Our Ancient Wars: Rethinking War through the Classics

by Victor Caston, Silke-Maria Weineck

Many famous texts from classical antiquity—by historians like Thucydides, tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides, the comic poet Aristophanes, the philosopher Plato, and, above all, Homer—present powerful and profound accounts of wartime experience, both on and off the battlefield. These texts also provide useful ways of thinking about the complexities and consequences of wars throughout history, and the concept of war broadly construed, providing vital new perspectives on conflict in our own era.


Our Ancient Wars features essays by top scholars from across academic disciplines—classicists and historians, philosophers and political theorists, literary scholars, some with firsthand experience of war and some without—engaging with classical texts to understand how differently they were read in other times and places. Contributors articulate difficult but necessary questions about contemporary conceptions of war and conflict.


Contributors include Victor Caston, Page duBois, Susanne Gödde, Peter Meineck, Sara Monoson, David Potter, Kurt Raaflaub, Arlene Saxonhouse, Seth Schein, Nancy Sherman, Hans van Wees, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Paul Woodruff.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published February 5, 2016

Reviews

[Sveta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good insights, but also some forced and trivial connections ("Hey, Homer wrote about war and there was a war in Iraq, so let's examine the wars side by side!"). For some chapters, it isn't entirely clear why it's fruitful to consider specifically antiquity's condemnation or celebration of war rather than, say, Tolstoy's or Stendhal's or Thackeray's or Grossman's or Hemingway's or... you get the idea. Seth Schein's contribution is wonderful and provocative, as ever, and Susanne Godde's analysis of the various ways that Achilles' violence has been 'dealt with' is insightful and instructive, especially since it highlights how and why modernity can't seem to simply accept him as he is -- whatever that means ;)

[Rafael · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5