Stasis and Civil War

This chapter compares stasis to the modern conceptual category with which it is most commonly associated: bellum civile, or civil war. It focuses primarily on the “original” civil wars of the first century BCE but also considers subsequent cases that are similar in scale, duration, and the types of violence involved. Against existing scholarship, which tends to conflate stasis with modern conceptual categories, including but not limited to civil war, it argues that stasis was a historically distinctive phenomenon that differs fundamentally from its analogues in both ancient and modern societies.