WAR AND PEACE IN THE REPUBLIC OF LITERATURE
WAR AND PEACE IN THE REPUBLIC OF LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the representation in European literature of the ‘two poles of the human condition - war and peace, the destructive and the creative’ - to use the formulations of Bernard Knox, the American Classicist, Homer’s and Virgil’s translator, writing about the “Iliad”. It will dwell mostly on classical examples of representation of war and peace in Greek and Latin literature, the shield of Achilles in Homer’s “Iliad”, and the shield of Aeneas in Virgil’s “Aeneid”. The paper will also look cursorily at the treatment of war and peace – or indeed of states hovering between the two cycles of life – in representative works of English, Italian and Russian literature, namely the English epic poem “Beowulf”, Petrarch’s sonnet 134 (‘Pace non trovo, et non o da fa guerra’), Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”, and Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace”. This paper has examined modes of representation of war and peace in seminal Classical Greek and Roman narrative poems (the Iliad and Aeneid) as well as a range of major European literary works.

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