In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies in the Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics, regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace. "The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave." Aristotle does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that belongs to peace can never come. Courage, Plato defines as "the knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that end is manifest. This ideal element, this formative principle, underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean League--from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus. It requires a steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of Greeks against Greeks--Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and Macedon--and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.