About three years ago, Robin noticed a strange phrase making the rounds in political talk about the costs of the Iraq war: “blood and treasure.” I’d noticed it too, and when he posted about it, I started to do some digging into its origins. I thought that it would be a nice tidy little search, make for a fun thread and discussion, and we’d figure out that it came from Washington, maybe, or Lincoln, or Clausewitz.

As it turned out, I spent the better part of a year trying to find out where “blood and treasure” came from. I exhausted databases. I learned languages. I asked everyone I knew about it. I gave lectures on it. I contemplated scrapping my planned dissertation to write about it instead, and when that seemed like a bad idea, I contemplated leaving graduate school to write a book about it instead.

“Blood and treasure” is in its own way the key to all mythologies. Tracing the phrase traces the history of human thought about violence, whether in politics, history, religion, philosophy, or literature. I wanted to share here a fraction of what I have found so far.

In the five years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a strange phrase has re-emerged: