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history

Stasis (Anatomy of Civil War)

στάσις

A city tearing itself apart in factional bloodshed — and watching its very language and morals rot in the process.

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.

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20 Greek sources

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