90 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 69–74 et passim.
91 James Madison, “Federalist #10,” https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10, The Federalist Papers, originally published in The New York Packet, November 23, 1787.
92 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 72–73.
Stasis in Corcyra Modeling Revolution for Thucydides and Plato
Thucydides inserts into his account of the stasis at Corcyra a series of reflections on the effect of war and revolution on people’s characters and actions. Corcyra fell into stasis when the Corinthians set free the prisoners they had taken at Epidamnus (3.70.1). Then the Corcyraeans provided the first full examples of the effects of revolutionary passion (3.85.1), giving Thucydides the occasion to provide a very characteristic, abstract interpretation of the events.
Thucydides sees the revolutions throughout the Greek world during the war as a kind of movement:, since as he says, “later at least the entire, so to speak, Hellenic world was set in motion” (ἐπεὶ ὕστερόν γε καὶ πᾶν ὡς εἰπεῖν τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐκινήθη, my translation, combined with Crawley, 3.82.1). Thucydides links stasis with the war as a whole, which he also sees as a movement, in fact, the greatest “movement” up to his time (κίνησις transliterated kinesis 1.1.2). In opposition to this movement excited by war and stasis stands the rest and orderly activity of research and writing, which exile gave to Thucydides (5.26.5).1 This opposition of orderly activity to disorderly movement is one of the central contrasts of Thucydides’ work, along with the relationship between logos and ergon. Because the work is composed around such antitheses, some have questioned whether Thucydides tries to resolve the antitheses or leaves them in place as a rhetorical device to stimulate thought.2 As we shall see both in the passage on stasis and in other sections, however, the oppositions are a rhetorical tool of Thucydides to engage his readers, but one which he also uses to lead toward certain philosophical conclusions, although the conclusions to a number of his presentations have more than one meaning and form. They are polyvalent as part of his method.3 This certainly seems true of the many echoes within the various speeches. Echoes indicate decline in political discourse between Pericles and Cleon, but they also hint at some disturbing similarities, while at the same time also making the reader wonder if some of the differences between the two men are more matters of degree. It is also interesting to consider some of the passages that we will encounter in which the language of one or two words or sentences is what Hornblower reflect a quality he calls “polyinterpretability.”4
The disturbances of stasis overturn a great number of customs (3.82, especially 3.82.6), including the axiosis of words (3.82.4). This entire dense passage describing the horrible effects of stasis on all political order and achievements stands as a contrast to the Funeral Oration, which is an exaltation of the custom of burial. While in the Funeral Oration Pericles reaches for the timeless expression of beautiful devotion to the city (e.g., 2.41.4, 2.43.3), in the description of stasis Thucydides shows how when the state fails, people degenerate into the pleasures of immediate and emotional action (3.82.6–3.82.8).
A number of the words Thucydides uses to portray stasis emphasize his concern in this passage with the movement and disturbance of stasis. Stasis moved forward savagely (οὕτως ὠμὴ <ἡ> στάσις προυχώρησε) until it engulfed all that was Hellenic (πᾶν . . . τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν, 3.82.1). This neuter phrase, which is Thucydides’ customary way of referring to Greece as a whole (cf. 1.1.1), has implications here beyond the entire physical Greek world. It also implies that stasis overturned all that was Greek, the customs and civilizations of the Greeks, and made the people more barbaric. Plato’s identification of strife between Greek cities as a kind of faction or stasis (Republic V.471a) makes the same point through the many particulars of any Greek conflict with Greeks.
The war made it easy for partisans to bring in outside forces to change or revolutionize a state.5 In contrast to this change, Thucydides places the constant of human nature (ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, “as long as the nature of humans is the same” [my translation], 3.82.2), which allows him to see the general forms stasis takes as part of a larger stable picture of man.6
The clinical nature of the description of stasis recalls the description of the plague, which first challenged the customs at Athens and weakened the people (2.54.1, 2.61.3). Like stasis, the plague has differing particular manifestations (2.51.1, cf. 3.82.2), but also like stasis it has a general form (τοιοῦτον ἦν ἐπὶ πᾶν τὴν ἰδέαν, “Such then, . . . were the general features of the distemper,” 2.51.1; cf., μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἡσυχαίτερα καὶ τοῖς εἴδεσι διηλλαγμένα, The sufferings of stasis appeared “in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms” 3.82.2). Like stasis, the plague overturned customs and pushed the people toward immediate actions for their satisfaction (2.51.2–2.51.3). Stasis is a political illness characterized by the examples Thucydides provides, which naturally raises the question of the nature of a healthy polis. We will consider this more thoroughly in connection with Pericles’ speeches and the speech of the Athenian ambassadors in Book 1, but for now it is enough to recognize that the frantic violence of stasis represents the lowest type of political action for Thucydides. The destruction in Corcyra did not end until one party had killed almost all the other (4.48.5). One forward-looking result of the narrative of the plague is to give the reader a sense when reading the discussion of stasis in Corcyra that we have seen this process before. Indeed, Thucydides’ comment at the end of his introduction to the description of the plague creates an ironic sense of foreboding:
λεγέτω μὲν οὖν περὶ αὐτοῦ ὡς ἕκαστος γιγνώσκει καὶ ἰατρὸς καὶ ἰδιώτης, ἀφ᾽ ὅτου εἰκὸς ἦν γενέσθαι αὐτό, καὶ τὰς αἰτίας ἅστινας νομίζει τοσαύτης μεταβολῆς ἱκανὰς εἶναι δύναμιν ἐς τὸ μεταστῆσαι σχεῖν: ἐγὼ δὲ οἷόν τε ἐγίγνετο λέξω, καὶ ἀφ᾽ ὧν ἄν τις σκοπῶν, εἴ ποτε καὶ αὖθις ἐπιπέσοι, μάλιστ᾽ ἂν ἔχοι τι προειδὼς μὴ ἀγνοεῖν, ταῦτα δηλώσω αὐτός τε νοσήσας καὶ αὐτὸς ἰδὼν ἄλλους πάσχοντας. (2.48.3)
All speculation as to its origin and its causes, if causes can be found adequate to produce so great a disturbance, I leave to other writers, whether lay or professional; for myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again. This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others. (2.48.3)
As students, or literally “someone looking” (τις σκοπῶν) we can see the effects of stasis as a kind of disease, a social and psychological disease perhaps, “if it should ever break out again,” or a moral disease in a deeper sense, that has effects quite similar to the plague. Or if we are in an army or leading an army, we might see incipient suspicion as the beginning of a collapse of order.7
One