Like other literary genres in fifth-century Athens, such as tragedy and oratory, ancient historiography responded to the continuous wars of the Greek city-states with an intense literary effort, producing the first prose descriptions of warfare in the western hemisphere. This chapter examines the representation of warfare in fifth-century Athenian literature against an historical background, taking account of Homeric epic as well as of political and normative contexts, in order to clarify textual priorities and narrative strategies. It begins by analyzing representations of extreme conditions: death in battle, often cast as the ultimate test of manhood, and military defeat. It then backs up to look at representations of the course of warfare, analyzing the role of victorious leadership, intelligence, and courage together with the accompanying descriptions of bodily suffering and human error. Finally, the chapter examines representations of the human causes of war: greed, retaliation for insult, and the desire for power, profit, and rule over others. As a short coda, it reflects on the popularity of war as a literary theme, noting the emergence of war fiction with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.

War and language have a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, wars are carried on and remembered through a proliferation of linguistic discourse. On the other, language is often a site of violent action and the battlefield of fierce struggles for power. This chapter explores the symbiosis between war and language at two different levels. First, it delves into the language of war as explored by modern and contemporary writers and thinkers. Second, it analyzes the language on war by suggesting the most common family resemblances of war writing (e.g., the preponderance of the adynaton, the absurd, the sublime, metaliterature and self-referentiality, the embedding of reflections on war, the presence of an authorial ethical stand, the importance of the senses, factuality), as well as by studying three of its main parameters. At the end, the chapter argues that the writing on war openly addresses epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues that most, if not all, literary writing has to face sooner or later, and it concludes that since it self-consciously brings out essential aspects of any literary artifact, war writing constitutes an apotheosis of literature itself.

This chapter examines the role that stories and narratives can play in the development of climate litigation strategies. Part I covers an introduction to thinking on narratives, the way they work to support or challenge the status quo, and some helpful definitions. Part II looks at some examples of successful reframings of narratives in campaigns. Part III draws on the existing literature on narratives in climate litigation to highlight some dominant narratives that are problematic and some new narratives that are being deployed. This chapter concludes with a suggested checklist for considering narratives in climate litigation strategies and case work and pointers to additional resources and networks.