War in literature - Part 1 of 2

A literary exploration into the tragedy of war and the horror that dwells in human hearts since way before the 7th century.

Mt. Olympus, Greece

---

Since I’m traveling a little this fall, I’ve planned a mini-series for supporters. Free subscribers will continue receiving post previews. Paid subscribers will receive the full articles and (re)sources. Thank you for supporting this work!

If you’re interested in how literature has always tried to understand war, consider becoming a supporter. This 2-part mini-series will run in the next couple of weeks.

---

I always looked forward to my Greek classes. Gods and goddesses fascinated me. The gods lived their lives with a similar rhythm to mortals. They obeyed rules, lived with customs and gathered from time to time in Zeus’ palace for small conferences. 

Mount Olympus was the brightest and most worshiped mountain of Greece.

The ancient Greeks put parts of their nature in the Olympus so they could talk to them and understand the self.

Twelve Olympians represented different aspects of human nature. Ares was the god of war, violence, and bloodshed. All the other gods despised the son of Zeus and Hera, except Aphrodite.

But there was also a goddess of war. Athena was the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and handicraft. The daughter of Zeus and the Oceanid Metis rose from her father’s head fully grown and in full battle armor.

Ares and Athena therefore represented different aspects of humankind at war. In a splendid gesture of cultural graph, the Romans adopted all the Greek gods, but renamed them. Meet Mars and Minerva—we went from the As to the Ms.

Zeus and the other Olympians took over after a ten-year battle with their predecessors, the Titans¹, who included the first twelve children of Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky.)

I’m sure we could go ever further back than the ancient Greeks to talk about war. But for the sake of keeping this series manageable, we’ll start somewhere more recent. And I’ll do it with the help of Nicola Lagioia.²

His podcast, can literature help us understand war? was the spark that ignited this series. He, in turn, relies on the words of great authors.

The end of history

“War is a place where young people who don’t know and don’t hate each other kill each other because of the decisions of old people who know and hate each other but don’t kill each other.”

Paul Valéry³

The phrase has circulated a lot online in recent weeks. We believed we could live in a world without wars. But never more than in these years and days are we forced to recognize that it was an illusion even for the twentieth century.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now the Middle East. But before that there were many other conflicts that we didn’t want to see, or we forgot about. One above all sticks in my memory, the civil war in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the nineties.

It’s not a coincidence that I immediately take into consideration that war, which now seems so distant to us, because it ended at the end of the twentieth century.

After 1989, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the world divided into two blocs, there were those who spoke of the end of history.

In the sense of the end of history based on conflicts, war, violence.

Some bring up various astrological categories. We’re about to enter the age of Aquarius, they said. An era of peace, harmony, universal hospitality. I don’t know if anyone remembers this nonsense.

The facts have destroyed these illusions. So much so that today we talk about the end of history, but in an apocalyptic sense. They had believed they could all too easily overturn Von Clausewitz famous adage according to which war was the continuation of politics by other means.

We believed that politics and diplomacy could become the continuation of the war with other means and even with other ends. But all this didn’t happen.

Before the region, or state, people, culture, or civilization, what is then in the depths of our heart, our mind, our spirit? Why is the possibility of emancipating ourselves from the horror of war completely sabotaged within us?

I believe that literature and narrative arts in general can make us observe this phenomenon from another point of view.

Do you know how European literature begins?

With a fight.⁴ The entire history of European literature begins with an argument. It begins with the clash between Agamemnon, the king of men, and Achilles. Two irascible and powerful spirits.