Although the paradoxical reality of warfare may elude definition, since antiquity war has been a constitutive element of Western culture; seen from a historical perspective, it gives access to a broad array of tensions between various modelsof knowledge and differentkinds of tradition. The essays in this volume approach the phenomenon of war from antiquity to Clausewitz from the perspective of a variety of disciplines. Particular attention is given to texts, images, and their interaction.

The theme of this volume, 'knowledge in literature', refers not to the way in which literature communicates cultural phenomena, events, and norms regulating or reflecting everyday action and behaviour. Instead, it focuses on the 'new knowledge' about nature and the human animal produced (or rejected) in individual branches of science and learning since the 17th century and the changes it has effected in human and social self-interpretation. The consequence of this has been a spate of rival concepts of nature and representation and new forms of literary penetration and appropriation of knowledge that display repercussions both on literature itself and on science, philosophy and the humanities.

Translations play a decisive role as the basis and trigger for more complex transformations a " both in the construction of science and for literature. In the fine arts and archaeology, it is a question of enquiring into forms of a ~translationa (TM) which bear resemblances to the functioning of textual translations although they are not based on the transmission of text.

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age. The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre "Transformations of Antiquity" and the "August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity" at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Their individual projects examine transformational processes on three levels in particular - the constitutive function of Antiquity in the formation of the European knowledge society, the role of Antiquity in the genesis of modern cultural identities and self-constructions, and the forms of reception in art, literature, translation and media.