Literature, since its origins, has contributed at least as much as geopolitics to the history of the world, given that those who govern it never act only out of calculation. Ashurbanipal, Alexander and Augustus built their empires dreaming of the deeds of Gilgamesh, Achilles and Aeneas; Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were guided by Greek philosophical literature; Constantine and Theodosius chose to follow the Judeo-Christian Scriptures; Caliph Omar took Jerusalem because the Koran ordered him to do so; Charlemagne had himself crowned by the pope after reading Saint Augustine; Catherine of Russia legislated paraphrasing Montesquieu; Lenin became a communist by reading Chernyshevsky; Mussolini took advice from Nietzsche and D’Annunzio; Churchill defeated the Nazis with Macauley’s verses… Fernando Gentilini guides us in these pages to discover how much the literary demon has influenced the actions of kings, queens, statesmen and autocrats of all time and how their choices, in internal politics and foreign, are closely linked to myths, traditions and books. A story that is three thousand years long and not yet over, not even after the digital revolution. After all, how else to explain the fact that Barack Obama seeks a possible future in science fiction novels and that Vladimir Putin attacks Ukraine in the name of Dostoevsky and the prophets of the Dnieper?
