Stasis (Anatomy of Civil War)

Stasis means factional strife or civil war, which Greek historians analyzed as a recurring social pathology — almost a disease of the body politic. Thucydides' (late 5th c. BCE) account of the revolution at Corcyra is the classic case: party violence corrupted society so deeply that the very meanings of words inverted and ordinary morality dissolved. Treated as a predictable, recurring phenomenon, stasis became central to Greek political thought on revolution and its causes.