Aristotle is known for the theory that there are four causes structuring reality. Best-selling author and American classicist Victor Davis Hanson follows Aristotle’s lead, identifying four causes that transform wars into civilization-ending defeats. Whilst most conflicts between great powers end in compromise, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation gives four reasons why wars sometimes liquidate entire civilizations. The historical record shows, Hanson argues, that no matter how sophisticated a great power is, there is the risk of annihilation when a strategy relies on hope, stokes vengeance, overstates prowess, and displays arrogance. Hanson’s latest is a rapid-fire history of the destruction of four civilization-bearing cities: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlán. Though we fret about AI, drones, and bioweapons, Hanson’s four historical case studies suggest that war has stable coordinates—the problematic character of human passion.

　　Thebes

　　The long and glorious history of Thebes literally ended within the space of 24 hours. The city fell afoul of Adam Smith’s axiom: a professional army always beats a militia. Thebes’s vaunted but “one-dimensional militia” marched out to meet “a symphony of killers,” the professional army created by Philip of Macedon. In a matter of hours, the old order gave way to the new and the slaughter began.

　　Thebes rebelled as a clarion call to other republican city-states to throw off the recent yoke of Macedonian monarchy and empire. Far from having allies, however, Thebes’s neighbours were promised a free hand in the city’s slaughter and plunder. Resenting past abuse, neighbouring districts hated the city’s residents. They brought both a malice to the killings and a boon to Alexander’s slave market of survivors. Roman historian Justin reckoned that local hatred drove up the price of the slaves because the buyers salivated at the thought of tormenting the captives.

　　For 350 years prior to that fateful day in 335 BC, Theban life had been stable, prosperous, and celebrated. The script flipped in 24 hours. The PR of the erasure of Thebes had to be managed, so Alexander took to styling himself a “reluctant obliterator”—a good, refined man whose hand had been forced. Hanson comments: “The fate of Thebes eventually horrified the Greeks, but also lowered the bar on what was deemed permissible in classical warfare.”

　　An ancestral home of Greek civilization, Thebes’s destruction meant the end of “the Classical Greece of hundreds of independent city-states.” Philip’s army, with King Alexander in the vanguard, showed that monarchy was the way forward.

　　Carthage

　　The Romans leveled Carthage because they were sick of over a hundred years of conflict. By 149 BC, the start of the three-year siege, gone were the days when Carthaginian generals of Hannibal’s quality could destroy 100,000 legionaries. However, another empire over their shoulder made the Romans paranoid and they were determined to get rid of what they believed to be an existential threat. Rome also reviled Carthage’s cult of child sacrifice.

　　Always disgusted by the Carthaginians, Rome raged as Carthage executed legionnaires upon the walls of the city. Furthermore, they had to stew in their rage, because victory did not come easily. The Carthaginians had not grown into a rival empire by chance. They were resourceful, so Rome needed help.

　　Happily, for the Romans, Carthage—situated in modern-day Tunisia—had the hostile Numibians to its rear. They were constantly chipping away at the Carthaginian empire from the south, whilst the Romans did so from the north. Most astonishingly, the Romans had a mole—the leader of the Carthaginians, Hasdrubal. He betrayed his city, his wife, and his children. With their children, his wife cursed him from amidst the flames consuming the final redoubt. Alas, while the Romans indulged their vengeance to the full, her curse was ineffective, and Hasdrubal retired to Rome to his promised life of leisure.

　　The slaughter was epic, with only 50,000 taken into slavery out of hundreds of thousands in the city when the walls finally came down in 146 BC. The Roman commander, the 37-year-old Scipio Aemilianus, struck a pose very like Alexander’s. He prided himself on being a good, cultured man, and had regrets, so he said. A self-avowed phil-Hellenist, the carnage Scipio wrought finished off not only a city but the “Greek-dominated world of the Eastern Mediterranean.”

　　Constantinople

　　Like Carthage, Constantinople had predators on two sides. The Venetians to the west and the Ottomans to the east were siphoning off the territory of the Byzantine Empire. What is more, the empire had always had a demographic deficit. To compensate, the Byzantines practiced active defence, assigning troops to rove the borderlands to keep predators at bay. By 1453, the empire’s battle space was highly restricted, closing in on the fabled walls of the city itself. Given its meagre forces, this constriction did not augur well. But, unlike the other cities in Hanson’s study, the Byzantines got one thing right. Clausewitz cautions that it is of the utmost strategic importance to have a line of retreat and in their port the Byzantines had one. It helped, a little.

　　Trade was the city’s boon and blight. A strategic trading hub brought wealth, but with it came disease. Ravaged down the years by plagues, when the city fell, it was down from a million residents to just 50,000. However, trade was the undoing of the city in a more profound sense. It began to split the Christian West from the Christian East. By 1453, the Atlantic was opening as a trade route. Portugal’s Henry the Navigator was leading the way with commercial contacts in Atlantic Africa. In consequence, Constantinople started to lose relevance and Western powers had started to think of the Hungarians as the strategic bulwark in the east holding the Ottomans at bay. Leadership overestimated the citys strategic importance to Western Christendom and aid was going to flow to Constantinople.

　　Despite its strategic problem, the fall in 1453 was touch-and-go. The city had a contingent of Italian troops who ably showed that stout-heartedness counts. The Ottomans were at a breaking point when the magnetic leader of the Italians was wounded, and panic suddenly gripped the defenders. Hanson comments, “So the defenses of nearly two months unexpectedly collapsed in minutes.” With the Italians in retreat, the Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died fighting bravely at the front of his men. Astonishingly, this gave the Italians a line of retreat and they escaped entirely through the port, along with other residents. The episode suggests that had the West sent even a small force, the city would likely have held. Against an enormous Turkish army, the Knights Templar in comparable straits held Malta in 1565.

　　The fall of the city marked the end of “the Mediterranean world as the nexus of European commerce.” However, the fate of Constantinople is different than the other case studies and muddies a bit of the book’s elegance. Unlike the obliteration of Thebes and Carthage, the mystique of the Byzantine city and empire remained. Mehmet II had no interest in destroying the city. For him, the city was to be the jewel in his crown. Moreover, the glamour of the citizenry saved some of them. Moving through the city, the Ottomans kept stopping to bicker over which of the beautiful youth would fetch the highest prices at the slave market. This grim commercial calculus gave time for some Byzantines to escape through the port. The aura of the city meant that after its conquest, the sultans called themselves caesars and the name of the city only changed from Kostantinniyye in 1923. Hanson points out that it was not the Ottoman Muslims who changed the name to Istanbul, but the secular nationalist, Atatürk. In a strange afterglow of Byzantium, and to the fury of the current Turkish government, DNA testing shows that most of Turkey’s population has Anatolian Greek ancestry, not Seljuk Turk.

　　Tenochtitlán

　　Tenochtitlán enjoyed no such consolation. In 1521, the Aztecs had every reason to believe they would prevail against the Spanish. As Hanson puts it, the fate of Tenochtitlán was a case where “a rendezvous with finality was often completely unexpected.” The Spanish never numbered more than a couple of thousand at once and the Aztecs were an empire of some four million. The annihilation of the Aztecs almost defies belief, but three factors played a critical role.

　　The principal cause was industrial cannibalism, the “systematic institutionalization of mass sacrifice.” Hearts cut out of living victims, they were then tossed off the slaughter altars for the citizenry to eat and feed their animals. The Aztecs had ruled the roost in Mexico for generations and had been utterly predatory, constantly demanding human tributes to feed their gods. They were loathed by their neighbours. This led to a fundamental strategic mistake. Being cocksure, they assumed the alienness of the Spanish would mean that their neighbours would let bygones be bygones and get rid of the foreigner with them. Instead, the surrounding peoples thought of the Spanish coming as an opportune time to eat the Aztecs in turn.

　　Hanson wonders whether contemporary preoccupation with war and technology is not misplaced. He believes his study shows—and I think he is right—that cities and peoples suffer apocalyptic defeat from “timeless human passions,” not machines.

　　The second cause was the mesmerizing figure of Hernán Cortés and the professionalism of his troops. A minor provincial with no track record, he nonetheless played a brilliant political hand assuring the Aztecs’ enemies that a feast of human flesh for the ages was in the offing. They duly joined forces. At one point, Cortés had no more than 800 men under arms. The army of Cortés might have been tiny, but it was schooled in combined arms operations. Navy, calvary, war dogs, and logistics, the Spanish had it all down to a science. “The sixteenth-century Spanish were global warriors who battled all comers.” The tercios were top soldiers, with experience fighting the British navy, Ottoman janissaries, and Italy’s mounted condottieri.

　　Finally, it helped that the Aztecs were the enemy. The Spanish horses and war dogs were terror weapons to them and sowed epic panic in Aztec ranks every time they were used. Tactically, the tercios worked together in force-multiplying combined arms formation. By contrast, the Aztec warriors were solitary fighters and for a very interesting reason. It was part of Aztec ritual killing that the warrior who captured victims got to wear the skins of their human trophies. As Hanson puts it, the Aztecs were brave but because akin to a militia, “hundreds of killers enjoyed advantages over tens of thousands of body snatchers.” The battlefield tilted towards the Spanish because the Aztecs wanted captives for priestly sacrifice whilst the Spanish just wanted them dead.

　　All contemporary accounts attest that the Spanish were worked into a lather as they could see their captive mates taken up steps to the slaughter altars. About 500 Spanish met this fate. Filled with abhorrence, the Spanish were going to be vindictive. However, the real slaughter of the Aztecs happened at the hands of their indigenous rivals who were not going to be denied their feast. The slaughter was at scale, and all done with handheld weapons backed by human muscle. It was a true blood bath.

　　The eradication of Tenochtitlán—now the site of Mexico City—“marked the end of Central American alteptl (city-state’) civilization as a whole. … The city’s death marked the collapse of the age of independent New World civilizations.”

　　The Aesthetic Motive

　　Hanson’s latest is a nice companion to Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind where the American geopolitical thinker recommends leaders read the tragedies. Both Hanson and Kaplan think tragedy, not hope, is the best guide for understanding the fate of nations. The End of Everything begins with the warning of Thucydides, that it is the nature of hope “to be extravagant.”

　　Reading, I started to wonder whether aesthetics is a principal cause, also. The conservative Hungarian theorist, Aurel Kolnai argues that disgust orients the moral order. Being the experience of biological things out of place, disgust has a strong aesthetic component that can be seen in each of Hanson’s cases.

　　The Romans were disgusted by the child sacrifice of the Carthaginians. Similarly, the Spanish were disgusted by Aztec cannibalism. Critically, the local Mexican allies of the Spanish ate enemies too, but they also found the industrial scale of Aztec sacrifice disgusting. To their minds, Aztec indulgence crossed a line, going too far. Condemning the disgusting sexual and human relations at the core of Greek mythology was a part of Alexander’s PR campaign against Thebes. To keep Greece on his side, he exploited the subterranean eeriness of the Thebans.

　　By contrast, the Ottomans found Byzantium alluring. Hanson portrays all four cases as examples of victors resorting to “nihilistic cruelty.” Yes, there was slaughter, rape, and executions in the sacking of Constantinople, but its glamour was also arresting. The Byzantines were smart to ensure a line of retreat, but aesthetics played a role in their having time to get out. The bickering over the beautiful was an escape hatch for others.

　　From the historical record, Hanson wonders whether contemporary preoccupation with war and technology is not misplaced. He believes his study shows—and I think he is right—that cities and peoples suffer apocalyptic defeat from “timeless human passions,” not machines. Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation is a cracking read and will get you thinking about what most moves us and our civilizations, for good and ill.