The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation

Hanson has produced a detailed, scholarly, and at times grisly account of the annihilation of four once proud civilizations. In 335 BC, the armies of Alexander the Great captured the ancient city of Thebes, effectively ending the Greek system of city-states. The Roman Empire erased the North African city of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC. Constantinople, the heart and last consequential redoubt of the Byzantine Empire, was conquered and sacked in 1453 by the Ottomans. And in 1521, the Spanish conquistadors and their Mesoamerican allies slaughtered the Aztecs in their magnificent capital, Tenochtitlán, whose ruins sit under modern Mexico City. Hanson sees some patterns. The victims “vainly counted on help that rarely appeared,” relied on methods learned from the past rather than considering the unique dangers of the present, inaccurately assessed both the military capacities of the enemy and their own mediocrity, and failed to appreciate that the balance of power had shifted—to their inevitable downfall.