FOWLER Your research reveals that a people on the brink believe help is on the way. Why does it never come? HANSON These cities were seen as eternally viable. So other Greeks, Punic states, Christians, and Nahuatl people assumed they would always survive and would pull through on their own as they always had. There were also resentments against the majesties of these eternal cities and some of their imperial practices, so come- uppance played a role as well. But mostly it was a question of apprais- ing relative strength, and in each case, would-be allies saw that Macedonians, Romans, Ottomans, and the Spanish had enormous advantages and would likely win, making it wiser either to stay out of the fight or to join the likely winners. FOWLER The End of Everything shows that the motivations behind these annihila- tions, while provincial and contem- porary, have lasting consequences and alter history. How are we today impacted by the obliteration of Thebes?
ianus, Mehmet II, or Hernan Cortes. They had no idea that they were in the midst of a rare perfect storm of destruction. FOWLER Consider how the Byzantine Empire was annihilated in 1453. At what key earlier point had the empire’s vital- ity begun to unravel so that utter destruction was to prove inevitable? HANSON The Eastern Romans or Byzantines were still viable after nearly 900 years until the misadventure of the Fourth Crusade when, in 1203–04, fellow Western Christians — dominated by Franks and Venetians — detoured, stormed the sea wall, and ravaged the city, taking it for decades, and key domains in the Balkans and islands of the Byzantine Empire for centu- ries. The late 13th-century restoration left a much smaller empire and one permanently at odds with the kindred West. Then, the second great plague of 1347–1400 really attenuated an already weakened empire and city, and at that point, the population, from once over one million before 1000, had dropped to perhaps 100,000 or less.
HANSON Well, no one quite thought Alexan- der, the supposed emissary of a new ecumenical creed and the protector of Hellenism, would actually destroy Thebes for its apostasy, given it was legendary — the home of the poet Pindar, the birthplace of the great myths of the House of Oedipus and Heracles, and the home of the idealistic Epaminondas’s democratic Theban hegemony. After Alexander’s leveling of the city, and killing off and enslaving almost all of the popula- tion, the Greek city-states fell into line, and he was on his way to a decade of conquest in Persia and beyond. Had Thebes survived and rallied the 1,500 city-states, the Macedonians may have reverted to their pre-Philip II irrelevancy in the affairs of Greece. The destruction of a fellow Hellenic city of such size and importance also signaled to the ancient Graeco-Ro- man world that anything was possible. FOWLER You’ve visited the sites of these once-great cities. As you wrote and researched The End of Everything , what did you notice about the ruins of Constantinople, Carthage, and
ALL HAD REMARKABLE CAPITAL CITIES WITH IMPREGNABLE FORTIFICATIONS—OR SO THEY THOUGHT. ALL HAD ALLIES THEY ALSO ASSUMED WOULD RALLY TO THEIR DEFENSE. AND ALL MISJUDGED ENTIRELY THE NATURE OF THE WOULD-BE CONQUERORS THEY FACED OUTSIDE THEIR WALLS.
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22 • AMAC Magazine
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