War and Peace in the Iliad and the Aeneid

Abstract

This paper discusses on the conceptions of war in its relation to peace which appear in Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. In the Iliad, although war is represented above all as a situation where individual warriors strive to win their fame and glory, it is also perceived as a source of mental and physical sufferings for many people and as an inevitable hard condition of human existence which is determined by gods or fate and continues for ever. On the other hand, Homer inserts into his narrative various sights of the peaceful world by means of soldiers’ “obituaries” and the similes. Especially in the description of the shield of Achilles, he puts warfare in contrast to peaceful life and makes us see war in perspective. We can understand what the peaceful scenes depicted on this weapon mean, if we consider their context: the greatest hero who returns to battle with this divine shield will never fail to kill Hector and in consequence to bring destruction to Troy as well as an early death to himself. Thus the picture of the shield stands for what all the men concerned with war have to lose definitely. In such a tragic poem as the Iliad, there is a distinct, insuperable gap between war and peace. The Aeneid is another tragic epic as many readers appreciate today, though it shows a different view of war and peace. In the first half of the poem, Aeneas is often described as wavering between these two opposite modes of human life. Being no longer confident of the traditional value of heroism after his experience of the destructive and mad force of war on the last night of Troy, he is inclined to find a peaceful life during his wanderings (at several places like Crete, Carthage and Sicily), but it always proves to be an illusion. The predictions are also ambiguous about the future, announcing war as well as peace in Italy. But when he has heard Sibyl’s oracle of the impending battles in Latium and has listened in the underworld to his father’ s prophetic instructions on the Roman mission, Aeneas acquires a new idea of the war which is neither incompatible with peace nor excludes it but should serve to bring about and establish it in the world. He never knows how he can carry such an idea into practice and we see many difficult problems in the course of terrible war narrated in the second half of the poem. But in the last book, Virgil makes us witness the first step taken in battlefield towards peace: Aeneas and Latinus swear the oaths to end the war without making the conqueror nor the conquered. Although the duel between Aeneas and Turnus comes to a tragic ending, a definite step to peacemaking policy of war is marked nevertheless. This is the last message of Virgil, which he leaves for future generations of mankind, inviting them to ask in their still disturbed history on earth: what is war for, if not for peace?