Athens is burning. Not literally, but the flames licking the suburbs of the capital might as well be torching the Parthenon for all the symbolic weight they carry. A wildfire, driven by gale-force winds and a summer that feels like a premonition of the apocalypse, is tearing through the Greek countryside. Firefighters are overwhelmed. Evacuations are chaotic. The death toll, mercifully still low, will almost certainly rise. And what do we do? We wring our hands. We offer thoughts and prayers. We gesture vaguely at climate change. But we refuse to see this for what it is: the collapse of a civilisation’s ability to manage its own environment.
I am reminded of the Fall of Rome. Not the dramatic sack of the city by Alaric, but the slow decay of provincial governance. In the later Empire, bureaucratic incompetence and a culture of entitlement meant that public works – aqueducts, roads, fire brigades – fell into disrepair. When the barbarians came, they did not need to break down the gates; the gates were already rusting on their hinges. Today’s Greece is a ghost of that empire. Its economy is a ward of Brussels. Its political class is a revolving door of mediocrities. And now its forests are tinderboxes because nobody thought to invest in fire prevention, land management, or a robust civil defence.
The blame game has already started. Some point to arsonists, the usual scapegoats for a systemic failure. Others blame austerity, which has gutted public services since 2010. Both arguments have merit, but they miss the deeper rot: a society that has lost its sense of collective responsibility. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where every problem is outsourced to experts, algorithms, or international summits. No one mends their own fence anymore. No one clears the brush from their own property. We wait for the state to save us, and when the state fails, we blame the state. But the state is us. Or it was. Now it is a faceless bureaucracy, a machine that dispenses benefits and levies taxes but cannot muster the will to dig a firebreak.
The Victorian era, for all its hypocrisies, understood something we have forgotten: the importance of duty. The British Empire built its railways, its sewers, its police forces not out of altruism but out of a grim conviction that order must be maintained. The Victorians would have looked at a wildfire and said, “Right, we need a volunteer fire brigade, a system of fines for negligent landowners, and perhaps a colonial office to coordinate relief.” Today, we have meetings. We have hashtags. We have an EU solidarity fund. What we lack is the moral fibre to say, “This is our problem. We must fix it ourselves.”
Greece’s wildfire is not a natural disaster. It is a cultural one. It is the predictable consequence of a society that has commodified leisure, fetishised victimhood, and outsourced resilience to a phantom called “Europe.” When Rome fell, the barbarians were a symptom, not a cause. The cause was a people who had forgotten how to be citizens. We are that people. The fires of 2024 are not an anomaly. They are a rehearsal. The next one will be worse. And the one after that will be worse still. Until we stop blaming the wind, the arsonists, and the government, and start asking what we have become, the flames will keep coming.
So look at the smoke rising from Attica. Smell the ash. And ask yourself: are we going to rebuild, or are we going to let it burn? The answer, I fear, is written in the embers.
