![]() According to this view, honor and vengeance were often the motives for the violent escalation of conflicts.Īccording to the Iliad, the goal of all men of honour in Archaic Greece was to "always be the first and superior to the others". However, scholars such as Hans-Joachim Gehrke and Henning Börm argue that stasis was essentially the product of power struggles among polis elites: competing factions mobilized the citizenry merely as pawns in their struggle against their rivals, who themselves were members of the elite. Proponents of the third model agree with the second insofar as they also believe that the real motives of the historical actors were often concealed.Croix), argue that the ancient actors alleged other reasons, in particular the struggle between oligarchs and democrats, to put an ideological veneer on conflicts that were primarily economic in nature. Scholars who followed this model, particularly prominent in British research (e. A second explanation identifies economic inequality, social tensions, and class struggle as the real roots of stasis.According to this model, stasis thus was a by-product of interstate conflict (e. Some scholars believe that outbreaks of violence in a polis were caused primarily by the involvement of the parties in external conflicts.The explanations proposed can be subsumed under three models: Historians have long recognized the importance of stasis and have discussed the question of the causes of stasis. It has been argued that the Greek cities were largely pacified only at the end of the Hellenistic era with the establishment of the Roman Empire (Börm 2019). ![]() Stasis in Ancient Greece įor centuries, stasis was an important factor in Greek history, and not only in Athens: Almost every major polis suffered from violent stasis at least once between the sixth and first centuries BCE, and many more than once (Lintott 1982 Gehrke 1985 Berger 1992). With 19 episodes of civil strife between 650 and 214 BC, Syracuse, in Sicily, was the city with the most recorded staseis. Staseis were endemic throughout the Greek world, in mainland Greece as well as the colonies of Magna Graecia. It was the result of opposition between groups of citizens, fighting over the constitution of the city or social and economic problems. In political history, stasis ( Ancient Greek: στάσις plural: staseis) refers to an episode of civil war within an ancient Greek city-state or polis.
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