Stasis: Political Violence in Classical Greece

Scott Lawin Arcenas joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press 2026).
Ancient texts (select)
• Homer, Odyssey and Iliad
• Alcaeus
• Solon
• Herodotus, esp. the account of the stasis in Chios
• Thucydides, esp. the account of the stasis at Corcyra (Book 3)
• Xenophon, Hellenika, esp. the account of stasis in Elis
• Aeneas Tacticus, Stratagems
• [Aristotle], Athenaion Politeia
Modern bibliography mentioned
• Carawan, Edwin. 2013. The Athenian Amnesty and Reconstructing the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Driscoll, Eric. 2016. “Stasis and Reconciliation: Politics and Law in Fourth-Century Greece.” Chiron 46: 119–155.
• Gehrke, Hans-Joachim. 1985. Stasis: Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in den griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. München: C. H. Beck.
• Gray, Benjamin. 2013. “Justice or Harmony? Reconciliation after Stasis at Dikaia and the Fourth-Century BC Polis.” Revue des Études Anciennes 115 (2): 369–401.
• Hansen, Mogens H., and Thomas H. Nielsen, eds. 2004. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books. (Originally published 1997 as La cité divisée: L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: Payot & Rivages).
• Ma, John. 2024. Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Simonton, Matt. 2026. Ancient Greek Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wees, Hans van. 2008. “‘Stasis, Destroyer of Men’: Mass, Elite, Political Violence and Security in Archaic Greece.” In Sécurité Collective et Ordre Public Dans Les Sociétés Anciennes, edited by Hans van Wees, Cédric Brélaz, and Pierre Ducrey, 1–39. Genève: Fondation Hardt.
About our guest
Scott Lawin Arcenas is a historian and classicist who specializes in the history of democracy and political violence. His first book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press) reveals the nature, frequency, and intensity of political violence in fifth- and fourth-century Greek city-states. He holds degrees from Princeton, Cambridge, and Stanford and is currently an associate professor of history and classics at the University of Montana.
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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph)," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies (brown.edu/academics/classics/classical-studies…) and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study (jnbc.brown.edu). jnbc.brown.edu
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