Thebes: When Defeat Eviscerates Culture

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show and welcome.

This is the weekend edition where we take a step beyond the 24-hour news cycle and to look at other things and often things from the past and the distant past.

And that's what we have on a docket today.

We're going to take a second to talk a little bit about January 6th because we are recording on January 6th and there are a few things that Victor would like to say and so we'll have a look at that but first let's have a word from our sponsors.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And how are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

Well, we've had the passing or we're at the end today as we record of January 6th.

And I know that we've had some interesting statements and the left is

commemorating the day in strange and wonderful ways.

Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

I'm in a state of, what did Hill call it, suspension of disbelief?

I mean, I look at, not that I read the New York Times, but I look at this article co-written by Jim Rutenberg saying about all the lies about January 6th.

I think, wait, this is the guy who when Trump was elected wrote an op-ed that said that reporters could not be disinterested anymore, that they had to be partisan because Trump posed such an existential threat, given that he said he was going to do that.

Why would I believe what he's writing about January 6th?

And then I heard Kamala Harris, our distinguished vice president, say that the 2,400 dead on

December 7th that inaugurated the Pacific War, which probably killed about 35 million people.

If you talk about the 15 million people in China, the 5 million in Asia, the 3 million in Japan, et cetera, et cetera.

And the 3,000 dead on 9-11 was comparable to

the one person who was shot violently or died violently on January 6th was poor Ashley Babbitt, whose name we're not supposed to mention.

Maybe Kamala doesn't know much about math.

I don't think she knows much about anything.

But my point is that I thought that they were going to keep her under wraps and not liberate her because to liberate her is not either to like her or to think that she's challenged in a way that maybe not quite like Joe Biden.

But this whole mythology of January 6th, let's be honest.

The FBI said there was no conspiracy.

That's Christopher Wray's FBI that's still stalked with James Comey and Andrew McCabe's hierarchy.

They said there was no conspiracy.

There were no guns found in the Capitol.

There were nobody packing weapons.

There,

I mean, they were buffoons, they were clowns,

they were rioters, they weren't terrorists, there was no conspiracy, they didn't have master plans.

So

at this point, Sammy, I think we all need to take a deep breath and do the following.

Let's just abolish this pathetic House Investigatory Committee.

Remember what it was.

It was

the majority party had its one member more, as is traditional.

And then

the speaker vetoed all of the Republican appointees.

So then to qualify as a Republican, and there's only two on there, you had to have one qualification.

You either, there was no way you could win reelection.

So Liz Cheney and Adam Kizen, they're not going to win re-election, or they're not going to run in his case.

That made you qualified to talk about January 6th.

So let's get rid of that and just have a warn commission.

No politicians, no elected officials.

We'll get

some distinguished Republican grandee and some distinguished Democrat, and let's appoint business people, let's appoint corporate people, let's appoint

whoever, and let's investigate quote unquote domestic terrorism.

And let's go through January 6th, we can go ahead, and let's find out the following.

Are there communications on record between any politician, right and left, about a conspiracy?

Is there any communications about either beefing up or standing down

security?

Because that was a security lapse.

Is there communications about the death of Ashley Babbitt?

Is there communications about the false reporting or the real story of how Brian Sicknick died?

Let's go through the whole thing.

Let's get the names.

Let's say, who is this

fellow, Epps or whoever he was, who seems to be everywhere on video and yet he's not charged with anything.

Is he he related to the FBI's informant program?

Let's get all of the videos, just get it all out in the open, and then let's go look at the 120 days of summer 2020.

Let's look piece by piece of how a federal courthouse was torched, how a police precinct was quote, was torched, how the St.

John's Episcopal Church was torched, how 2,000 officers were injured, how 30 plus people were killed, how $2 billion in damage was incurred.

And let's do the following.

Who did it?

Who was arrested?

And what happened to them?

Were they let go?

Did they cross state lines?

Was there a conspiracy?

Did they use Facebook and Twitter to plan their rendezvous to loot and to burn?

Because that was an accusation that a couple of people had used parlaire in the Capitol.

Let's just get it all out and see where the truth is.

But what we're seeing is there was a a deliberate suppression of all of the evidence and all of the truth about the 220 summer riots, 2020, and we haven't had the full story still yet.

I want to get the full story.

And if it turns out that there's some guy with cow horns in a basement and he's got a map and he's got his Lego set that's, you know, the facsimile of the Capitol, and he's got all of these people around the circle, and there's no FBI informants, then let's put him in jail for conspiracy.

And if somebody volunteers and said, you know, I didn't tell you I had an AR-15 hidden down my pant leg, let's get, let's find out.

But they don't want to,

this commission is only for one, it's just to feed Kamala Harris's crazy ideas about World War II and January 6th.

And then there's Joe Biden.

Joe Biden today was speaking.

And my gosh, it's the same get off my grass.

I keep saying that, but all he does is yell about, I got more votes than Donald Trump did.

I want a popular vote.

Just leave it alone.

Calm down, as they say in modern Greek, Siga petty move, Siga.

Just quiet.

And you're the president.

Nobody's going to take the presidency away from you.

All you have to do is do your job.

Don't worry about this bogeyman under every bed, Donald Trump.

He's not, you know, the ghost of election past that haunts you at night.

Just leave him alone.

Leave January 6th and just go to it.

But it's been constructed as this, I don't know.

It's, you know, I have a rule of no reductio ad hitlerum that you're not supposed to compare anything to Nazi Germany, but there was in 1933 the Reichstag fire.

Still don't know quite the story, but it may have been, you know, a Dutch radical.

And all of a sudden, that was transmogrified four weeks before the National Socialists took power into a national emergency laws.

But when you look at what's following from January 6th, it's Mark Milley.

Let's find out every white supremacist.

It's Lloyd Austin.

It's

Merrick Garland.

And it's, you can't dare to have a voter ID law.

That's racist.

So that's, it's a tool that's being used.

And just calm down and investigate.

And I don't think the left wants to do that because I fear that they fear.

that the truth will set America free from it.

Well, Victor, let's take a break then from this contemporary world and let's look back at the past.

And I know that in the past we always hear everything about Athens and ancient Greece as the great city, as the flourishing city, as the culturally productive city, as a spontaneous

culture.

And yet we have another city, Thebes, that paralleled it.

And

both Athens and Sparta, and of a quite different nature.

I mean, all of the city-states in ancient Greece,

whether they were democratic or monarchy or anything in between, were all very unique in their constitutions.

And Thebes in particular sort of stands out as an example.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Thebes and its history and sort of its political significance as well.

I think listeners would like to hear about Thebes.

You know, Thebes was a city-state.

It was a very large one, almost comparable in size of its agricultural land and its actual population to Sparta, not quite as big as Athens.

But we don't hear anything about it.

It's kind of like the San Joaquin Valley of ancient Greece.

It was rural.

It's centrally located.

It's about 50 miles west of Athens.

And, you know, it's about, oh, 50 miles of, no, 45 miles from the isthmus above the Peloponnese.

It's got absolutely wonderful agricultural land.

First time I went there, I had just turned, I was 19, and I went out and camped out there.

I went to the Battle of Leuctra and Chaeronea, but I was just struck by how

once the swamps had been drained by the French in the 19th century, it's just wonderful farmland, but it was in antiquity.

And Thebes had this old ancient culture.

There was a Mycenaean palace found, there is at the so-called Acropolis, the Cadmea.

So we know that it was one of the oldest cities in Greece back to Mycenaean times.

But we also know that from a different source, Sammy, that

classical mythology as it appears in Greek plays of the fifth century, that is tragedies, reflect a Mycenaean heritage that gets transmogrified through the Dark Ages

and then it gets into the classical drama some seven or eight hundred years later.

But all of the most ancient scenarios of Greek tragedy are in Thebes.

Think about Oedipus Oedipus Rex,

Oedipus at Colonna's, Antigone, Seven Against Thebes.

They're all stories about this weird place.

It's kind of eerie.

You look at it, it's about a thousand feet above sea level.

There's Mount Cathyron right above it.

That's Euripides' Bacchae, where people go up there.

And supposedly, if you're King Pyntheas in that play, they do nasty things and take off their clothes and have sex.

And that's kind of the Freudian backdrop to that wonderful play by Euripides, composed, I think in 406.

But my point is that it plays a really valuable role and there's five or six events that involve Thebes that reflect major turning points in Greek history.

In the first, once the city-states start to appear, say around 700, it becomes very prominent.

And

in the first major trial of the Greek city-state in 480 BC, Xerxes invades Greece and he sweeps across Thrace and Thessaly and comes down on his way to Athens and across the Isthmus.

He doesn't get that far across the Isthmus, but he's going toward the Peloponnese.

And the first major big city that hasn't fallen is Thebes.

And what does Thebes do?

For its internal shame, it Medizes.

Medizes is the fancy word for join the Mede, and that's the alternate name of Persia media.

And so at the Battle of Plataea in 479, who is fighting side by side?

The Persians who were destroyed by the Athenians and the Spartans.

The Thebans are.

And so Thebes does two things wrong.

It fights for the enemy.

It's kind of like the French Vichy government, and they lose.

And so it's their eternal shame for the rest of the fifth century that they're not going to be a moral force.

The other thing is they have this border with Athens, and and other than Mount Cathyron, a little bit to the east, it's wide open, something called the Europis.

It's kind of in between.

So it's very easy to get across that border.

And that's why it's known as what we call the orchestra Polomo, the dancing floor of war.

And you can go in your car today.

And you can drive 35 miles from Athens, pull over the road, and

take out a bike or even walk.

And guess what?

You can see the classical major battle of Haliartis.

You can find the battle of Chaeronea a little bit to the north.

You can find the battle of Leuctra.

You can find the Battle of Haliartis.

You can find the Battle of Plotea.

They're all in that general region, Oinea, Oinofita.

They're all there because these are where these two great city-states met, and it's the highway down to the south.

Okay.

how do you live that off so during the peloponnesian war people criticize thebes and it joins it can't stand the athenians and the athenians can't stand them the athenians say they're swine they're pigs if you read aristophanes lysistrata the theban the boeotians the thebans they they sound like they're from fresno

and anyway they're looked down upon they're not democratic they have an old aristocracy that's kind of an oligarchy.

And

they're not really taken seriously.

They join the Spartans and they attack Athenian allies like the Plataeans.

People are scared of them because they have a tradition of being very strong agrarian soldiers.

So during the Peloponnesian War, they're on the right side.

And of course, 27 years later, Athens loses.

So what do those damn Thebans do?

They come over and they are the most angry at the Athenians.

Their land has been attacked and vice versa.

And they tell the Spartans, let's tear down these walls.

Let's not let, they want to destroy Athens.

And

some of the Thebans and some of the Athenians are saying, now, wait, wait, wait.

The way that the city-state system works is you never let Athens

be stronger or closer.

to Sparta or closer to Thebes than they are to each other.

And there's a triangle.

You get rid of Athens and then you've got Sparta, and who's going to check Sparta?

Corinth, maybe.

So they let Athens survive.

The Athenians then find them useful when they come back after the Peloponnesian War.

They both don't like the Spartans.

Spartans, top dog, won the Peloponnesian War, and it blows it, of course.

And by the 370s, something happens that nobody anticipated.

These Dolords, these agrarians, these people who are blasphemied as meatizers

find

that they're sick of the Spartans and they're sick of the annual invasions of Sparta into their territory.

They are triangling with the Athenians, et cetera, et cetera, and they have a revolution.

And it's a democratic revolution, but it's not like Athens.

That is, it's a revolution of small farmers.

There's not a lot of slaves, unlike Athens.

Very liberal, that sounds familiar, a very liberal city-state with a lot of slaves.

It's mostly a middle class, and what emerges is not a narrow dynastia, a dynasty of

aristocrats or even a oligarchy, but a broad-based, what we call politea, a broad-based land,

landed democracy, landed constitutional government.

And suddenly they increase the number of people who are citizens and they create a huge army.

And out of the nowhere comes this

Pythagorean nut named Apaminondas, vegetarianism, equality between the sexes,

who believes the old saying from Alcademus, no man is born a slave.

He's got a henchman, Pelopidas, and the two of them then become revolutionary figures.

And after Pelopidas is killed, Epaminondas says, I'm not going to sit here any longer and get invaded.

by Spartans.

We're a constitutional system now, and I'm going to lead a moral crusade, if it were, down to Sparta.

And look what he did, Sam.

He said, and everybody's free to join me, because I'm not going to, we're all afraid.

Nobody's been down there in 700 years.

We're going to go right to the heart of Sparta and we're going to go right across the Eurotus River.

And we know what we're going to do.

We're going to free the Helots of Messenia.

maybe 150,000, 300,000 Messenians, 100,000.

And we're going to make sure that if we get rid of those Helots and make them free people, then guess what?

The Spartans have to do their own farming.

Now, I know they had Laconian Helots, but they're going to have to farm.

If they're going to have to farm, they can't train all day.

We are going to train very well.

And so he makes this huge army, 60,000, 70,000 in the winter of 371.

Before he does that, he beats the Spartan army at the Battle of Leuctra.

He masses a huge phalanx, 50 men deep.

He crushes the Spartan army.

He He kills their king.

And what does he do?

He says, that's not the end.

That's the beginning.

We're going to go down to Sparta.

He makes this huge army.

He does it midwinter when there's no fruit out in the field.

He says, it doesn't matter.

And he goes down there and he almost gets into the downtown Sparta, which has no walls, but he can't quite.

get across the river.

So what does he do?

Does he go home?

No.

He goes over the mountain Tyegetus and he says to the Messenians, we're going to free you.

And then

that spring and summer, they build one of the biggest walled cities in Greece.

You should go there today, Sammy.

It is amazing.

And they built it very quickly.

And they make a constitutional democratic government right in Sparta's backyard of former slaves.

Apaminondas does that.

And then for the next three campaigns, he comes back.

And he says, I'm going to do the same thing with Megalopolis.

And they build a huge city, the big city, Megaopolis.

and then they do the same thing with Mantinea.

And when he's through, guess what?

There are no more Messenian helots.

Sparta is boxed in by three cities, all bigger than Sparta, all walled and fortified by Theban architects.

And it's no longer a great power.

And then at the Battle of Mantinea, unfortunately, in 362, he gets killed.

of Pamelandas.

And you can go there today in that battlefield, and you can hike up in the heights above the battlefield, and there's a monument where he was killed and you can see the the monument where he died.

So he was an amazing revolutionary figure.

Just to end this conversation on Thebes, Sammy, so in 362 with the death of Apamanondas,

Thebes starts to fade a little bit.

They next come into history in a prominent way at the Great Battle of Chaeronea in 338.

BC.

That's when Philip and his 18-year-old son Alexander the Great sweep down to take Greece, consolidate it under Macedonian rule, and then go into Persia.

And remember what their propaganda is.

We're so tired of all this squabbling.

It's 1,500 city states.

We have no nation.

But

I can combine all of our aggregate strength under my Godhead.

I'm Philip.

And then we can pay back those damn Persians for invading us and just get richer than Croisis by going into Asia.

And

of course,

a lot of Greeks, like Demosthenes and the Athenians, say, I don't trust that SOB.

So at the Battle of Chaeronea, they get the Thebans to come out of their sloth, and they come and they're amazing fighters.

They have this 300 band of 150 pairs of lovers.

A lot of gay scholars have really focused on them.

The sacred band, the Hiros Lokos, and they're at Chaeronea.

And unfortunately,

the line cracks.

Alexander the Great, at 18, is a marvelous master of horse.

They destroy the Athenian Theban resistance.

Demosthenes throws down his shield, runs back like a whip dog to Athens.

The sacred band is wiped out to the man.

There's a great lion monument to there.

If you go there today to the town of Chaeronea, birthplace of Plutarch,

you can see these, not far from it, you'll see this wonderful lion that marks the place where the sacred band was wiped out.

And there's a big argument whether it was the sacred band or not.

But then you walk a mile and a half right down the line, you'll see what we call a tholos or a mound.

And that's where the Macedonian or the Theban dead.

There's a big argument, but it's probably the Macedonian dead.

And you can see the battle line of Chaeronea.

When I was also 19, I went out there one day and I mapped the battle and wrote a paper on it at the lion, walked through, got bit by a dog, unfortunately, trying to to get to the other side of the battlefield.

And then it rained, and I had to stay overnight out in an orange orchard.

But it's a fascinating place.

So, then what happens?

We have one final chapter of this sad tale.

What caused the Thebans to lose that battle or the Greeks?

Two things.

One,

Philip revolutionized the Macedonian.

army.

So we know what a phalanx is.

A Greek phalanx had a man, and I wrote a book about it.

He has a shield three feet wide.

He has heavy body armor.

He has an eight-foot spear.

They're eight people deep.

They can be deeper on one or two wings.

But

Philip says, as a monarch and an aristocracy, we don't need the body armor.

We hire people.

They're expendable.

The aristocrats will be on mounted heavy cavalry with lances or sarissas.

But we're going to lengthen that spear from eight, maybe to 12, 14 feet, and it will eventually get up to 20.

And we'll have to have two hands to carry it.

But think what what it does.

Instead of the first three spears hitting the enemy, the first three rank spears, it's the first five.

So you have a 40% increase in the killing power of a phalanx.

And they're no body armor, so they're quicker.

And they train as professionals.

They're not farmers.

You would have them in more of a square, and it would be easier to outflank them and come in behind them.

Good point, unless you have something called the companion heavy cavalry under a military genius like your 18-year-old son on one wing and your most trusted loyal henchman Parminio on the other.

And these are 15 to 2,000 men that grew up their entire life since they're five years old on horses.

And they have not swords or bows, but they have a heavy sarissa.

That's a long lance, and they have padding on the horse and they wear armor.

So what happens, imagine that they're two boxing gloves and in the middle is the phalanx.

And then behind the phalanx, there are archers and spear throwers.

So they throw their spears or they shoot their arrows, and they point out a small point in the Theban or Athenian line.

They

soften it up, and then BAM goes one side, BAM goes the other.

They try to get around the back of the Greeks, the heavy cavalry.

They come in from the back, and where they find that weak spoint, wherever they go, they can go from the back or they can go right through at a

loxane at an angle.

That's That's the Greek word for it.

And then once they open that terror, they give the order and there goes this phalanx.

And it's supported by light cavalry.

Light cavalry just means people have swords or javelins and they protect the flanks.

And it's a symphony.

And it's all professional killers.

And it's hard to defeat the Thebans because physically,

As we know, they're the toughest fighters in the Greek world, more so even than the Spartans, whom they defeated, Leuctra, and destroyed.

But

after this annihilation at Chaeronea,

then the whole story should be over.

Philip wins.

Greece is consolidated.

He's ready to invade.

He probably wasn't going to go beyond modern-day Turkey.

He might have gone to Babylon.

Limited vision of going in, plundering Asia Minor, and maybe going in somewhere beyond into central Turkey and then coming back.

But he gets killed.

He's assassinated.

And Alexander now is, you know, he's 21.

Everybody thinks he's a rookie.

And he's got revolts everywhere.

And one of the revolts is in Greece.

And who is going to spearhead it?

The Thebans.

And they say, we're not going to be under this tyrant.

And he'll never come anyway.

He's 21 years old.

The whole empire is over.

Everybody join us.

And they said, well, A, we don't like you particularly.

Never did.

B,

only two of you guys showed up at Chaonea, and the Athenians say, we'll give you some weapons, and, you know, let's.

So everybody was looking to see whether they were going to win or not.

And Alexander got there in two weeks.

Can you imagine that?

300 miles with an army, and he's there in two weeks.

And he pulls up outside Thebes, and the phalanx of the Atheians is there.

And he says, you know what?

Just turn over the guys who, you know, killed my guards that were, they had a little garrison there and who revolted against my dad, who's dead, and we'll clean it up and we'll all get together and be friends and we'll go over there and get rich in Asia.

Come on.

He was very reasonable.

And they said, no, we're not going to give up Greek freedom.

He said, you don't have any Greek freedom.

You lost it at Chaeronea.

And he said, no, your dad's dead.

We've got it back again.

So they have a fight out in front of the walls.

The Thebans do very well.

They kill 500 Macedonians, more than a lot of the Persians did at major battles.

And then they find an open gate.

The rest is history.

Alexander sends his 30,000 people,

they kill the Thebans, they enslave the women and children, 30,000 dead.

They destroy the houses, the wall, except anybody who was a turncoat pro-Macedonian, and Pindar, the great poet of Thebes.

Pindar's odes, you remember, are some of the

hardest Greek in the world to read, but they're very majestic.

And so that's the end.

And it's not like Thebes was defeated.

This happens a lot in city-states.

It was annihilated.

It ceased to exist as a people.

There were no more Thebans.

The spot itself will eventually be rebuilt, but these are different people.

The Theban males are dead, and the women are sold into slavery, and their children will grow up as non-Thebans and be intermarried with other people.

They did the same thing to the little city-state of Thespiae.

And it happens a lot in Greek history.

And,

you know, just as an in-thought,

there's a lot of ways to end a war, but one of them is very rare, and that is to utterly destroy a country or a nation or a city-state.

And I don't mean defeat them utterly.

We defeated Germany and Japan utterly, but nobody went in there and destroyed them.

And the Japanese people, the German people, Hitler wanted to do that, of course, in Russia.

But when a city is vulnerable or it's overmatched or it has bad leadership, whatever those stars line up, if you're Carthage in 146 and you made the mistake of fighting Rome a third time in the Punic War, they're not going to let you off.

They're going to destroy your city, supposedly salt, they don't think they did, but salt the ground and kill the males.

and put everybody in slavery and then it's going to be called New Carthage and the Punic race ceases to exist.

I mean there's still going to be a little Punic language here and there and the Berbers may be related and all that, but it doesn't exist anymore.

It's very rare to see that.

Aztecs are another one.

Completely gone.

Do you think when they destroy a culture like that, or that the significance of a destroyed language where nobody speaks it anymore is that the culture has been completely destroyed as well, that there's a tight link between language and the nature of a culture?

Yeah, it's very hard to find ancient Carthaginian.

I mean, most of the evidence we have, I mean, they had a very rich,

they were very heavily influenced by Greek colonists, so they had a rich agrarian agricultural scholarship.

There's a lot of treatises, Maggio the Carthaginian, and they had a lot of military treatises.

And there were Spartan drill masters.

So they had an intellectual tradition of writing about certain areas of technology and expertise, but that's gone.

So

New Carthage is one of the biggest cities in Roman Africa, along with Alexandria and Leptis Magna and Sobratha.

But it's not, it's settled by Romans.

Yeah, I was going to say,

by the time that you have Augustine of Hippo there or Saint Augustine, it's all Roman.

So the whole idea that, oh, Augustine is from the north of Africa and therefore is African is kind of a misnomer.

I mean, you really basically just have Roman culture and he's a Roman subject.

Yeah, he's a Roman subject.

There is no culture left.

I mean, you don't ever exterminate racially a whole people.

That was why the Holocaust was so bizarrely evil.

That was an attempt by Hiller to make sure there were no Jewish people, not just no Jewish Germans.

He could have accomplished that.

He did very easily by exporting them.

But the idea of wiping out a whole race, there was no no Aztecs in Tenochetland,

you know, basically after Cortez destroyed the city.

But it didn't mean there were some that didn't filter out or reassimilated in the new Spanish town,

Spanish city of Mexico City.

After Black Tuesday of 1451, when the Ottomans stormed the walls of Constantinople, remember they went into this.

Very sad to read that.

They went into the inner sanctum of Hagia Sofia and they found the last 7,000 women and children huddled in there.

They were all praying for the Archangel Mark to come down and deliver them.

And they butchered them.

And they spent three days butchering people.

But today,

what had been Greek for millennia, there was nothing there.

I mean, there were Greeks that scattered after the Byzantium fell, Constantinople.

They were in Smyrna.

They were wiped out.

Some of them stayed until the 1920s, but subject, they were scattered peoples, and they ceased to exist as a Greek-speaking people

in Asia Minor.

And that was very remarkable because the center of Greek wealth, the wealthiest land, the crossroads of trade routes, was not in Athens or Sparta, it was in Byzantium, which became Constantinople.

But after 1453, it's instantly

yeah, and Greek culture as it was disappears and it comes back, you know, 400 years later, modern 18th century.

It does 19th century, very different, right?

Is what you're trying to tell me.

Yeah, it's the Greek people within

30 years or maybe a little bit longer after the fall.

of Constantinople ceased to exist as an independent people in mainland Greece.

And the last stand is probably at somewhere like Mistros in the Peloponnese.

That doesn't mean the Greek people disappeared.

They were still there after 1453.

Yeah,

you mean genetically, but the culture has changed.

No, it was just, yeah.

But what was unique about Greece is they went up to the hills and they kept the language alive and the Orthodox religion alive.

And the Ottomans can never subject them.

to complete

annihilation.

So they were always waiting, waiting, waiting till they had outside sukkur.

And during the Romantic movement in the the 19th century and the weakening of Istanbul, they re-emerged.

And what was weird about the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s is when they re-emerged, they had their language, they had their customs that had been somehow,

I don't know, it's an amazing tribute to the Greek people.

And when you want to know why they fight so well in World War II, and why are they unafraid of the Turks, even though they're

outnumbered in Cyprus, why are Greek fire pilots so great today?

It's that tradition of absolute what they say, oki, when General Metaxas said to the German, you're not coming across our borders without a fight.

But in Asia Minor, they did disappear.

That's my point.

And they disappeared in every aspect of that word.

The Greek Orthodox Church, I know it has all sorts of titled religious figures that nominally are related to the Greek church in Athens.

It's a sinner, supposedly, the potentate, all of that of Greek Orthodoxy, but there's nobody there that goes to those churches.

I know there's a few, not so much under Aragon at all, maybe.

And it doesn't, Hagia Sophia is now back, it's going to be a mosque again.

And

there's no, you don't meet people in the streets that are Greek.

Maybe between 1453 and 1922,

there were probably a million and a half survivors from the Byzantine Empire that had been in small enclaves that were allowed to pay the tax to the Muslim overlords, and they were still there, but they were wiped out after the failure of the so-called Megalah idea, the great idea of reconstituting the Byzantine Empire after World War I.

So

these are very interesting things because I'm kind of curious.

I think I'm going to write a book about it, and that is what predicates a losing side, losing everything?

How does a whole, is it because you're small?

Carthage wasn't small.

The Aztec Empire was huge.

Is it because you find yourself making strategically stupid decisions?

Is it because you are faced in a war of annihilation rather than just winning or losing?

What is it?

that allows that.

Some countries, I mean, it's more what I'm getting at, Sammy, is it's not just Poland not being a country to the Treaty of Versailles, you know what I mean?

Or it's it's not just Yugoslavia now has disappeared from the map, or there is no longer a Prussia.

Those are names, but there are people that speak a Prussian-German dialect.

There are people in Yugoslavia, Serbs,

Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, etc.

It's just the name had been reconstituted.

But in the case of Carthage,

there were no Carthaginians.

They were scattered.

They were never going to come back.

There's never going to be a Greek-speaking people in Asia Minor again at the site of Constantinople.

There's never going to be a majestic Aztec civilization.

That language doesn't, I mean, there are people in Oaxaca that speak elements of it, Nahutul, but it's gone.

And the same thing was true of Thebes.

There's people who live on Thebes in Roman and Hellenistic times, and maybe they even have a quasi-Theban dialect, but they're no relation to the original Thebans.

Yeah, and I'm going to take you back a little bit bit because you were talking about anybody who goes to Greece today will see a landscape of, you know, Greek Orthodox churches in the mountains and the old city-states are on the plains more or less or sometimes in these

rises in the plain that the old citadel sat on.

But there's another type of ruin that you find in Greece, those Frankish castles.

How do they work into Greek history?

They're medieval, right?

So they're around the 10th, 11th, 12th century and the 14th century.

14th?

Yes.

So you as,

and you probably know better than I do, that there a terrible thing happened to Constantinople in the so-called

Fourth Crusade.

And that was,

I don't know what you would call it.

It was a great tragedy.

Pope Innocent sent this huge army, and I guess it was 1202, and they never got to the Holy Land.

They just got to their allies at Constantinople.

And this is really important because if you want to know today why Greeks don't trust Western Europeans, it goes back to the Fourth Crusade.

And

they destroyed, they sacked Constantinople and they weakened it.

And it never really fully recovered.

But part of what they weakened was the empire's vast lands in places like Rhodes, in places like Cyprus, in places like Crete, and places in mainland Greece like Noplion or Acrocorn or Monovasia.

They became Frankish.

So for about 150 years,

the Franks had stolen control, depending on where you were in the Byzantine Empire, until they were kicked out.

These buccaneers built these beautiful, and they had a a very sophisticated way of fortification and castellation.

So when you go to Acrocorinth or the Palmivi in the town of Noplion, or go out to Nopitos, they're really stunning castles.

And these very small population of Franks ran everything and then they exploited it.

And they were, you know, Geoffrey Villadon.

You hear these stories of these larger-than-life knights.

But that's why today, when you go to Greece, if you excavate or you look at things, you get these layers.

So, you go to Greece,

you around

330,

280 BC, you start getting Hellenistic, not perfectly Greek classical.

And then

around 200 BC, you start seeing Roman type of architecture or pottery.

And then around 600 AD,

you start to see Byzantine.

the pottery is glazed and shiny Byzantine coins and that goes all the way to about 1500, 1550.

And then you start seeing things that start appearing your trench that have

they're Turkish or they have an Arabic script or they'll be and the fortification they don't want to be chalvinistic but it's much inferior.

Turkish architecture and military architecture does not match Byzantine architecture and surely not Frankish architecture.

And then for a brief period after the end of the Byzantine,

for about 150 years, you see this Frankish stuff and then you see Ottoman, as I said, and that goes all the way to the 19th century.

And then maybe a foot or two feet from the surface, you start to see the artifacts of 19th century Greece.

And it's purely Greek.

And when you go to cemeteries, it's very hard to see Muslim cemeteries.

Until the politically correct movement in Greece, it was sort of odd to see a lot of Muslim places of worship, mosques.

There weren't very many of them, they had been destroyed.

And

I had some professors in Greece that were, you know, they were students of Muslim art and culture, but it was very hard because for 500 years, that rule of Greece was so harsh.

The dervishum and the idea that, you know, you came into a Greek village and you look for, you know,

blonde-air and blue-eyed kids, and then

you took some and castrated them for sexual pleasures of the sultan and the haram you took the other boys you took them in back to constantinople which is now istanbul a corruption of at the city at the polis

and

what did you do you just brainwashed them into robotic gigantic warriors.

You picked the biggest little boys in a Greek village, you snatched them from their mothers, and their mothers would probably want them to go there.

They thought, well, at least they won't be killed or castrated, and they'll have a privileged life.

And then they were segregated, and they became the shock troops of the Ottoman Empire, but they were not Turkish, is my point.

Yeah, you're talking about the Janissaries, right?

Yes, I was just going to say that.

And these become the Janissaries.

And what was psychologically terrifying, if you were Greek, or for that matter, a Balkan, suddenly when if you tried to resist and this army came from the sultan, they looked like you and they probably you might recognize somebody you thought might have been in your village, but they were going to be the most fervent Muslims in the world because they'd been indoctrinated at a very young age of four or five or six, and they were ruthless.

And so they were a terrifying force for the sultan.

Okay, Victor, we were getting close to the end, but and I need to take a break for our sponsor.

So let's go ahead and take a break.

And then I have a couple of questions when we come back.

Yeah.

All right, welcome back.

And I have just a couple more questions for Victor.

I'm going to take you back again into ancient Greece because you said that Thebes was the setting for a lot of plays such as Oedipus Rex and Antigone and the Seven Against Thebes and

those types of plays.

And so, part of the mythology, is there any speculation on why in Mycenaean times, or if Thebes was a very important city in Mycenaean times, perhaps even more important than Athens or, you know, in the citadel, is that the reason for it being the setting of all these?

Is there any speculation on why Thebes is so often used as a setting in place?

There is a continuity of culture that's geographically based.

So the way to look at this is places that have fertile soil, like Mycenae and the environs of tirins or some places in sparta or in boeotia like gla and thebes and athens the acropolis was a mycenaean citadel these are the places that will figure prominently archaeologically let's say in linear b tablets and when that those systems collapsed the mythology of the dark ages it's kind of like a hollywood movie of the apocalypse movie you know you're walking around you see a new york building or

you know, you're in LA in a thousand years and nobody knows what, you know, the Colosseum is there.

So they saw these

majestic Mycenaean buildings, but because of the depopulation, losing 90% of the population, and they were illiterate, nobody knew what these strange Mycenaean linear B tablets meant.

They forgot how to read.

So they exaggerated.

And they said, you know, once upon a time, there were people that were like Hercules, or they were Cyclops, or they were these, and that became the mythology.

And so, probably, some of the names, even like Achilles, these appear in Ajax.

These were Mycenaean bureaucrats or Mycenaean generals or king, who knows?

But they, when that system is destroyed, then you have the ingredient, classical ingredients for mythology.

An impoverished culture following a majestic culture for three, four, or 500 years tries to make sense of it.

And then when civilization returns, 700 BC, 800 BC, it returns to Greece on entirely different premises.

It's not foreign people, it's the Greeks there, but they start to populate, the demography changes, they're more attuned to private property, and the Greek language is now, the Greek language remains.

They're still speaking the same language as Linear B, but they write it with Phoenician letters.

And they have no idea.

We didn't know in 1953 that the Linear B tablets and the Phoenician Greek alphabet were the same language, but they were.

But part of this process is then people say they grew up, their ancestors in the Dark Ages, that Thebes was this great place, i.e.

they couldn't make sense of the Mycenaean citadel there.

Or they couldn't make sense of the Athenian.

So don't forget Athens, you know, King Theseus, in all the subjects he's in all sorts of plays.

And don't forget that the house of Atreus is at Mycenae, and then Menelaus is at Sparta.

So all the Greek plays that deal with myth, and they all deal with these mythological themes that come down to the Dark Ages that themselves are exaggerations of lost Mycenaean lords, probably.

Anyway, they're centered at Sparta or Athens, but especially Thebes.

So it seems to be, of all those Mycenaean places, that it was as powerful as Mycenae.

And its patron was Heracles, and its emblem was the club of Heracles on shields and it's in vases.

But one of the reasons, it's kind of an artifact.

The problem is that the city of Thebes, the modern city

that grew up during Frankish and Byzantine and Frankish and Ottoman times, is right on top of the Mycenaean citadel.

There is no city on top of Mycenae.

That was just a little town.

There was no city on top of Bla or Tirins, but there was a city on top of Thebes, which means, you know,

it was an ideal place to build a city.

That's what that means to me.

Yes, but it means how do you go up to Mr.

and Mrs.

Papadopoulos or Mr.

Mrs.

Zikas and say, oh, by the way, you know, this house that you've had for 400 years?

We think it's right on top of a Mycenaean citadel.

And we we have a suspicion.

We know that because your neighbor the other day was in a bar or Taverna, and he said that when he excavated his septic tank, he found some linear B tablets.

So we feel that you're right near an archive.

So we're going to take your house and destroy it.

That's not going to happen in Greece.

It's an archaeological nightmare, I get it.

It is.

So there's been a lot of Americans over the 1920s and 30s that offered to write a check by the whole city and just demolish it.

But it's just, so we don't really know the archaeological record of Thebes because the modern city

is a quaint, nice city.

I've stayed there a lot and stayed there for week ones.

And there's a lot of places in Boeotia that, even though it has a bad reputation, like Labatia, it's got a beautiful area, the Oracle of Trephonius.

So it's a very, it's one of my favorite places in Greece.

And yet, people, when you say that, think, are you crazy?

You know, the shoreline is not that nice.

It's very humid in the summer.

People are kind of crazy.

And Labatia, Be careful when you go there.

Why would you want to go to Thebes?

But I like Thebes a lot.

I like the cities of Plataea

and Thisbe and Leftra.

These are all ancient names, but they have modern equivalents.

Yeah.

Can I ask you one more question?

And again, our time is short, but you noted that it had a revolution after the Peloponnesian War, but it was a middle-class revolution.

371.

Yeah.

And do you think that that might have been a model for Aristotle in his politics where he talks about the nature of a middle-class civilization constitution?

It's hard to know because Aristotle's a near, remember that he's in,

that he comes only a generation after Apaminondas, but we know that he had over 150 constitutions that he discussed in his politics.

And the Constitution of Athens is just one of them.

It's the only one that survived by an accident on on papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, otherwise, we wouldn't have any of the constitution.

But there's mentions of them.

And you make a good point.

When you read the politics, he refers to a lot of Theban lawgivers and Boeotian lawgivers.

Boeotia is just the word for the area that encompasses Thebes, like Laconia does Sparta or Attica does Athens.

But apparently, from what Aristotle seems to say, is that in his time,

there were evolutionary governments that had gone, let me put it this way, they had not followed Athens' radical pathway in the fourth century of paying people to go to the theater or paying people to vote or that kind of stuff, but they were more moderate.

And he felt that of the four typologies of democracy, the best

was a rural democracy where there was a low property qualification, but you had to have some evidence that you were industrious and you owned a little bit of property to be a full citizen.

And he felt that that was the ideal way of getting the most people who deserved to participate.

And you didn't have what he called the urban mob,

the aqua.

In Thebes, there was not considered that.

And Epaminondas, because he was this religious mystic, a Pythagorean, an idealist, and he wanted to destroy Sparta and he freed the Hellots.

And then he inaugurated this democratic experiment that apparently lasted from 371 to the destruction of the city in 335.

And it's kind of tragic.

I wrote a novel called The End of Sparta and this is the whole story.

I don't know if it's quite a novel.

I'm not a novelist, but it was more of a history in the sense that every character who spoke,

I wrote it out in Greek first and then translated it back into English, see if I could get the right level of diction or grammar.

But it's more of a history than just a novel.

But it's factually based, is what I'm telling you.

Every character in that novel is based on a historical event.

Nothing is really, the main outline is not made up.

And it's about a Pamanandas getting angry and leading a huge crusade in

371,

370 to liberate the Hellots and then build these great cities.

And anyway, I urge everybody to, if you ever go to Greece, just stay a day in Thebes and go drive out and see some of these battlefields.

Look at Mount Cathyron.

You can go up there now.

There used to be a missile base in the Cold War when I was there, but it's open now, much more open than it had been.

And that's where the Bacchae roamed.

It's got a lot of pine forest.

And it's not too far from the Battle of Marathon, Battle of Plataea.

It's not far.

So you can see a lot of stuff there.

And the main free, the old, both the old road and the main national freeway go right along outside the skirts of Thebes.

So you can look over and see the Acropolis.

And if you're really adventurous, I'll end with this.

You can take the old road over Mount Cathyron and you can see all these,

you know, you can actually see the...

on your way up the road you can see where the battle of plataea is the ancient city of plataea you can wind around

and you'll end up with the road to a gosta and then you'll come down to athens that was the road until the 1960s when they made the national highway.

That was the old path.

And I'll just finish, I promise I'll finish, Sammy, but

when I was 20, a bunch of us thought we were going to, because we all thought we could march.

Remember, JFK said the 50-mile hike.

So we got up at three in the morning, a couple of us, we tried to hike to Thebes.

And we didn't quite make it.

And then when I was 24, there was the wonderful Eugene Vanderpoel, and he said we were going to hike to Thebes.

So we got up, we took the bus out to what would be called Acarnia, the site of Aristophanes' Acarnians.

And

we took the venicular up to the casino on Mount Parnes.

We'd walked some, then we took it up, and then we walked over the crest of Mount Parnes, and we were taking the, not over the Cathywon route, the roundabout ride.

And it got foggy, it got cold, we'd hiked about 30 miles, people were tired, we had a lot of people out of shape, and it got dark in the winter.

We ended up at Avlona, a little town not too far from Thebes, right on the border with Attica, but no one knew where we were.

And Eugene Vanderpoel was like 74.

And

he was a wonderful man, but it was trying to recreate what Thebans did and Athenians did by hiking this route.

This is one of the routes.

We took the sea route, but I'd still like to go to Greece and maybe if you could hike what

three miles an hour on the sea route, in 10 hours you do 30 miles but you can see a 50 mile hike would take

I don't know 16 hours so you'd get up at eight and get if you started at six in the morning you'd be getting there at nine at night in the summer unless you could hike faster yeah and that that would be quite a pace even at three miles an hour so yeah well victor thank you so much for your discussion of how states are completely destroyed, their culture as well destroyed.

And it sounds like you have a good book in the making and maybe our listeners can

let us know what their ideas are about it.

But it also sounds like you might have a good tour to do up in the Theban area.

I hope so.

I've taken a lot of tours of Greece and we've stopped at Thebes a number of times, but I have a feeling that I'd like to do one last tour of Greece and replicate the march of Epaminon to start in Thebes.

And then we would go down through the isthmus and then we would go into Sparta and then we would go over to Messini, get a hotel and look at the battles of Mantinea, et cetera, go to Megalopolis, Mantinea.

It might be a good thing to do.

Yeah, it sounds really fun.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

I remind people that you have a website at victorhanson.com.

Welcome to all.

We've also opened new social media with MeWe and Getter.

So I had a great suggestion from somebody on the Victor Davis Hansen fan club.

So I went in to open those media.

Thanks a lot, Victor, for everything.

Okay, thank you for listening, everybody.

Yeah, this is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.