Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, the historian Edward Gibbon wrote every age. However, destitutes of science or virtue

sufficiently abound with acts of blood and military renown

War it seems as one of mankind's most constant companions one that has blighted the lives and troubled the minds of men and women from antiquity onwards

Plato and vision society without war but find it had no arts, no culture and no political system

War was often thought as desirable. It's peace, which is now desirable

But how has war been understood through the ages? Who's it served and how's it been justified?

Is war in here into human beings or could society be organized to the exclusion of all conflict with me to discuss the thought and history of war?

As a Michael Howard emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Oxford and

Angie Hobbs lecturing philosophy at the University of Warwick and Jeremy Black professor of history at the University of Exeter

Angie Hobbs war featured greatly in Greek I think in a sense the foundation of our literature is a great war book in the ad

Can you just say what Homer said in 800 BC about war in that book?

Yes

Right from the very beginning we're presented with a very complex picture of war on the one hand war seems to be accepted

Not simply as an inevitable facet of human experience

But also is the ideal training ground display case and test for heroic courage the the supreme

Greek warrior Achilles makes it explicit that his brand of heroism requires a battlefield and

Battlefields of course are also where the hero

Wins the glory that is to be his compensation for risking his life or even sacrificing his life

The danger of this approach of course is that it could lead some people not Homer I think but some of his readers

to

...