The Functions of War Literature

Of arms and the man I sing. From the days of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrew chroniclers, epic poetry, drama, and historical accounts have repeatedly been inspired by, and often centered around, war, which Heraclitus called father of all, and king of all.1 The role played by the Trojan War in the whole of ancient Western literature is so central that it can be considered the single most important topic of the body of literature inherited from early Western civilization. Similarly, in the large body of early European literature constituted by medieval sagas and epics, war is the central, indeed sometimes the only, theme; and although there were ancient influences, illustrated for instance in the French Roman d'Alexandre (twelfth century), most of this corpus, whether in the Germanic or the Romance languages, represents an autochthonous phenomenon. To note a similar association between much of the oral tradition of non-Western