Acceso usuarios
Giovanni Brandi Cordasco Salmena
If in the most recent settings the state and war are conceived as phenomena directly dependent on each other is because the two concepts have evolved in this way. It should be noted, however, that this has not always been the case: in ancient civilizations, war was not a purely public matter, it was not an attitude of politics, distinct from the concept of peace. The State has, as a first way of identifying itself, a body of laws that necessarily provide for the rules that must manage the war, in all its aspects. As in any set of practical actions, the war also provides for a series of tacit agreements and unwritten laws that manage certain aspects of it that cannot be the subject of state legislation: Often these are very general rules to which we must adapt or rules established for individual events. The relationship between war and society ends in a written and unwritten corpus of rules, which sanction behaviour. History is historical analysis and this cannot be detached from a precise context, which is space and time, social relationship and specific personality. Although it is not always possible to make a distinction between the Greek and the Roman world, some distinctive features mark its civilizations. From a general point of view, scholars continue to be cautious about the genesis of war and the way in which it must be studied: according to the "bellicistic" opinion, relations between states of the ancient world were essentially warlike and hostile; a second theory, "pacifist", is in polemical opposition to the first: the relations would have been tendentially hostile as positive and therefore the positions between the States must be analyzed time by time; finally according to the method of the "genetic" theoryThe study of war must start from its genesis without neglecting the evolution of public institutions (evidently identifying war and state). Reflecting on the different experiences gained in Greece and Rome, which will be read through the testimony of Thucydides and Virgil, we will try, in the possible traits, to verify the possible points of coincidence and differentiation.
