Meaning
The savage, destructive forces that war lets loose - plunder, slaughter, famine, and fire - and, by extension, the ruthless people who profit from conflict, especially mercenaries. The image is of attack dogs straining at their leashes until a handler releases them on the enemy. Usually shortened, dropping the havoc clause; today it most often means either mercenaries or the chaos of war itself. Let slip means to release deliberately, not to lose by accident - a point modern readers frequently miss. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean allusion; common in political and military journalism).
Origin
From Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 1, in Mark Antony's soliloquy over Caesar's corpse, foretelling civil war: Caesar's spirit shall, with a monarch's voice, 'Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.' Havoc was a real medieval army command licensing plunder: the 1385 Ordinances of War of Richard II forbade soldiers to cry it without order, and the historian Maurice Keen notes an unauthorized call was punishable by death from the fourteenth century. Let slip refers to releasing dogs from slip collars. Dated later uses include Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862), calling the cannon 'sombre dogs of war', a Punch cartoon of 17 June 1876 showing Russia about to loose them, and Eric Partridge's classification of the phrase as a cliche by 1940; Frederick Forsyth's mercenary novel The Dogs of War (1974, filmed 1980) then fixed the hired-soldier sense. Wikipedia notes that Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare's source, already carried war-dog imagery, so the exact wording is Shakespeare's even if the image is older.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- let slip the dogs of war
- the dogs of war are loose
- unleash the dogs of war
Usage Examples
- When the tariff walls went up, the dogs of war were loosed on the currency markets, and traders braced for a brutal week.
- The documentary follows a former mercenary, one of the dogs of war who fought in Africa's bush wars of the 1970s and 80s.
- Talks collapsed and, within days, the propaganda stations on both sides were letting slip the dogs of war.