War

The Iliad is not about the Trojan War but about a few weeks of it, and not about victory but about what it is like to be a man who will die in it. That is the shelf’s founding choice: the great books on war are almost never on the side of the war. Thucydides, a general, writes the history of his own defeat and lets the speeches condemn both sides. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon opens with the victor coming home and closes with him murdered in his bath. Virgil, commissioned to celebrate an empire, ends the Aeneid with his hero killing a man who is begging for mercy, and stops.

Herodotus is the exception, a history of a war that was worth fighting, and even he spends more time on why the Persians lost than on why the Greeks deserved to win. Machiavelli and Hobbes treat war as the normal condition to be managed. Tolstoy wrote the longest novel on the shelf to argue that nobody controls it, least of all the generals. Clausewitz wrote the treatise that tried to prove they could.

Students meet the theme in the first month, through Homer, and most programs return to it in the last year through Tolstoy. Read the Iliad before anything else on this shelf, since everything else is answering it.