War
In the following works one can see a progression: the earliest works often ask how to fight, why to fight, and what makes a great warrior; later works increasingly ask what war does to people who fight it and wether its political objectives can justify its human cost.
But the progression isn’t simply from “pro-war” to “anti-war”. Homer already sees the terrible suffering beneath glory; Euripides gives civilians a voice in 415 BCE; the Bhagavad Gita wrestles with the morality of killing more than two millennia ago; and modern writers still recognize courage, loyalty, duty, and sacrifice.
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Ancient Foundations
Homer
c. 750 BCE, Greece
War offers glory and honor, but Homer continually places that glory beside grief, rage, mutilation, and death. Achilles ultimately discovers a shared humanity with his enemy Priam, suggesting that compassion can survive even amid seemingly limitless violence.
traditionally attributed to Vyasa
c. 400 BCE – 200 CE, India
Arjuna’s horror at fighting relatives and teachers turns war into a profound moral problem: can killing ever be one’s duty? Krishna teaches him to fulfill his dharma without hatred, selfish desire, or attachment to the outcome.
Sun Tzu
c. 5th century BCE, China
The highest form of warfare is not heroic combat but achieving political objectives with minimal fighting and destruction. Intelligence, preparation, deception, adaptability, and understanding both yourself and your enemy matter more than brute strength.
Herodotus
c. 440 BCE, Greece
The Persian Wars demonstrate how ambition, imperial expansion, fear, revenge, and hubris can propel societies into enormous conflicts. Herodotus repeatedly contrasts overwhelming material power with judgment, freedom, courage, and the unpredictability of fortune.
Thucydides
c.400 BCE, Greece
War emerges from the interaction of fear, interest, and power, most famously Athens’ rise and Sparta’s fear of it. War also corrodes moral and political restraints: prolonged conflict transforms language, institutions, leadership, and ultimately the societies fighting it.
Euripides
415 BCE, Greece
Euripides looks at war from the perspective of its defeated civilians rather than its victorious warriors. Victory becomes morally ambiguous when we see enslavement, murdered children, destroyed families, and the suffering inflicted on people who did not choose the war.
Virgil
29-19 BCE, Rome
War can establish political order and historical greatness, but Virgil refuses to hide its human cost. Aeneas’s mission requires duty and sacrifice, yet the poem’s violent ending leaves us asking whether even a supposedly destined victory can remain morally pure.
Rome, China and the medieval world
Records of the Grand Historian
Sima Qian
c. 91 BCE, China
Wars and empires rise and fall through an intricate mixture of leadership, character, strategy, political legitimacy, and circumstance. Military success alone cannot guarantee lasting rule; commanders and rulers are ultimately judged by what they do with power.
Josephus
c.75 CE, Roman/Jewish world
The Jewish revolt against Rome illustrates the catastrophic consequences of fanaticism, factionalism, political miscalculation, and overwhelming imperial power. Civil conflict within a society can become almost as destructive as the external enemy.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Luo Guanshong
14th century, China
War is a contest not merely of armies but of intelligence, alliances, loyalty, deception, patience, and political legitimacy. Even brilliant victories are temporary because power constantly shifts and no strategist can permanently master history.
possibly by a poet named Turoldus
c. 1100, France
The poem presents the heroic ideal of the warrior—courage, loyalty, faith, honor, and willingness to die for one’s lord and comrades. Yet Roland’s refusal to summon help also reveals the dangerous boundary between heroic courage and destructive pride.
Anna Komnene
c. 1148, Byzantine Empire
War is inseparable from diplomacy, political survival, alliances, deception, personality, and imperial administration. Successful rulers must be strategists off the battlefield as much as commanders on it.
13th century, Japan
Samurai glory exists under the shadow of impermanence: victorious families fall, warriors die, and political greatness disappears. War therefore becomes a Buddhist meditation on ambition, attachment, loss, and the transience of worldly power.
War, statecraft and political power
Niccolo Machiavelli
1532, Italy
A ruler who cannot defend his state cannot preserve either political order or independence, making military competence fundamental to political leadership. Machiavelli therefore treats war realistically rather than sentimentally: leaders must understand force, preparation, necessity, and the dangers of depending upon others for defense.
William Shakespeare
c. 1599, England
Shakespeare shows the extraordinary power of leadership, rhetoric, patriotism, and shared identity to motivate people in war. But beneath the heroic victory at Agincourt lie uncomfortable questions about political justification, civilian suffering, responsibility, and the stories rulers tell to make wars legitimate.
Miguel de Cervantes
1605/1615, Spain
Cervantes dismantles romantic fantasies about martial glory by placing obsolete ideals of chivalric heroism against ordinary reality. The book reminds us how societies can transform violence into attractive stories of honor that bear little resemblance to actual suffering.
Carl von Clausewitz
1832, Prussia
War is an instrument of politics, not an autonomous activity, and military objectives must therefore remain connected to political purposes. Real war is shaped by uncertainty, chance, emotion, friction, and the interaction of opposing wills, making simplistic plans dangerous.
Revolution, civil war and total war
Leo Tolstoy
1869, Russia
History cannot be adequately explained by supposedly great commanders controlling events from above; war emerges from countless individual decisions, accidents, social forces, and circumstances. Tolstoy strips military glory of much of its romance and emphasizes confusion, suffering, contingency, and ordinary human experience.
Stephen Crane
1895, United States
War tests the psychological reality of courage rather than the romantic ideal of it. Fear, shame, imagination, confusion, and the desire for recognition can be as important to the individual soldier as patriotism or strategy.
Jaroslav Hasek
1921-23, Czechoslovakia
War appears not as heroic destiny but as an enormous machine of bureaucracy, stupidity, arbitrary authority, and absurdity. Satire becomes a powerful argument against institutions that turn ordinary people into instruments of purposes they barely understand.
All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)
Erich Maria Remarque
1929, Germany
Modern industrial warfare destroys not only bodies but the emotional and cultural world of the young people sent to fight it. The soldiers on opposite sides often have more in common with each other than with the governments and ideologies that sent them into battle.
Ernest Hemingway
1929, United States/Italy
Grand abstractions such as glory and honor become increasingly hollow when confronted with the randomness, bureaucracy, fear, and physical destruction of actual warfare. The individual seeks private meaning and love in a world whose larger political narratives have become difficult to believe.
George Orwell
1938, Spain
War is fought not only with weapons but through ideology, propaganda, factionalism, and control over truth. Orwell’s Spanish Civil War experience taught him that even people ostensibly fighting on the same side can become enemies when political movements place ideological power above reality.
Ernest Hemmingway
1940, Spain
A just cause does not remove war’s moral ambiguity: individuals may still be required to kill, sacrifice themselves, and participate in brutal acts. Hemingway nevertheless finds meaning in solidarity—the recognition that one person’s fate is connected to that of the larger human community.
World War II, genocide and the nuclear age
If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
1947, Italy
War and totalitarianism can create systems deliberately designed to strip human beings of identity, dignity, morality, and solidarity. Levi nevertheless shows that tiny acts of generosity and human recognition can become forms of resistance when civilization itself has collapsed.
John Hersey
1946, United States
By describing the atomic bombing through the experiences of six survivors, Hersey converts an abstract strategic decision into individual human consequences. Modern technology has made it possible for military decisions taken far from a battlefield to destroy an entire civilian world almost instantaneously.
Kurt Vonnegut
1969, United States/Germany
The destruction of Dresden becomes an argument against attempts to impose heroic narrative and rational order on mass killing. War is absurd, traumatic, repetitive, and extraordinarily difficult for survivors to fit into a coherent story.
Tim O’Brien
1990, United States/Vietnam
Soldiers carry psychological burdens—fear, guilt, love, memory, shame, grief—as surely as they carry weapons and equipment. O’Brien also asks whether literal factual accuracy is sufficient to communicate war, suggesting that storytelling may sometimes reveal emotional truths that conventional history cannot.