The German and Dutch historiography of eighteenth-century patriotism defines two different forms of patriotism. It is either presented as an enlightened and virtuous-eudemonic form of ‘love for the fatherland’ based on reason, or as an ideology that foreshadows nineteenth-century emphatic forms of aggressive nationalism. A critical reading of the mid-eighteenth-century epics Cyrus by Christoph Martin Wieland and De Gevallen van Friso by Willem van Haren shows that the discourses are strongly intertwined. Heroism in these epics is based on a personal experience of war acts and no longer on distanced and ‘theatrical’ experiences of the military spectacle. It confronts us with aggressive war fantasies related to early bellicism, as well as with pacifist statements. In Cyrus, for instance, the sentimental warrior inspires his fellow-soldiers to offer their blood in the struggle against the enemy, but he has doubts about the war and shows compassion with the enemy. Explorations of the effects of individual emotions on the battlefield, prepared both further idealisations of patriotic war acts and a more critical literary approach to war and fatherland.