What is the meaning of war? This may seem a peculiar question, for war is always terrible: It always mean the death of young people at the order of their elders in the name of one ideal or another. But therein lies all the difference: The ideals that push one society to war would be dismissed by another. What constitutes self-defense by one group would be seen as blatant aggression by another. These differences in what constitutes what the early Christian church called a just war are important to remember even as our own country is at war, for the rhetoric of leaders during wartime is always that the war is just and inevitable. But by putting that rhetoric within the context of what other societies and other historical eras have considered to be the appropriate response to danger and aggression we can better judge whether the responses of our own nation are appropriate against the backdrop of history. If we look to literary accounts of war, we see the examples that we might expect of glorification of fighting and the deaths of heroes, but we also see sobering reminders that war must be a last resort, the actions of a people and a leader
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