Abstract
Almost all Greek authors, from Homer to Plato and beyond, deal with war and its impact, some more intensely and directly than others, but war seems an ever-present reality.1 Homer’s Iliad is an epic about war and how it affects those who fight it. Tyrtaeus, the mid-seventh-century elegist, composed songs that became “hits,” celebrating the hero’s beautiful death and urging the Spartans to fight bravely to protect their families and community. The Athenian sage and lawgiver Solon recognizes in civil strife and war and the deaths of young men the inevitable consequence of elite abuse of power. The early philosopher Heraclitus sees in war one of the natural forces that produces contrast and never-ending transformation. In the early fifth century, Simonides was in high demand to write poems celebrating the achievements of the Persian War heroes. In Persians Aeschylus dramatized and mythologized a recent war, showing the loser’s misery and warning against overstepping god-set limits. Sophocles’ Ajax confronts us with a hero whose mind cracks under the intense emotional experience of war. Euripides’ Trojan War plays stage the human consequences of Athens’ power and war policies and the price even the victors have to pay for martial glory. Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ invention of large-scale prose history, stimulated by extraordinary wars, focuses on war as an agent that drives history and challenges humans to excel in great deeds.
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Raaflaub, K.A. (2014). War and the City: The Brutality of War and Its Impact on the Community. In: Meineck, P., Konstan, D. (eds) Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137398864_2
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