodosin walls, the land wall at Constantinople, or the Carthaginian, they're designed to be built over generations.

Not that you can't build them quickly, but they're usually, when we say wall, that is a simplification.

If you take the Theodosin walls, you're talking about a mound.

You dig a trench, a fossa.

fossa and that you can fill it up with water.

But the dirt that you take out makes a mound, so it's even higher.

So if you're going to take the walls, let's say Constantinople, we don't have the exact description of Carthage, but it's somewhat similar, though not as intricate.

So you have to go over the mound, and then you've got to bridge that water.

And then there's a killing space.

Usually it's concrete, or it's hard-packed dirt for the outer wall.

And there's people up at the ramparts, and you know, every hundred yards there's a tower.

And they are shooting water.

They're shooting arrows, they're throwing stones, javelins, and boiling oil and they did that in antiquity.

And then you have to find a way to get over the inner wall.

Then there's usually another pavilion, a killing zone.

Once you get over, the

defenders, and this is what saved Constantinople for 1100 years, they retreat back into the inner wall.

The inner wall is higher than the outer wall.

In some places the towers go up 70 feet.

And so then they close the doors, and they're in the inner wall, or they have a secondary forces there that welcomes them.

So then you get over

the outer wall, then you're running to the inner wall, then they have another chance to kill you.

And by the way, the inner wall is manned when the outer wall is manned, and they can shoot over the outer wall at you as well.

So it's almost impossible to take these cities, at least before the age of cannon.

And so nobody had ever...

these walls had been vested for years.

After the First and Second Punic War, the Romans didn't even try.

They had an agreement that they had defeated Hannibal at Zalma outside the walls, and they said, okay, here's the deal.

You give up your overseas territories, you give us permission whether you want to have a war with your neighbors, you give up your neighboring land, you have some allied little towns, we'll let you have that.

But you ask us permission for any major policy decision you make, and you pay this huge fine.

And they were natural Phoenician traders, so

within a half century, they were rich and they were compliant.

And it's very moving to read these accounts.

There's a little bit in Diocassus, who's

third century AD.

There's a lot in Appian, as I said, who wrote about 120 AD.

There's some in Diodorus, 30 BC, there's some in Plutarch, 100 AD, and you can piece together the missing narratives of Polybius, who was a contemporary, and Livy, who drew on other contemporary sources, including Polybius.

And

from what they tell us, especially

the

atmosphere in the Roman Senate, it was a completely unnecessary war.

The Romans of the time, I don't like to be a modern historian and use contemporary morality and go back in a pre-modern age and condemn people, but people at the time in Rome felt that it was unjust, that there was a methodology to allow a largely Singapore, Hong Kong-like, disarmed Carthage

to have a sphere of mercantile interest in the Mediterranean, maybe even as an ally of Rome.

It wasn't just Punic.

It was over that 800 years, it was founded by the mythical Dido.

fourth book of

Virgil's Aeneid, where Aeneas and she copulate in a cave, that famous scene.

But it had a lot of Greek influence.

So it actually had a constitutional system,

almost based on the Greek model of a mixed constitution, mixed constitution in two spheres of thought, a legislative, executive,

and judicial branch, what the Cretans and Plato and through the Renaissance into Monescue

ended up with our founding system, tripartite, but also a mixed constitution that balanced the interests of the wealthy, the middle, and the poor.

And so, and some of the Hanno and other Greek writers,

there was a huge corpus of Greek literature, technical treatises that came out of Carthage.

And we know a Spartans had, I think his name was

Xanthippus.

There were Spartan taskmasters, so to speak, that went to Carthage and trained them how to fight.

Their problem was always this.

They had to hire mercenaries for their phalanx.

They were a naval and cavalry power.

They did not have yeoman infantry.

And why didn't they?

Because they didn't have a system like Rome and the Greek city-states of middle-class yeoman farmers who then created militias, and they were the best infantry in the world.

Professional mercenaries could not beat them and were fickle, at least until Alexander sort of solved that problem, but that's another story.

You have a statement from Sullas, who is Sallus, yes.

Yeah, and he wrote Dragurtha.

Yes.

And much later, I think he's a

Cataline conspiracy, too.

Oh, okay.

But so a little bit later, and he writes about the politics in Rome at the time.

And very interesting quote here from Solus.

It says, In truth, until the destruction of Carthage, the Senate and Roman people conducted the affairs of the Republic with shared calmness and restraint.

There were no rivalries among the citizenry for either glory or dominance.

Instead, a fear of the enemy kept the state in good order.

But when the anxiety was absent from their considerations, then decadence and hubris, the natural dividends of prosperity, began to dominate.

Consequently, Consequently, the very calm that had once so eagerly sought, they had once so eagerly sought in their times of trial proved later when they had obtained it to be far more injurious and dangerous than the adversity itself.

Yeah, a couple of things is

Sallust wrote a history of Rome.

He wrote around

60 or 70 BC, all the way down probably to 30 or 40 BC.

He was an early

late Roman Republic, but in terms of Roman historiography, kind of late.

We have the entire treatise of the Catiline conspiracy.

It's really interesting.

And he wrote a book on the Jugurthan War.

Jugurtha was a Nubidian upstart that fought Marius and Sulla.

But the point is, he knew something.

He probably had been in North Africa, say,

oh, 80 years after the end of the Third Punic War.

So then he wrote a monumental history like Livy and Polybius called The History.

It's lost,

but we had fragments such as that that survive.

And he picks up a late Republican theme.

We're talking about the period of the 100 BC, let's say to 14 AD.

In this period, Rome expanded from the Italian and

peninsula and borderlands in what would be eastern France, southern Switzerland, and parts of

the Balkans to the entire Mediterranean.

And by that I mean from Gibraltar all the way to the Nile Delta and from Spain

all the way up to

up to what is now Holland and Belgium and eastward all the way

the Danube and the Rhine, and then most of what is today Albania, Greece, Montenegro, the Balkans, and then on into the whole coastal corridor of Asia Minor and around the coast of Asia itself down into what we would call the Holy Land.

Okay, that's what it expanded to.

In that expansion, there were millions of slaves from conquest.

A million came from Gaul alone.

Caesar did that in just 10 years.

And what that did is it gave Romans, Italians,

things they'd never had before.

First of all, it allowed them to have maids and cooks and gardeners and teachers

and gladiators.

And then, most importantly, field hands.

The process was insidious.

The more they had to send soldiers abroad, the more that small farmers who were the best legionnaires in the world left, the more

their plots were consolidated, and the more they brought back through their conquests slaves that destroyed their, the people who

conquered the land for Rome and acquired the slaves for Rome put themselves out of business because the slaves went back with the money and

the plunder and loot, and then the rich got richer and there was something called latu fundia.

Sometimes they had Roman colonies so there was all of these Catiline talks about these insurrections.

Virgil talks about in the ecologues insurrections and not insurrections but confiscations of people's land

and there was of course the graci wanting redistribution.

Catiline wanted the redistribution of land and the cancellation of debts.

But out of that conundrum came this topos that said

there's some things wrong with us.

We are decadent and it's not from poverty.

We were better off when we fought Hannibal and lost 100,000 men in two years at Trebia and Trashsemane and Canai.

And,

you know, we fought, then we had martial virtue.

And now we, there's a famous passage in

Aelius Aristides.

He said, men in the legions used to

daily comb the hair on their horses to military preparedness.

Now they comb their pubic hair.

And he's saying that they're feminized.

And we've talked about, we had a session on the Satyricon, which was written around 60 AD.

But this period of decadence just permeates all of late Republican and early Principate literature.

It's in Tacitus.

It's in Liby.

It's in Suetonius.

It's in Petronius.

It's really in Catullus.

And it suggests that humankind can deal with poverty and want and war, but it can't deal with peace, luxury, and affluence.

And that famous Roman

Horatian

precept that nothing's more injurious than a long peace.

And so

that was what

Sallus was talking about.

And you know, it's not that ancient.

Matthew Ridgway, which in the Savior Generals, I argued was probably one of the greatest generals the United States produced.

He saved the Korean debacle in just six months.

But he said, he lived to be in his late 90s,

just a wonderful general, wonderful guy.

And he said,

we can't get rid of the draft.

And everybody gave all these reasons why we should.

And he gave an ancient description.

He said, the idea that there's a military threat and people have to take up the burden of collective defense and that ensures that everybody's invested in strategic decision-making and we create deterrence, that's important

not just for the life of the United States, but for their moral character.

People got so angry when he said that.

Oh, you're just a militarist.

And if you read very carefully Appian, there are speeches where

after the destruction of Carthage, people got angry at Rome.

They said, oh my God, why did you do this?

You destroyed our constant threat.

As long as there was Carthage for over 119 years, we had somebody to get scared about.

And we raised little boys in school and we said, Hannibal ad portus.

Hannibal's at the gate.

He's at the gate.

He's at Rome.

We scared people with that.

This is what kept us on the edge.

This is what created the legions.

We told everybody after the Trevia River, we reconstituted the legions.

Then we said, we were wiped out at the Ticenius earlier, Trevia, we reconstituted the, we were really wiped out at Lake Trashsemane.

We reconstituted the legion.

And then the worst of all is we lost 80,000.

Legionnaires in three hours.

And we reconstituted the legions.

And he never got close to Rome because that's who we were.

And now what do we do?

We eat sparrow eyes and crow feet and

we have sex with anything, and we're decadent, and women dye their hair, and they put lead makeup on.

And

no one wants children, everybody's divorced.

That theme is really a theme of Horace in his odes.

Everybody should read the third book of Horace's odes.

I mean, we, a bad generation worse than our fathers, are about to bring forth a generation worse than we are.

That idea of decline permeates.

Now, some of you are going to say, well, Victor, they lasted 400 years.

And what you call decline, well, it's not me, I'm quoting them, was a global project.

So suddenly, you could get in a ship.

And you could leave Ostia, the harbor of Rome, and you could go all the way to Antioch in Turkey, in the Middle East, or you could go all the way to Alexandria, and you would not be attacked by pirates.

And then you could go on a road all the way to Constantinople, the Wia Agnicia, through Dalmatia and down

along the Hellespont, and you would not be attacked by Thebes.

And everybody would speak Latin, at least the people that mattered, the magistrates, and there would be aqueducts and clean water.

And if you were arrested, you could say, let's say you were arrested for theft.

You could be arrested in Noo Carthago, the Roman city.

You could say, Kiwis

Romanus sum,

I am a Roman citizen.

And therefore, you would be insured the rights of habeas corpus over 1 million square miles and 80 million people participating in that project.

So that was what Romanity did.

It united and globalized the known world,

but it destroyed the Italian

original catalyst for it all.

The whole system was based on small farming, rural values of the early republic.

And it was so successful that it put itself out of business.

And it has a lot of lessons for today.

Yeah.

I thought, reading Salas's quote, I thought that just sounds exactly like our own Congress and our own political environment.

She's just saying that because this last week, Miss Eyelashes,

Marjorie Taylor Greene said, you can't read through those big eyelashes.

Somebody else with big eyelashes.

I almost went at it.

Yes, I am, but I'm saying it also because

it's a lot of wars of Senator Menez.

It seemed like during the Cold War, as long as the Soviet threat was out there, then our two parties didn't argue too much over some things, right?

But now they're completely just at it with the children.

I can remember in 1961, Mrs.

Redden, second grade.

Okay, it's two o'clock.

You've got 30 seconds.

Everybody under your desk.

We used to do that too in this.

Nuclear war.

And I can remember a guy, I can remember his name.

He was a wonderful scout master.

His name was Corky Livermore.

And he knocked on the door one day in our little 800-foot square house.

He said, Mrs.

Hansen, it was right during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I've been, I'm kind of a

salesman for canned food.

And he opened a little box.

It was a suitcase and there were canned beans and corn.

And he says, if you'd like, I have another little pamphlet for you.

And he showed us, and it was this huge, looked like a cesspool, right?

And it had a ladder in it.

It was a drawing.

So you dug in your lawn and then you could take the ladder through the porthole.

and then it had a little snorkel.

It was very primitive, but that was your bomb shelter.

Oh, okay.

And he was trying to get us to dig.

So then my dad said, well, I think we'll wait and go to the Fresno Fair.

So he went there.

I like the concrete model better.

What do you think, Pauline, to my mom?

She goes, nah, I don't think we should do either one.

I'd rather go quickly.

So, but I mean, that kept everyone on edge.

It really did.

To some extent, getting along with each other, as Solar says.

That's what he said.

And they said, as soon as that was so funny that they, I put that in the book, that they saw the Third Punic War as a great tragedy because it removed the existential enemy of Rome and it left all that wealth to be claimed by Rome.

And there was no rivalry anymore and there was no contest.

It's sort of like,

you know, you're 10-0 and then all of a sudden the next year you're 10-0, and then the next year you're 10-0, and then you tell your football player, you really got to get motivated, we've got to win the championship.

And they go, nah.

One of the reasons that you have these great baseball dynasties, and then they collapse, right?

They all collapse because people get complacent.

They don't want to tamper with success, and they don't feel that there's a great danger that they're going to be zero in ten or that the people are not going to watch them.

So

that's just human nature, and that was really Roman.

And

the final thing is,

about a half century after they destroyed the city in 146, about a hundred years later, they came up

actually it was about 80 years later, they came up with the idea of re-founding it.

But since the Synod has condemned it as an unholy place, they had to move it to what is pretty much modern Tunis.

And they called it Noah Carthago, or Carthago Noah, the new city.

And it was Roman.

But it enjoyed the same advantages.

It was a promontory.

I mean, it was out in the Mediterranean half, a third of the way.

It drew on all of the wealth of Africa.

The Atlas Mountains were there, snow-capped.

In those days, I'm not a global warming fan necessarily, but the climate was a little bit more temperate, and they had snowfall, and we're told that the land plain between the Atlas Mountains in Libya and Tunisia and the coast is one of the most fertile and rich in the world.

And so the Romans took advantage of that and re-founded this Roman city, moved it away from the old Punic city, called it Carthage, and

it failed because the Gracchi decided that they were going to make dispossessed farmers give them this land.

And everybody thought the Gracchi were crazy socialist.

So they said, okay, you can put some soldiers there, but then they thought that they were building the younger Gracchas.

They were building a a constituency, a revolutionary constituency, maybe to take over Rome.

So they cut off the subsidies, money necessary to jump-start it.

So it disappeared.

Then Julius Caesar came back in 40,

40,

I think it was 46, 45,

and he

rebuilt the city.

the old Gracchi colony and it thrived.

And he did the same thing by the way.

the same year they destroyed Carthage.

In 146, they destroyed Corinth.

It was a new destroyer policy.

And I excavated at Corinth.

You can go there and see the actual burn level when you get down into the one to the mid-first century, second century BC.

They just completely wiped.

Gaius Mummius did that.

They looted the satues.

They destroyed the city because it was in revolt.

during one of the Macedonian wars.

And they did the same thing.

Anyway, they rebuilt the city, a Roman city, Roman corn, and they did the same thing to classical Thebes.

After Alexander had destroyed it, Cassander, 20 years later, rebuilt the Thebes, fake Thebes, and then it was sacked again, and then Caesar rebuilt it.

The point of all this is that these original states that are wiped out, annihilated,

there was something to the spot.

It was a location that usually took advantage of water,

drinking water, navigable water, security,

and geographical proximity to wealth and trade.

So you destroy Tenochtitlan and you build Mexico City right on it.

You loot, sack Constantinople, and then you rename it eventually Istanbul by the 17th century.

It was a mispronunciation of Constantinople that the Turks called it.

And

they slapped minarets on everything and said it's their city and

erased Christians that were in it and just sort of stole their city.

And it was psychologically devastating because people had always, when they came up the Darnall,

they had looked at the Hage Sophia as the reassurance of Christendom.

And now it just changed the entire calculus, the mental map of the world, because now people were terrified in the West to go even into the Hellespont.

Because they thought they were going into sort of Mordor, right?

And this beautiful city that gave you such reassurance, the oldest cathedral and the largest in Christendom, was now the epitome of this new anti-Western power.

So it's tragic.

Yeah, that's well, Victor, we're at the end of our show here, and

I was always wondering what the military genius of Hannibal was, and I realized that that was not a direct topic of today, so maybe we'll be able to talk about that some other time.

But you've just given us a great discussion of your second chapter in The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, which is on or has been on the New York Times bestsellers list as number four.

And then number three, I think you've gotten down as far as number one.

It's second week, it's number three.

I'm very lucky.

Keller toss is what the ingredient is, I think.

And

the more I read over the last half century, when you look at an ability, I'm talking besides leadership, inspiring troops, it's quickness.

Yeah.

Kellertas Kaisar, the quickness of Caesar.

So Hannibal.

Yes, Alexander the Great.

Where is he?

He's way up there in Pella, 250 miles away.

Ten days later, he's at Thebes.

Where is Hannibal?

Oh, where is he?

Oh, my gosh, he's in the Alps.

He won't be be here for six months.

Then suddenly he comes into the river Traikinus, and

he's at the river Trebia.

Quickness, quickness.

George Patton, quickness, Rommel, quickness, with her.

Napoleon, too.

Napoleon, my gosh, Napoleon.

And that's, you have to, if you're going to take,

what did he say?

Was it to suit or which marshal was it?

He said, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

Right.

Biden,

if you're going to support Israel, support Israel.

Well, we've taken Vienna today, and thank you so much for this commentary on Carthage.

It was fascinating.

And the book, I know I took quotes from your sources this time and one passage from you because they were so rich, the sources themselves, but also the writing of the Victor's own writing, of course, is both cinematic and

argumentative and beautifully done in both fashions.

So I highly recommend you getting it.

Of all the four chapters, I got very sad reading it.

There's a lot written on the fall of Constantinople.

And when you read these first-hand passages, it was end of days.

They looked out there and the last day it was end of days.

The people who survived it and fled and got out to the Hellespont, they wrote about it.

And it was just imagine your whole world collapse in a matter of hours.

Rape, pillage, murder.

Oh, it was horrible.

It just,

reading about it and all these vain.

Maybe the Venetians will come.

The Genovese were here.

If we just had another

200 Genovese, we could win.

Mehmet won't do this.

We had letters exchanged with him.

We've always dealt with assault.

It was just sad.

I just hope we're not reading about ourselves.

Yeah, that's one thing.

But also, we see that daily on our own movies and television sets,

just

the studio tearing apart of bodies and shooting up bodies, etc.

For some reason, I think for us it seems almost unreal.

And I think the passages read for a Roman were probably a lot more realistic than what we can even portray.

Just

a final thought.

You know, we just had we're going to have Memorial Day when I'm broadcasting.

What were those people who stormed the beach at D-Day, whether

Utah or Omaha, or the people who knew something had gone terribly wrong on Okinawa, on the Shuri Line?

They had been told that it was going to be a cakewalk, and they went into a three-story solid cement coral fortifications deep with Japanese hardened troops from China.

And they were, you know, as I said, they rendered the 6th Marine Division combat inoperative.

But my point is, what would they think about Afghanistan today?

If they could come out spirit world, they'd come back and say, wait a minute, you were there 20 years?

You left a $300 million base.

You turned over $50 billion to terrorists.

You gave them a $1 billion

embassy?

You left all the American contractors?

You could have saved 13 Marines and somebody had the terrorist suicide bomber in his sights and you didn't give them permission?

You blew up some civilians and you called it a righteous strike.

You left your NATO partners, all the loyal Afghans that were there, they were all killed, you just abandoned them.

What the hell's wrong with you people?

That's what they would say.

So did you ever have to go into Okinawa?

Did you ever land at Iwo?

Did you ever fly a B-17 in 1942 in daylight with no fighter escort?

Did you?

Were you ever on the death mark?

This is what we did.

We handed the country over to you.

And you do this?

That's why I get really angry when you.

I don't mind debacles.

It's human nature.

It's screw-ups.

That when you have that self-righteousness, Mark Milley and Biden, it was a wonderful evacuation, you know.

We flew in and we had Mediterranean food for all of the refugees.

That's what one general told us.

It's just, it's an insult.

And

I don't know.

We're reading Professor Kendi, and I want to understand what it's about.

Remember that, Millie?

Yeah.

I can tell you what it's about.

It's called racism, General Millie.

It doesn't take a genius to understand.

You can pick up one page and you'll understand what he's doing and why he wrote it.

So people that are gullible like you will assign it to people that are going to be accused falsely of being racist, which they were.

And then you're going to write a report two years later saying, gee whiz, we didn't find any racist cabal.

And we're 45,000 soldiers short, but it had nothing to do with that.

That's what we're asked to believe.

Yeah, and I don't think he was so much gullible as a careerist, but we'll leave it there.

And thank you to the listeners for listening to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everyone.

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