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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Greek and Roman writers on war and peace
Philo: “Ah, my friends, how should you not hate war and love peace?”
Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness
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Philo
From Who is the Heir of Divine Things
Translated by F.H. Colson and Rev. G.H. Whitaker
Inequality is the mother of the twins, foreign war and civil war, just as its opposite, equality is the mother of peace.
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“…I am the harbinger of peace to creation from that God whose will is to bring wars to an end, who is ever the guardian of peace.”
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“[T]hou shall depart to thy fathers nourished with peace, in a goodly old age.” So then we who are imperfect are victims both of war and slavery, and hard-won is our release from the terrors which menace us. But the perfect are a race subject neither to war nor slavery, but nourished in peace and freedom sure and secure.
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The words “nourished with peace” are not a pointless addition, but mean that the greater part of the human race are with little exception “nourished” for war and all its attendant evils. Now war sometimes arises from things outside us, waged against us by ill-repute and poverty and mean birth and the like. Sometimes it arises from intestine enemies…
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