"Peace is obtained by war"
About this Quote
"Peace is obtained by war" lands with the hard-edged compression of a Roman maxim: not a plea for tranquility, but a justification for force as policy. Cornelius Nepos, writing in the late Republic, knew an audience trained to see conflict as the engine of order. The line isn’t interested in the moral purity of peace; it treats peace as an outcome you manufacture, not a natural state you discover. That’s the rhetorical trick: it flips the sentimental expectation that peace is the opposite of war and recasts war as peace’s prerequisite.
The intent reads less like bloodlust than like managerial realism. Rome’s elite sold expansion as stabilization: defeat the enemy now, prevent unrest later. Under that logic, war becomes a kind of civic infrastructure project, an ugly investment that pays dividends in security, tribute, and political calm. The subtext is a warning about the fragility of peace itself. Peace is not the default setting; it is the condition imposed by the side with the capacity to impose it.
Context matters because Nepos was chronicling lives and virtues in a culture that fetishized virtus and disciplina, where the general was the star and the battlefield the proving ground. In that world, peace achieved without dominance can look like weakness, and weakness invites challenge. The line also exposes the propaganda loop: once peace is framed as something only war can deliver, war becomes permanently self-authorizing. You don’t end conflict; you institutionalize it as the price of "order."
The intent reads less like bloodlust than like managerial realism. Rome’s elite sold expansion as stabilization: defeat the enemy now, prevent unrest later. Under that logic, war becomes a kind of civic infrastructure project, an ugly investment that pays dividends in security, tribute, and political calm. The subtext is a warning about the fragility of peace itself. Peace is not the default setting; it is the condition imposed by the side with the capacity to impose it.
Context matters because Nepos was chronicling lives and virtues in a culture that fetishized virtus and disciplina, where the general was the star and the battlefield the proving ground. In that world, peace achieved without dominance can look like weakness, and weakness invites challenge. The line also exposes the propaganda loop: once peace is framed as something only war can deliver, war becomes permanently self-authorizing. You don’t end conflict; you institutionalize it as the price of "order."
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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