Any reader of a Victor Davis Hanson book is confronted with two facts which the mind struggles to assimilate: (i) he managed to get this published, and (ii) people are actually reading it. One of the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, The End of Everything, describes it as ‘stupendous.’ Latinist readers know that this adjective comes from the verb stupere, which can mean ‘to marvel at’ but also ‘to be benumbed,’ and insofar as this second definition is applied, I could not agree more. The book wore me down into such a stupor that, before the end of the book, I found myself praying (secular prayers) for the end of everything.

The title is singularly infelicitous, because the book hardly deals in the kind of apocalyptic universal eschatology promised either by the title or the cover art. Instead, Hanson explores the destruction or sacking of four cities: Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan. Conservatives are fascinated by the decline of civilizations, a subject which provides an excellent foothold for intellectual judo maneuvers that allow them to argue that progressive impulses bring about the sorts of changes which undermine the virtuous elements of once glorious cultures. The ancients themselves excelled at this sort of thing: every time Nestor opens his mouth, there’s a good chance that he will fault his contemporaries for their suffering by noting their manifest inferiority to their predecessors.

Hanson begins, inauspiciously enough, by framing his conclusion as a rebuff to a preposterous straw man:

“Its conclusions warn that the modern world, America included, is hardly immune from repeating these tragedies of the past.”

Out there on his farm, Hanson may be touching too much grass. The most cursory glance at the psychic cacophony of the internet would suggest that no one believes that any place in the world, least of all America, is immune from tragedy. Contemporary discourse, regardless of one’s politics, is entirely invested in the idea of civilizational collapse. Geopolitical conflict, domestic disorder, climate change, the loss of cultural values mistily glanced through roseate lenses – does anyone today go to bed easily with the smug reassurance of imagined future stability?

For my own part, I have relied for the past several years on a panoply of somniferous consumables, though I now think that I have wasted thousands of dollars on sleep aids which could probably be replaced by a regular dose of Hanson’s soporific writing. Let’s stop touting the study of classical languages as the royal road to excellent prose. At least we know that Hanson isn’t a killer. (Nabokov: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”)  Observe:

“As the first-century historian Diodorus put it, most in Greece on news of the revolt were sincerely worried about the Thebans. But their sympathy was not the same as their succor.”

I wonder how proud he felt of the apparent rhetorical balance of the alliteration in the second sentence. But the phrase “most in Greece on news of the revolt” is singularly inelegant. Luckily, Hanson didn’t need to activate too many new neural pathways during the drafting phase, leaning instead on well-worn cliches:

“In fact, the timid allies advanced all sorts of flimsy excuses why discretion was the better part of valor, claiming that a century and a half earlier the Thebans had helped the Persian invaders and thus were unworthy of the sacrifice of their brethren.” [Italics added.]

Sometimes the cliche takes the form of unexamined nonsense expressions:

“…quite in contrast to the one-dimensional hoplite phalanxes of old.”

“…the Thebans, like all Greek armies, remained a one-dimensional militia.”

As Kingsley Amis noted, the standard journalese description of characters as “one-dimensional” reflects muddled thinking. Only a point in abstraction is properly one-dimensional, but somehow “two-dimensional” has never really caught on as a suitable replacement. Sed hae sunt nugae.

Consider this paradox:

“The Thebans were within a single day completely defeated. Their army was routed and erased from history.”

It’s one thing for a group to be “swept into the dustbin of History,” as Trotsky had it, but one might well wonder how an army erased from history finds itself discussed in what is billed as a work of…history. There is much in antiquity which has been entirely effaced from history, but it all takes the form of Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Anything erased from history is ipso facto not discussed – it’s gone.

Speaking of expressions featuring facto, brace yourself for pedantry: Hanson has a singularly irritating tendency to use the phrase post facto throughout the book, which makes agrammatical nonsense of the phrase ex post facto and seems rather unbecoming of a man who wrote such an impassioned polemic about the value of rigorous training in classical languages. Not that Hanson is afraid of a nice bit of pedantry himself. There is a four-page stretch featuring the use of the rather finicky ultimata where most writers would happily settle for the Anglicized ultimatums.

You might think that Hanson was a millennial blogger in light of his fondness for the adverb apparently. A lot of statements get qualified thus in this book, as in this ghastly little performance:

“That sum was the equivalent of paying more than seven thousand of his soldiers together a year’s worth of wages, apparently a far preferable proposition than providing sustenance for thousands of the helpless in the occupied city.”

What to make of this? “Apparently a far preferable proposition than…”? Have you ever observed the way in which people speak with fawning reverence about Ivy League education? Did you know that Hanson went to Stanford?

If it appears (apparently) that I am belaboring Hanson’s faults as a stylist instead of discussing the content of the book, it’s because there isn’t much there. We have potted histories of four cities, linked only by the fact that they were sacked or extirpated and serve as a synecdoche for broader civilizational collapse. No one with a passing familiarity with any of these narratives will find anything novel or surprising in their treatment here, as this contains no real original scholarship. By itself, this is not a damning criticism. But the theme which binds the tetralogy of destruction together is weak, uninteresting, and not particularly well-managed.

I made two great sacrifices to write this post: I added a few extra cents of pocket lining to America’s most famous raisin farming reactionary and sank some irrecoverable hours into reading it. At some point in the past, Hanson set himself about the task of becoming a classical scholar, but found his real metier in Fox News punditry. He may have once done illuminating work on the phalanx, but even his historical work now savors of Rupert Murdoch’s tailpipe. It turns out that the mind, too, can dry up just like those raisins.

Martin Amis once suggested that Philip Larkin was afflicted by ‘early death awareness syndrome,’ an obsession with his own personal eschatology that sapped him of vitality and turned him into the sad sack who, for all of the straitened confinement of his personal life, composed some of the finest verbal expressions of the sorrow of drab quotidian existence. A cursory search through the archives of this blog will remind the casual reader that the ancients (and what a ridiculous abstraction that term is!) were similarly afflicted by this view to the end, though it seems rather to have animated them to search for alternative immortalities. Reader, you are no doubt already anticipating my next point: from Achilles on downward through the stream of time it’s a long series of grappling matches with that still unresolved problem. Achilles settled for KLEOS as fair compensation for an early end. Centuries later, Horace saved his own life by taking Archilochus not only as a poetic model, but the inspiration for an act of life-saving cowardice (or prudence). It afforded him the chance to compose his monumentum aere perennius (a monument more lasting than bronze) and he lives on in print.

But let’s get real: posthumous glory is worthless, a lesson which Achilles learned and imparted. As scholars, we are tempted to think that the work, not the life, is of chief importance, but most work has gone the way of most lives – utterly forgotten.

A few days ago, I did something that I do with ungentlemanly frequency: I went to the bookstore. Anyone who frequents used bookshops is aware that the chief attraction of such places, beyond the fact that they’re troves of esoteric treasures that simply have no home in algorithmically-stocked emporia is the residue of life to be found in every volume. Is that a five dollar bill used as a bookmark? Does this receipt from the tire shop dated 1985 a sign that someone was reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for an improving couple of hours in the waiting room? Most of this contains mere hints at a person’s life because, generally speaking, it is contained in one volume. But occasionally you will find an entire collection of books and acquire, in one expensive sweep, a sizable chunk of someone’s library.

This has happened to me on three notable occasions. About 14 years ago I acquired something close to 100 volumes of Teubners, OCT’s, a number of commentaries, and even a load of uncut Belles Lettres editions of Greek texts for about $500. Given the store’s proximity to the University of Texas, I could only infer that this was the collection of some recently deceased classicist, but I had no real lead as to whose it was. Right before the pandemic, I snagged about 40 Greek Loebs from the collection of Hobart Huson.And just a few days ago, I stumbled into that same Half Price Books that offered up that initial accession of classics and walked out with several of Karl Galinsky’s books. Galinsky

Galinsky followed a practice which I have always found fascinating: not just inscribing his name on the pasteboard or flyleaf of each volume, but also noting the date when he acquired each volume. More than the stray receipts sandwiched between pages, this gives the new owner some indication of the diachronic course of their previous owner’s intellectual interests (or compulsions). Student editions with commentary in the 1960s at Princeton yield to uncribbed Teubners and OCTs in the following decades. Later still, he was reading Cassius Dio in a Loeb edition. (Those of us who refuse to yield to the old impulse to feel dirty about consulting Loebs will be happy to learn that the English half of the text is liberally sprinkled with marginalia. I recall hearing that Shackleton Bailey, too, liked reading the translations before bed.)

Such knowledge always imparts a sting to the usual thrill of acquisition. Professor Galinsky was reading Propertius with commentary in 1964, but now he is gone. I’m reading that Propertius volume now, but I too will soon enough be just as dead as Galinsky or Propertius.

My house is full of books – rooms full of shelves only loosely organized because of the constant influx of new material. I’m often asked why I don’t simply check things out from the library and cease living from paycheck to paycheck in thrall to tsundoku. I’ve always feared that, no matter how much I feel enriched by any given reading experience, there would be something inherently ephemeral and unstable about it if I didn’t have some physical monument to it, even when I know that I am not likely ever to read through the book again.

We all labor under silly compulsions which our rational minds can reject readily enough. For all of the vivacity of great books, they are ultimately dead. By the time that any thought is committed to the page, it belongs securely in the unreal and vanished world of the past, printed on dead material, lifeless and inert except when reanimated through readerly attention. But somehow their presence feels to me like a bulwark against mortality. Here’s a paradox: an assurance of stability fostered by the words of long-dead people laid out on fragile, inert matter. Or so I feel until I glimpse those names and dates on the flyleaf and realize that book ownership did nothing to prevent the deaths of the previous owners.

Though I am a material beneficiary of such an act, the post-mortem parcelling out of a beloved personal library strikes a ghoulish and unfeeling note. Thomas Jefferson was able to maintain the integrity of his collection (and escape some inconvenient debts) by making it the seed of the Library of Congress. In George Eliot’s Romola, one of the chief drivers of the plot is the Bardo de’ Bardi’s desire to keep his library together after his death:

“No, Romola,” he said, pausing against the bust of Hadrian, and passing his stick from the right to the left that he might explore the familiar outline with a “seeing hand.” “There will be nothing else to preserve my memory and carry down my name as a member of the great republic of letters—nothing but my library and my collection of antiquities. And they are choice,” continued Bardo, pressing the bust and speaking in a tone of insistence. “The collections of Niccolò I know were larger; but take any collection which is the work of a single man—that of the great Boccaccio even—mine will surpass it. That of Poggio was contemptible compared with mine. It will be a great gift to unborn scholars. And there is nothing else. For even if I were to yield to the wish of Aldo Manuzio when he sets up his press at Venice, and give him the aid of my annotated manuscripts, I know well what would be the result: some other scholar’s name would stand on the title-page of the edition—some scholar who would have fed on my honey, and then declared in his preface that he had gathered it all himself fresh from Hymettus. Else, why have I refused the loan of many an annotated codex? why have I refused to make public any of my translations? why? but because scholarship is a system of licenced robbery, and your man in scarlet and furred robe who sits in judgment on thieves, is himself a thief of the thoughts and the fame that belong to his fellows. But against that robbery Bardo de’ Bardi shall struggle—though blind and forsaken, he shall struggle. I too have a right to be remembered—as great a right as Pontanus or Merula, whose names will be foremost on the lips of posterity, because they sought patronage and found it; because they had tongues that could flatter, and blood that was used to be nourished from the client’s basket. I have a right to be remembered.”

I can consider with some equanimity the mere fact of nonexistence, but the mind recoils in horror at the thought of all of my books being dispersed and disposed of, whether in the thrift store or the scrap heap. Right now, they form a cohesive whole: a visible record of all the things that ever interested me. Later, they will be little more than pieces of junk, an inconvenient heap that some survivor has to deal with. Some of them may form pieces of another’s collection, but once my own life is over, so too the loose narrative and contextual bond that united them all will be dissolved. As a corpse decays and returns its fragments of materiality to the world, so does a personal library dissolve into its disparate parts which may have significance of their own but will never mean the same thing again.

Like all reflections on mortality, this will all seem either entirely trite and uninteresting unless you’re in one of those moods to wax maudlin about the terror of death. Ancient poets seemed happy  (or miserable) to harp on about it at length, so I have granted myself some space to do it here. Quod Homero mihi quoque licet. These last few days have convinced me that my entire course of classical reading over the past twenty years has really just been a search for stability in a world of Heraclitan flux. These dire intimations of mortality suggest that I was too busy thinking of books as objects to internalize their lessons. I had collected them for their material heft and apparent permanence, but the inscription ‘Galinsky – 1963’ reminded me that we are closer to 2063 than to 1963, and now these volumes are nothing but reminders of universal impermanence. To return to Larkin: “Get stewed – books are a load of crap.”