By Anis Haffar Wars can be unpredictable and messy, to say the least. The causes may be politics, economics, or security. More often the intent is ego-driven: to conquer, plunder, and claim territories from weaker enclaves for the conqueror’s purposes. The Source Record of the Great War [World War I] states, “the war could no more have been avoided than an earthquake or any other cataclysm of Nature’s unknown forces … To say that a war arises from this or that individual event is folly. Such empty phrases were part of the old blind statecraft which we have outgrown. War springs from human nature.” The lessons of the past lay before the future. About 2,000 years ago, the Emperor Julius Caesar (100 – 44BC) conducted various campaigns, won territories, and exacted terrible vengeance from those that rebelled. He extended the Roman Empire far and wide including North Africa and Britain. He brought loot and riches to Rome and lavished them on the Roman nobility. He won such great influences that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius in his honour. His very person was declared sacred, and statues of him were placed in temples. There was hardly a more tragic scene in drama than in the Roman senate where Caesar was murdered by his colleagues. The drama climaxed where after the fatal stabs from the conspirators’ blades, Caesar, in the throes of death and about to drop on the floor, spots a hazy view of Brutus, a protégé he had raised like a son. Blood dripping from his butchered body, the dying man staggers towards him. Lo and behold, Brutus, with a dagger drawn, advances and plunges the final blow into the Emperor. Caesar’s last words, “Et tu Brute?” [And you too, Brutus?] echoed through time as the vintage symbol of betrayal and treachery. From the name Brutus, representing the supposed noblest Roman of all, evolved the creepy words: brute, brutal, and brutish. Shortly thereafter, the great Roman Empire itself began to crumble, and was destroyed finally. Pundits called Caesar’s death the most famous assassination in history. Before Caesar lived Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC), King of Macedonia and a former pupil of Aristotle. In his day, Alexander conquered larger and larger areas till there were no more lands to defeat. In his famous wars he devastated extensive regions, including Thebes which he razed to the ground as a warning to the Greeks. After his death, Macedonia itself was condemned. In Helen of Troy, a handsome young prince from Troy named Paris drifts into Sparta, and sees Helen. He falls instantly in love with her. Helen‘s beauty lit amorous fires; and was, as you guessed, already taken as a wife by the King of Sparta himself, King Menelaus. Paris, undaunted, ensues and seduces this wonder woman. And to add abuse to the King’s pierced and bleeding heart, he abducts her to Troy. If you were King Menelaus, with your subjects and family looking on, gaping - in your face! - what would you do? Just forgive? and still be strong and settled to lead? King Menelaus must have borrowed a nerve from the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro Wiwa, in whose classic short story the question “Who born dog?” was posed, and applied. The King garnered a thousand ships, filled them with fighters, and set off to Troy. He waged a war for ten years. With Paris killed, the King now yanked his woman back home to Sparta. In that war Troy was burnt to ashes, and all its citizens destroyed. It was a pyrrhic victory: A great many of the King’s ablest soldiers perished including the celebrated warrior Achilles. [There’s a new version of the classic movie, Helen of Troy, but that one paled against the original production directed by Robert Wise starring the Italian throb Rossana Podesta as Helen, Jacques Sernas as Paris, Cedric Hardwicke as Menelaus, and Stanley Baker as Achilles. If you got the chance, watch it.] Also called The Trojan War, that story of love, possibly, was a myth about an extraordinary war ordained by the Greek gods for their sport, where humans figured and suffered like pawns. Though the gods might be departed, the morale lived! Like all great tragedies, the causes were worth heeding by all [including Machiavelli’s “Princes”]: do not bait or be baited unduly; egos can be hard nuts to crack; they bode evil for both victims and aggressors.