DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Our Ancient Wars

Rethinking War Through the Classics

Victor Caston author Silke-Maria Weineck author Victor Caston editor Silke-Maria Weineck editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Michigan Press

Published:31st Jan '16

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

Our Ancient Wars cover

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.

The chapters reflects an unusual degree of thoughtfulness as well as sound scholarship. The collection will appeal to a much broader group than the academic community. All the chapters are readable by an educated general public, and the topics covered are timely and provocative.” —Rosemary Moore, University of Iowa

ISBN: 9780472072989

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 628g

312 pages