Victor Davis Hanson was a Manichaean

Victor Davis Hanson can be a scholar when he wants to be, although since 2004 that has just been a hobby while he focused on punditry. Many people who have read his books and articles on antiquity are confused at the positions he takes, where Spartans can be admirable defenders of Freedom in the pass at Thermopylae, but despicable slave-holders at Leuctra (and there were helots at Thermopylae, and Hanson was not one of the radicals who teach that the Sparta we think we know emerged after the death of Leonidas). I know a bit about ancient Persian religion so this was always easy for me to understand. This week I have written up the way I explain it when it comes up in conversation ever since a much younger self was reading one of his trade books at the Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch.

Hanson divided the world into good guys and bad guys, and the first thing he asked himself when faced with a situation was “which side is my side?” Americans were good, so Confederates, Nazis, and Imperial Japanese were bad (he did not seem as angry about the British Empire despite the Revolution, maybe because his ancestors came over afterwards- his paternal line was Swedish and arrived in California in the 19th century). Greeks were good, so barbarians were bad. Democracies were good, so kings were bad. Small farms were good, so big estates were bad. Westerners were good, so easterners were bad. These positions are not derived from any logical or moral principle, although he certainly has the brainpower to straighten things out if he wanted to. He knows in his heart that his parents’ generation were good, and their enemies were despicable, just like he knows in his heart that what let his great-great-grandfather take a farm in the San Joaquin Valley can’t have been as bad as the textbooks make it sound.

Hanson can’t bear the Greeks after Alexander or the Romans after Augustus because they were under the thumb of kings and emperors. He has trouble liking the Homeric or Mycenaean Greeks either (would he have agreed with Moses Finley that the Myceneans were no true Greeks?) But something in Hesiod’s Works and Days spoke to his memories of growing up on grandpa’s grape farm with day labourers bustling back and forth and pans of grapes drying in the sun.

I think this explains why he threw in with Bush II. He knew very well that neither major party in the USA was interested in breaking up the agrocorps and helping small towns. He could presumably see that the Imperial Presidency was leading towards someone like Lucius Cornelius Sulla. And he was against preemptive war when Bill Clinton was for it. But Bush was the man who gave speeches about how you are with us or with the terrorists, and since al-Quaeda had attacked the United States, they must be bad. That called to Victor Davis Hanson’s heart. And so he retired from teaching and local politics to become a national pundit, and fell into worse and worse company, and wrote things that I will not write about here.

This binary worldview also explains why he had trouble taking a consistent stance against slavery or imperialism, even though he could write passionately about these evils when they are practised by his bad guys. If he had adopted a general principle that enslaving people or conquering them is bad, then his history would have been very dark with a few bright sparks such as Benjamin Lay or Martin Luther King. And he was very determined that there were people who deserved unqualified adoration, and that these were the people he had admired as a child and a young man.

In the history of religion we call this worldview Manichaeism after the prophet Mani of Ctestiphon in Mesopotamia. Older scholarship often blamed the Achaemenids for spreading Zoroastrianism to the Judeans and teaching them about cosmic good and evil, but the everyday religion of Achaemenid Persia was not the same as our Zoroastrianism, and the Neo-Assyrians already present their enemies as wicked and driven by cosmic disorder. Humans are prone to binary and black-and-white thinking but Mani built a whole religion around it. (It helps that until recently the best-known accounts of Manichaean teachings were by Neo-Platonist philosophers and theologians who presented the religion as abstract and philosophical; Mani wrote many books but after his last followers died nobody preserved them and the scraps and translations were available only to dedicated scholars).

If you are an academic, this is distressing, because academics are trained to be logical and consistent, and most of us at least try to sort out the biggest inconsistencies in our thinking. But Hanson never wanted to be an academic, he wanted to be a small farmer who gave talks on the Spartans for the local Rotary Club and ancient Greek agriculture for the 4H. He only became a professor because he could not make a living growing commodity crops on his farm, and did not want to go to a big city, talk to some fancy restaurants, and plant some heirloom vegetables and specialty wine grapes for exclusive customers. He wrote just enough for academics to keep that job and aimed the rest of his writing at the public.¹ The parts of being an academic which he enjoyed were writing and speaking for large audiences, not eating hors d’ouevres in a suit at a conference buffet or correcting two words of an inscription last edited in 1932. He could have been an excellent research academic if he had wanted to, but he did not want to. If he had kept his academic-debate muscles in shape, he could probably have quoted David Hume on how reason is a slave to the passions and must not pretend to be their master.

Ten years ago I wrote a whole academic paper about how Hanson’s writing in the 1980s and 1990s shaped the study of Greek warfare (“War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations” available here). If you love that writing but try to forget his rants about decadent lefty academics or western and eastern ways of war and have not read his political commentary, remember that when he had a choice he wrote and spoke for the public not scholars. Academic classicists loved his research more than he loved theirs. It was scholars outside of civilian academic classics like Rose Mary Sheldon and John Lynn who addressed the big problems with his argument and wrote in places that people outside universities read.

I have written this essay in the perfect tense because Hanson stopped writing for ancient world scholars in 2013 (arguably 2000) and I don’t have the time or the stomach to make my way through his writing for the far right since then. Even his admirers thought that after he became a pundit he wrote far too fast, supported too many contradictory ideas, and did not stop and ask enough questions before clicking “send.” The Internet has an infinity of grumbles and jeremiads about US and California politics and that is not what people visit Bookandswordblog to read. But even though much of his writing is not logical or honest, some things about Victor Davis Hanson were very public and open.

Hanson was a real conservative in an age when most so-called conservatives are revolutionaries much like the old communists. He really did seem to believe that California in the 1940s and 1950s was close to the best of all possible worlds, and that since then everything was in irreversible decline. He sincerely wanted to stand in the path of history and cry “stop!” where most conservatives just use the past to decorate their plans to remake the world, or openly reject the past and embrace the creative destruction of markets. His ancient world was selective and personal and creative (as mine is too) but it was based on the past and not the present.

Hanson was not publicly or enthusiastically religious back when he wrote things I read, even though that was very fashionable at the court he followed. He found a few nice things to say about Jesus and the New Testament but his love was clearly for Archaic and Classical Greece and he despised the Roman empire. But his worldview, like the worldviews of so many secular Americans, was deeply religious. He saw history as a series of binary conflicts between us and them. That lead him to make the tragic error of turning from the path of a popularizing academic to the path of a hard-right commentator, and allying first with people who were bad, then people who are worse. His story is sad, but it is very human, driven by human contradictions and human refusal to sort them out. I hope that one day he can drift into retirement under his own vine and his own almond tree.

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Further Reading

Encyclopedia Iranica “MANICHEISM” https://iranicaonline.org/articles/manicheism-parent

Frederick Mario Fales, “The Enemy in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions: ‘The Moral Judgement’,” in H. Kühne, H.J. Nissen, and J. Renger (eds.), Mesopotamien und seine Nachbarn. Politische und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im Alten Vorderasien vom 4. bis 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (XXV Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale) (Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient), Bd. II, Berlin, pp. 425‒435

Roel Konijnendijk, “The Spartans at war: Myth vs reality,” Ancient World Magazine, 20 March 2019 https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/spartans-war-myth-vs-reality/ talks about how Xenophon’s Sparta may have been created after the Persian Wars as the Spartiates reinvented themselves as warriors first and foremost and neglected the other things a slaveowning Greek could do with his time

(scheduled 20 February 2025, last updated 6 April)

Edit 2025-04-20: s/San Fernando/San Joaquin; added link to Roel Konijendijk on the Spartan Mirage and Fales on Assyrian moralism

1. Edit 2025-07-08: From memory, VDH has four traditional academic publications after 1992: a revised edition of Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1998), a literature review on ancient Greek warfare in the Journal of Military History (1999), a chapter in Hans van Wees, ed., War and Violence in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth & the Classical Press of Wales, 2000), and a chapter in the conference proceedings Men of Bronze (2013). Some of his trade books from the 1990s are cited by ancient historians and classicists, but not his later writings. A convenient dividing line is Carnage and Culture (2001) which was not reviewed by ancient world scholars like his earlier trade books; in the afterward to the second edition he boasted that scholars had suggested corrections in private and he had ignored them, but people who follow his later work say that he stopped talking about a Western Way of War. ↩︎