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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Greek and Roman writers on war and peace
Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness
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Philo
From The Confusion of Tongues
Translated by F.H. Colson and Rev. G.H. Whitaker
And therefore when I hear those who say “We are all sons of one man, we are peaceful,” I am filled with admiration for the harmonious concert which their words reveal. “Ah, my friends,” I would say “how should you not hate war and love peace – you who have enrolled yourselves as children of one and the same Father, who is not mortal but immortal – God’s Man, who being the Word of the Eternal must needs himself be imperishable?” Those whose system includes many origins for the family of the soul, who affiliate themselves to that evil thing called polytheism, who take in hand to render homage some to this deity, some to that, are the authors of tumult and strife at home and abroad, and fill the whole of life from birth to death with internecine wars.
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For who, when he sees that war, which amid the fullest peace is waged among all men continuously, phase ever succeeding phase, in private and public life, a war in which the combatants are not just nations and countries, or cities and villages, but also house against house and each particular man against himself, who, I say, does not exhort, reproach, admonish, correct by day and night alike, since his soul cannot rest, because his nature is to hate evil?
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