“History is written by the victors” is a saying so commonplace that it has become almost a platitude. It seems as though everyone has simply come to accept it and believe it. The problem is that it is not actually always true. Strictly speaking, history is not, in fact, written by the victors. History is written by the people who write history. These people are often the victors, but not always and not necessarily. There are examples throughout history of history being written by the people who lost. In this post, we will explore just a few of the occasions when the victors did not write history.
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War was a war fought in several stages from 431 BC until 404 BC between the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. Sparta unquestionably defeated Athens in late summer of 405 BC with the Battle of Aigospotamoi, in which the Spartans utterly destroyed the Athenian navy, except for twelve ships, most of which fled to Kypros. Without their navy, Athens could no longer import grain, meaning the city would either starve to death or give in to the Spartans.
The Spartan victory was so complete that they could have razed Athens to the ground if they had wanted, slaughtered every last remaining Athenian man, and sold every last woman and child into slavery. That would have been the end of Athens forever. Sparta’s allies Corinth and Thebes were both strongly in favor of this. The Spartans, however, remembering how the Athenians had defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC when few other Greek city-states were willing to take a stand against them, decided to show mercy on the Athenians who remained.
Instead of destroying the city and its inhabitants, the Spartans imposed harsh penalties on Athens. They forced the Athenians to tear down the Long Walls between the city proper and its port of Peiraieus, to abandon all their overseas territories, and to promise that they would never attempt to rebuilt their navy. In addition to all these penalties, the Spartans stripped Athens of its democratic constitution and instead imposed a pro-Sparta oligarchic junta of thirty aristocrats known as the “Thirty Tyrants,” which ruled Athens for eight months from 404 BC to 403 BC.
During their brief, but bloody reign, the Thirty Tyrants brutally executed anyone whom they suspected of not giving their regime their fullest support. By the time the oligarchy was overthrown and democracy was restored, the Thirty Tyrants had executed roughly one twentieth of the total remaining population of Athens. Athens was left devastated, massively depopulated, and stripped of all its former power, but the city remained standing.
Yet, contrary to the popular saying that “History is written by the victors,” virtually all of our knowledge about the war comes from Athenian writers. In fact, there are absolutely no surviving historical works written by Spartans, but a whole ton of them written by Athenians. The reason for this is because the Spartans were primarily focused on the military and were not as inclined towards writing history as their Athenian adversaries.
The main historical account recording the events of the Peloponnesian War is Histories of the Peloponnesian War, written by the Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BC). Another major source, covering the last seven years of the Peloponnesian War as well as the war’s aftermath, is the Hellenika, written by the Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC).
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaster cast of a Roman-era copy of an early fourth-century BC Greek bust of the historian Thoukydides
The Babylonian Captivity
Another example of history being written by the losers is the case of Babylon and Judah. In 587 or 586 BC, the Babylonians under King
Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, while the city held out, the Babylonians sacked and burned all the other major cities throughout Judah. The last two cities remaining outside Jerusalem were Lachish and Azekah. Finally, even these cities were destroyed, first Azekah then Lachish, as an inscription on a potsherd found in the ruins of Lachish reveals.
King Zedekiah, the last king of the independent kingdom of Judah, attempted to flee the city with his guards and generals by night, but was captured by the Babylonians on the fields of Jericho. He was taken before
Nebuchadnezzar II himself. Under Nebuchadnezzar II’s own orders, Zedekiah was forced to watch as his own sons were killed right in front of him. Then, the Babylonians gouged out both his eyes, so that his sons’ deaths would be the last thing he would ever see, and took him into captivity.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1866 by the French illustrator Gustave Doré showing the Babylonians slaughtering the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes
About a month later, the city of Jerusalem itself finally fell. The Babylonians under their commander Nebuzaradan sacked the city and burned it to the ground. They burned the Temple of Yahweh, plundered the city of its wealth, and took all the prominent inhabitants into captivity. Archaeological findings have confirmed the horror of Jerusalem’s final hours, with signs of the conflagration everywhere throughout the excavated portions of the city dating to this time period and Babylonian-style arrowheads littered around the houses.
The sense of hopelessness of the Judahite exiles is perhaps best captured by the words of Psalm 137:
“By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:1-9; NRSV)
ABOVE: Jeremiah Sitting on the Ruins of Jerusalem, painted in 1844 by the French Orientalist painter Horace Vernet
Yet, because the Jewish accounts of the exile later became incorporated into the Hebrew Bible and thus the Christian Old Testament, the best known accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity are from the Hebrew Bible and were written by Judahites.
We do have a singular Babylonian account of the first Babylonian Siege of Jerusalem from 597 BC in the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle, an account of the first eleven years of Nebuchadnezzar II’s reign, which refers to Jerusalem as the “city of Judah.” This account is not as well known as the Biblical one, though. Here it is for those who are curious:
In the seventh year [598/597], the month of Kislîmu, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-lan, and besieged the city of Judah and on the second day of the month of Addaru he seized the city and captured the king [i.e. Jeconiah]. He appointed there a king of his own choice [i.e. Zedekiah], received its heavy tribute and sent to Babylon.
There is no known Babylonian account of the second Babylonian Siege of Jerusalem from ten years later in 587 or 586 BC, the one which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem.
The Pilgrims
Often the version of the story that became the best-known is less a result of one side being the “victor” per se and more a result of mere random historical coincidence. For instance, everyone in the United States knows the story of the Pilgrims coming over to America and the so-called “first Thanksgiving,” but the Pilgrims were not the first English settlers to come over to North America. They were not even the first ones to found a permanent English colony; the first permanent English colony in the Americas was Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, thirteen years before the Pilgrims set foot in Massachusetts.
Why do we know the Pilgrims better than the founders of Jamestown? It was not because Massachusetts and Virginia went to war with each other and Massachusetts won, but simply because, by pure coincidence, the majority of writers of history in the United States in the early nineteenth century happened to be New Englanders, who gave their own history disproportionate prominence in their accounts.
ABOVE: The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, painted in 1914 by the American painter Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, depicting the artist’s imagining of what the First Thanksgiving might have looked like
Good examples! As you say, history is written by the literate, so even when they are are defeated, they’ll still be the ones to write the account. Perhaps we can take a longer view of who the “winners” are, though. That is, it’s not just the people who won a particular war, but the people who survive, in fact or in memory, until what they have written becomes the established story. (“People” here meaning not individuals, but races or nations.)
Thus, the Athenians have become the people most moderns think of as “the Ancient Greeks,” with the Spartans largely a curiosity or a source of clever remarks about fighting in the shade. Babylon is no more, and the Babylonians, if there is any such people, are now something else – Iraqis, maybe? – while the Jews are still a people. So in a sense, the authors of these accounts are the winners!
I suppose you could say that the Athenians and the Jews were the ideological winners. Certainly, the Jewish people out-survived the Babylonians. With Athens and Sparta, though, it is harder to say that. Athens was defeated by Philippos II of Macedonia in 338 BC in the Battle of Chaironeia and subjugated by the Macedonians; whereas Sparta managed to maintain at least nominal independence for much longer. Athens and Sparta both remained significant cities until the Byzantine period. Ultimately, though, by the late Ottoman period, both cities were nothing more than obscure cow-towns in the middle of nowhere. The only reason Athens is the bustling metropolis it is today is because, after the Greek War of Independence (1821 – 1829), the new Greek government chose Athens as the site on which to build their capital. Sparta still exists, but it is only a small town.
We don’t need look further than the american civil war to see how losers are trying to write the history:
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