Stasis, or The Greek Invention of Politics

STASIS, OR THE GREEK INVENTION OF POLITICS*
Moshe Berent**
Abstract: The Greek word stasis meant ‘faction’, ‘civil war’ but also ‘political
standing’. This seems a strange contradiction, particularly since we credit the Greeks
with having invented politics. This strange contradiction is partly explained by the nature
of the Greek polis, which was not a State, but rather what anthropologists call a stateless
community. The latter is a relatively unstratified egalitarian community characterized
by the absence of public coercive apparatuses. However, though stateless, the Greek
polis was also different from stateless communities studied by anthropologists as it was
not tribal.
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The fear of stasis was directly related to the absence of public means to check seditious
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factions or to deal with divisions which might be the outcome of having political
standings. However, the absence of central authority, social hierarchy and kinship
identity, gave room for much individual deliberation and made politics indispensable.
Thus the Greeks indeed invented politics, yet the Greek concept of politics was different
from the modern one in being predominantly ethical, that is, in seeking to curb ‘political
standings’ by morality, education and self restraint.
M.I. Finley notes that nothing was feared in classical Greece more than stasis,
a term which is usually translated by the English word ‘faction’. It also means
‘party formed for seditious purposes’, ‘discord’, ‘division’, ‘dissent’ and even
‘civil war’ or ‘revolution’.1 Finley adds that:
. . . I believe, that there must be deep significance in the fact that a word
which has the original sense of ‘station’ or ‘position’ and which, in abstract
logic, could have an equally neutral sense when used in a political context,
in practice does nothing of the kind, but immediately takes on the nastiest
overtones. A political position, a partisan position — that is the inescapable
* This paper was extracted from my Cambridge PhD thesis. I owe special thanks to
two men in Cambridge: my supervisor, Dr Paul Cartledge, who has also helped me to
bring this paper to its final form, and the late Professor Ernest Gellner who commented
on my thesis and on earlier versions of this paper. I wish also to thank Professor W.Z.
Rubinsohn of Tel-Aviv University and Dr A. Avidov of Beit-Berl College for their helpful
remarks.
** Dept. of Sociology and Political Science, The Open University of Israel, 16
Klausner St, PO Box 39328, 61392 Tel Aviv, Israel. Email: mosheb@oumail.openu.ac.il
1
M.I. Finley, ‘The Athenian Demagogues’, in Democracy Ancient and Modern
(London, 2nd edn., 1985), p. 44. Originally printed in Past and Present, 21 (1962). See
also Andrew Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City: 750–
330 BC (London and Canberra, 1982), p. 34; D.L. Loenen, Stasis (Amsterdam, 1953), p. 1.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIX. No. 3. Autumn 1998

332 M. BERENT
implication — is a bad thing, leading to sedition, civil war, and the disruption
of the social fabric . . . There is no eternal law, after all, why ‘demagogue’,
a ‘leader of the people’ must become ‘mis-leader of the people’. Or why
hetairia, an old Greek word which means, among other things, ‘club’ or
‘society’, should in fifth century Athens have come simultaneously to mean
‘conspiracy’ and ‘seditious organisation’. Whatever the explanation, it lies
not in philology but in Greek society itself.2
Having a political standing was considered, then, a dangerous thing, if it was
not actually identified with civil war. As Nicole Loraux observed, ‘this is a
strange contradiction, particularly since we credit the Greeks with having
invented politics’.3 Further, the fact that stasis meant both ‘faction’ and ‘civil
war’ implies that grouping was considered dangerous.

Although the dominant line of Greek writers called stasis the greatest of evils,
it was a constant fact of Greek reality.4 Further, though denounced, stasis was
not necessarily illegal. On the contrary it was the right and duty of citizens alone
to engage in stasis,5 as we can clearly see from the so-called ‘law against
neutrality’, which is traditionally attributed to Solon:
Seeing that the city was often in a state of strife, and that some of its citizens
through apathy accepted whatever might happen, he enacted a special law to
deal with them, that if when the city was torn by strife anyone should refuse
to place his arms at the disposal of either side he should be outlawed and
have no share in the city.6
This adds to the peculiarity of the Greek attitude towards stasis. Why was stasis
so feared and morally condemned? Why was it not outlawed?
Traditionally stasis has been considered both as a peculiar phenomenon of
the ancient Greek cities (though the term was sometimes used to describe
2
Finley, ‘The Athenian Demagogues’, pp. 44–5.
3
N. Loraux, ‘Reflections of the Greek City on Unity and Division’, in City-States in
Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. A. Molho, K. Raaflaub and J. Emlen
(Stuttgart, 1991), p. 39.
4
M.I. Finley, ‘The Freedom of the Greek Citizen’ (1976), reprinted in M.I. Finley,
Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, ed. Brent D. Shaw and Richard P. Saller
(London, 1981), p. 82. H.J. Gehrke, Stasis: Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in
den Griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Munich, 1985).
5
Finley, ‘The Freedom of the Greek Citizen’, p. 82. Loenen says that ‘illegality is
precisely not the constant hallmark of stasis’. Loenen, Stasis, p. 5.
6
Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, 8.5, trans. P.J. Rhodes (Harmondsworth,
1984). The authenticity of this law has been the subject of a long controversy. Yet the
debate has focused mainly on the question whether this so-called law was indeed
‘enacted’ (either by Solon or by others) and enforced, and not on the question in which
I am interested here, that is, whether it reflects a sort of ‘positive’ attitude towards stasis.
See E. David, ‘Solon, Neutrality and Partisan Literature of Late Fifth-Century Athens’,
Museum Helveticum, 41 (1984), pp. 129–38. R. Sealey, ‘How Citizenship and the City
Began in Athens’, American Journal of Ancient History, 8 (1983), pp. 101–5. J.A.
Goldstein, ‘Solon’s Law for an Activist Citizenry’, Historia, 21 (1972), pp. 538 ff.
STASIS, OR THE GREEK INVENTION OF POLITICS 333
violent political struggles elsewhere) and as the cause of their destruction.

Nevertheless, W.G. Runciman in an illuminating paper on the reasons for the
downfall of the polis, belittles both the problem of stasis and its being a violent
struggle peculiar to ancient Greece, suggesting that ‘it is not stasis which of
itself drives any given type of society into extinction’, pointing to Korea,
Mamluk Egypt and Haiti as ‘societies whose exceptionally high level of internal
violence did not prevent their institutions from reproducing themselves quite
stably enough’.7
This brings us to other questions: What is it, if anything, that makes stasis a
special kind of violent struggle? And what is it, if anything, that makes stasis
a struggle which historically was confined mainly to the ancient Greek world?
In the following paper I intend to follow Finley’s lead and to argue that the
answers to all these questions lie ‘in Greek society itself’. Stasis was indeed a
violent struggle peculiar to the ancient Greek world, and it owes its peculiarity
to the unique character of the polis as a political system. I shall argue that,
contrary to what has been traditionally assumed until now, the polis was not a
State, but rather what the anthropologists call a stateless community. The latter
is a relatively egalitarian unstratified community characterized by the absence
of coercive apparatuses, that is by the fact that the application of violence is not
monopolized by an agency or a ruling class, and the ability to use force is
more-or-less evenly distributed among an armed or potentially armed popula-
tion. The fear of stasis was directly related to the absence of public means to
restrain a seditious party. Though denounced, stasis was not outlawed, because
the only way to check a seditious party was by another one. Further, the absence
of constitutional coercive apparatuses made stasis a semi-legal means for
constitutional reform (metabole politeias).
Though the polis was stateless, it was also different from the agrarian stateless
societies studied by anthropologists, as it was not tribal, and thus the Greek
staseis were not kinship groups. Consequently, the polis lacked the kinship
mechanisms which regulate conflict in tribal stateless communities, which
indeed added to the explosive nature of the stasis. The decentralized non-tribal
nature of the polis and the nature of the Greek stasis made the Greek experience
unique, and they could also partly explain Greek democracy and the Greek
invention of politics as a rational and critical discipline. Stateless communities,
as we shall see, tend towards democracy and ‘open government’: where there
are no means to enforce public policies, the latter must be the product of a wide
consensus. Further, the absence of authority which symbolized and enforced
identity, on the one hand, and the absence of tribal forms in which alliances are
determined by kinship, on the other, left much room for individual deliberation,
that is, to politics.
7
W.G. Runciman, ‘Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead End’,
in The Greek City from Homer to Alexander, ed. O. Murray and S. Price (Oxford, 1990),
pp. 349–50.
334 M. BERENT
The statelessness of the Greek polis was reflected in the Greek concept of
politics and thus made it different from the modern one. The latter, as it was
introduced by the first modern theorists of the State, dealt primarily with the
regulation of force, since the State was (to use Max Weber’s celebrated defini-
tion) an agency within society which has the monopoly of the application of
violence. The Greek concept was different. If politics was the science of public
affairs (ta politika), it could not have been about the regulation of force, since
in the Greek context force was private and thus uncontrollable. Consequently
the stasis-free society could have been achieved only by ideological, moral and
educational means. As Ernest Barker observed, ‘political science . . . became
in the hands of the Greeks particularly and predominantly ethical’.8 At the
centre of this fusion of morality and politics was the idea of self-restraint. The
latter meant, among other things, the denial and delegitimization of private
interests. Thus, while the modern concept of politics involves the idea of
conflict or the advancement of political standing and private interest, the Greek
notion of politics, in the absence of public means to deal with conflicting
political standings and private interests, meant their denial for the sake of the
public good.
I
The Nature of Stasis
A. Polis and State: Horizontal vs. Vertical Conflicts
In The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World Ste. Croix says:
We can accept the fact that what we call ‘the state’ was for the Greeks the
instrument of the politeuma, the body of citizens who had the constitutional
power of ruling . . . Control of the State, therefore, was one of the prizes,
indeed the greatest prize, of class struggle on the political plane. This should
not surprise even those who cannot accept the statement in the Communist
Manifesto that ‘political power, properly so called, is merely the organized
power of one class for oppressing another’.9
Inasmuch as what is meant by the ‘control of the State’ is the taking over of a
ruling apparatus, then Ste. Croix is expressing here a common error. If we
accept Max Weber’s celebrated definition of the State as that agency within
society which possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence, then we must
accept also that the polis was stateless.10 The rudimentary character of State-
coercive apparatus in the polis has been noted by Sir Moses Finley among
8
E. Barker, Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors (London, 5th edn.,
1960), p. 6.
9
G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London,
1981; Corrected Impression, 1983), p. 287.
10
For a more detailed discussion of the statelessness of the polis see M. Berent,
‘Hobbes and the Greek Tongues’, History of Political Thought, XVII, 1 (1996), pp. 36–59.
others. With the partial exceptions of Sparta, the Athenian navy and tyrannies,
the polis had no standing army. Only in the case of tyrannies were militias used
for internal policing.11 (Tyrannies were indeed a departure from the traditional
poleis, being attempts to centralize the means of coercion). As for police, it
seems to be agreed that the ancient polis ‘never developed a proper police
system’;12 the nearest thing to it was usually a ‘small number of publicly owned
slaves at the disposal of the different magistrates’.13 Thus, as Lintott has
observed, policing was done by self-help and self-defence (that is with the help
of friends, neighbours, family).14 There was no public prosecution system, and
cases were brought to the popular courts either by interested parties or by
volunteers. In the same manner, court orders were not normally carried out by
the officials but by the interested parties, sometimes by self-help.

The statelessness of the polis meant that there was not a ready-made state-
apparatus, one over which anyone who wished to, or was urged to, rule could
preside, and that consequently stasis was not a struggle for the control of the
State or for the seizure of a locus of power, because those simply did not exist.
In their introduction to African Political Systems, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard
maintain that in the (tribal) stateless society
. . . there is no association, class, or segment, which has a dominant place in
the political structure through the command of a greater organized force than
is at the disposal of any of its congeners. If force is resorted to in a dispute
between segments it will be met with equal force. If one segment defeats
another it does not attempt to establish political dominance over it; in the
absence of administrative machinery there is, in fact, no means by which it
could do so. In the language of political philosophy, there is no individual or
group in which sovereignty can be said to rest.15
Though certain qualifications must be added to allow for its non-tribal nature,
the quotation above still holds for the polis. In stateless societies conflicts are
horizontal, that is between similar or equal groups. In State-societies, by
definition, conflicts are also vertical, either because society is stratified or
because there are conflicts between the rulers and the ruled, or conflicts between
11
M.I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 18–20.
12
E. Badian, the entry ‘Police’, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L.
Hammond and H.H. Scullard (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1970), p. 851.
13
Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, p. 18.
14
Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, p. 26; Tracy
Rihll, ‘War, Slavery, and Settlement in Early Greece’, in War and Society in the Greek
World, J. Rich and G. Shipley (London, 1993), pp. 86–7. See also Virginia J. Hunter,
Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420–320 B.C. (Princeton, NJ, 1994).
15
M. Fortes and E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Introduction’, in African Political Systems
(Oxford, 1940), pp. 14–15.
336 M. BERENT
elements of the State-hierarchy or because there are conflicts conducted be-

tween various groups of the élite in order to seize power.16
The absence of coercive apparatuses in the polis was also complementary to
the relative absence of stratification. The latter is considered today as a universal
correlate of the agrarian State.17 Thus Gellner observes:
In the characteristic agro-literate polity, the ruling class forms a small minor-
ity of the population, rigidly separated from the great majority of direct
agricultural producers, or peasants. Generally speaking, its ideology exag-
gerates rather than underplays the inequality of classes and the degree of
separation of the ruling stratum. This can turn into a number of more
specialized layers: warriors, priests, clerics, administrators, burghers. The
whole system favours horizontal lines of cultural cleavage, and it may invent
and reinforce them when they are absent.18
Gellner himself does not think that this model applied to the classical Greek
world, pointing out that the Greek world lacked a military-clerical domination.
Indeed Gellner calls Greek society a ‘domination free society’. Further, the
horizontal lines of cultural cleavage between the high culture of the ruling
classes and the low culture of the mass producers, which characterized the
agro-literate polity, were absent in Greek society. The Greeks indeed emerged
as the ‘nation of Homer’, that is, as a literate society with high culture.19
The relative absence of stratification in the polis is evident from the follow-
ing numerical calculation put forward by Aristotle when he advocates the rule
of the middle ‘class’, the middling group of citizens:
It is clear from our argument, first, that the best form of political society is
one where power is vested in the middle class and, secondly, a good govern-
ment is attainable in those poleis where there is a large middle class — large
enough, if possible, to be stronger than both of the other classes, but at any
rate large enough to be stronger than either of them singly; for in this case
16
Peter Lloyd, ‘The Political Structure of African Kingdoms: An Explanatory
Model’, in Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, Monograph 2
(London 1965), pp. 78–80.
17
Henry Claessen and Peter Skalnik, ‘The Early State: Theories and Hypotheses’,
in The Early State I, ed. Henry Claessen and Peter Skalnik (The Hague, 1978), pp. 20–1.
18
E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 9–10. Gellner’s position
is different from that of classical Marxism expressed by Ste. Croix. According to the
latter, stratification, or the emergence of classes, must precede that of the state. Gellner,
on the other hand, points to the so-called Asiatic Mode of Production, where the State
seems to have emerged in a classless society, as a possible refutation of this Marxist
position. Further, classical Marxism sees the State as the prize of the class-struggle
between the ruling and the ruled. Gellner, on the other hand, limits struggles for power
in the agrarian state to the ruling strata only. See ‘The Asiatic Trauma’, in State and
Society in Soviet Thought (Oxford, 1988), pp. 39–68.
19
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 9–10.
its addition to either will suffice to turn the scale, and will prevent either of
the opposing extremes from becoming dominant.20
Here a horizontal conflict between the classes is described. The decentralized
and egalitarian nature of the community is obvious from the fact that each class
can command force and, as expected in an egalitarian community, force is
directly related to the size of the class. It might be related also to the type of
weapons available to the various groups. Thus the rich could probably afford
to be fewer than the poor, since they could afford better arms (such as the hoplite
armour). However, society is still egalitarian and decentralized, since the dis-
advantage of the poor in weapons could be overcome by their numbers. From
Aristotle’s calculation it is also obvious that the various elements are, if not of
the same size, at least of a similar order of magnitude.

The situation in agrarian stratified State-societies is different. In the latter the

ruling classes are only a tiny minority of the total population while the vast
majority are peasant producers. Thus force is totally divorced from numbers.
Further, politics is limited to struggles within the ruling élite, thus there is no
question of the ruled, the vast number of direct producers, assuming control of
the State.21 The fact that in the Greek case every class could potentially prevail,
points to the relative absence of stratification.
Again, it is important to note that the ‘middle class’ prevails because it is
large enough, not because it establishes dominance over the other sections of
the community, because it has no means to do so: the armies engaged in stasis
are non-professional citizen armies, and they exist only as long as the hostilities
last. However, there was the possibility that a victorious party would want to
achieve domination, and that it would not dissolve and disarm itself, but rather
go on to establish a tyranny. Tyrannies were indeed attempts to gain and
centralize power, that is to create a State, and the only case where militias or
bodyguards were available for the purpose of ruling. Thus stasis acquired its
bad reputation also because it was a means to establish tyranny. Indeed the
sources sometimes describe the tyrant as a leader of a faction. We are told by
Herodotus that Cylon ‘put on a brave air of one that aimed at despotism and
gathering a company of men of like age he essayed to seize the citadel’
(emphasis added).22 Herodotus describes Peisistratos’ success in his second
20
Aristotle, Politics, IV.11, 1295b34–39; trans. Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aris-
totle (Oxford, 1946).
21
As Michael Mann observes, the direct producers and expropriators could unite
against the state political élite, not to transform it, but to evade it. Thus when the ruled
are involved in class conflict in agrarian states, they are not aiming at the control of the
state, but rather at its disintegration. See M. Mann, ‘States, Ancient and Modern’, in
States, War and Capitalism (Oxford, 1988), pp. 51–6.
22
Herodotus, V, 71, trans. Godley (Loeb Edition). Thuc. I, 126–7, tells us that this
faction was composed of his friends and the Megarian force sent by his father-in-law,
Theagenes, who was at that time tyrant of Megara.
338 M. BERENT
attempt to establish a tyranny: ‘When the Athenian coast-dwellers and those

from the plain were engaged in stasis . . . (Peisistratos) aiming at tyranny, raised
a third stasis, and collecting stasiotai . . . contrived the following plan’.23 In an
armed or potentially armed citizenry, the most obvious thing for a victorious
party that wishes to establish a tyranny would be to disarm the rest of the
population, as Peisistratos and the Thirty did to the Athenian demos.24 It is
important to note that the tyrant’s stasiotai were not his accomplices for the
usurpation of power, in the usual sense of a locus of power, for in a stateless
community the latter did not exist: they were the newly established power.
A note must be added here about the position of the slaves. The existence of
slavery always seemed to enhance the notion of the ancient ‘Greek State’. This
was, no doubt, influenced by the Marxist idea that exploitation could exist only
where it is backed by State coercive apparatuses. Thus it was Engels who was
one of the first to suggest that ‘the people’s army of the Athenian democracy
confronted the slaves as an aristocratic public force and kept them in check’.25
In a somewhat similar manner I. Morris suggests modifying Gellner’s model
of the Agrarian State to make it applicable to the ancient polis by drawing the
main horizontal line (which separates rulers from ruled) between the citizens
and the slave population.26 Again, seeing the citizens as a ‘ruling class’ conflicts
with Gellner’s model of the agrarian State because of the absence of a division
of labour: the citizens were not professional soldiers or administrators and did
the same work as slaves (when not under arms). Further, we know from the
study of tribal communities that slavery could exist also in stateless condi-
tions.27 As for ancient Greece, it was characterized by chattel slavery; that is,
slaves were usually owned by individual masters. Further, and this is important,
the control of the slaves was also ‘private’, that is, by self-help. In an illumi-
nating passage in the Republic Socrates equates the slave owner with the tyrant.
It is the business of the slave-owner to control the slaves. But why is it that
‘such slave-owners . . . don’t live in fear of their slaves’? The answer is that
23
Herodotus, I.59. On the relation between stasis and tyranny see Marcus Wheeler,
‘Aristotle’s Analysis of the Nature of Political Struggle’, in Articles on Aristotle Vol. 2:
Ethics and Politics, ed. J. Barnes, M. Schofield, R. Sorabji (London, 1977), p. 160.
(Quotation of Herodotus by Wheeler, ibid.) Cypselus, who established a tyranny at
Corinth, was also heading a faction; see W.G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democ-
racy (London, 1966), pp. 114–19.
24
Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, 15.4 and 37.2.
25
F. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) (New York,
1972), p. 230.
26
See Ian Morris, ‘The Early Polis as a City and State’, in City and Country in the
Ancient World, ed. John Rich and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (London 1991), pp. 46–9.
See also Runciman, ‘Doomed to Extinction’, p. 348.
27
S. Miers and I. Kopytoff, ‘African ‘‘Slavery’’ as an Institution of Marginality’, in
Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. S. Miers and I. Kopy-
toff (Madison, Wisconsin, 1977), pp. 15–26.
‘the entire polis (pasa he polis) would run to help (boethei) him’.28 That
Socrates refers here to self-help rather than to any organized or professional
help becomes more obvious from what follows:
But imagine now that some god were to take a single man who owned fifty
or more slaves and were to transport him and his wife and children, his goods
and chattels and his slaves, to some desert place where there would be no
other free man to help him; wouldn’t he be in great fear that he and his wife
and children would be done away with by the slaves?29
The emphasis here is not on the absence of a State in some desert place, and
not even on the absence of citizens, but rather on the absence of other free men
who constitute the natural group from which help could come.30
The absence of any ready militia to crush slave-revolts is complementary to

the fact that ‘slaves never represented a cohesive group either in their masters’
or their own mind so for all their exploited situation they did not engage (for
the most part) in social conflict’ and that we don’t know of any slave revolts in
ancient Greece, with the conspicuous exception of Sparta.31 As for the latter,
the Helots were not at all chattel slaves but a local population which was
enslaved by Sparta and were only able to revolt outright because of their ethnic
and political solidarity, while ‘these conditions did not obtain for chattel slaves
of classical Greece’. 32
28
Plato, Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth, 2nd revised edn., 1974),
578d–e, 361a–b. Here, I must say, the traditional translations are imbued with statism,
thus P. Shorey translates ‘because the entire state is ready to defend each citizen’ (Loeb
edn., London, 1935) and Desmond Lee translates ‘because the individual has the support
of society as a whole’. What is missing is the notion of self-help which is projected by
the verb boethein. Boe means a shout and also a cry for help. The boe was a main way
of calling the neighbours for help, and people were supposed to run in response to a cry
for help. The verb boethein became one of the standard Greek words for giving assis-
tance. See Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, pp. 18–20.
29
Plato, Republic, 578e (emphasis added).
30
N.R.E. Fisher, Slavery in Classical Greece (London, 1993), pp. 71–2.
31
Thomas J. Figueira, ‘A Typology of Social Conflict in Greek poleis’, in City-States
in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen, p. 302. See
also P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Were Greek Slaves a Class?’, in The Black Hunter (1981), trans.
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore and London, 1986), pp. 159–67.
32
Paul Cartledge, ‘Rebels & Sambos in Classical Greece’, in Crux: Essays in Greek
History Presented to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday, ed. P. Cartledge and F.D.
Harvey (Exeter and London, 1985), p. 46. The Helots were not slaves in the ordinary
sense. They were an identifiable and cohesive population who have been enslaved en
bloc by conquest. They were therefore Greek, not foreign; they tended to be the property
of the city as a whole, not just owned by individuals. Hence Garlan in his Slavery in
Ancient Greece, Ch. 2, classifies them as ‘community slaves’. Since these were actually
communities many scholars (e.g. Ste. Croix in his Class Struggle) find it helpful to
classify them as ‘state-serfs’ rather than as slaves; Fisher, Slavery in Classical Greece,
pp. 23–4.
340 M. BERENT
It is important to note that Greek slaves were incorporated also culturally into
Greek society. Plato’s and the Old Oligarch’s complaints that in Athens slaves
could not be identified by their physical appearance were perhaps an overstate-
ment of this phenomenon. In other words, the cultural horizontal cleavages
which Gellner sees as characteristic of stratified agrarian communities were
absent in the Greek case.
B. Stasis and Metabole Politeias
By using the traditional notion of the polis-State, Ste. Croix provides a powerful
economic motive for stasis. It aims at the control of the State, which is ‘the
organized power of one class for oppressing another’.33 The idea of the Greek
State as an instrument of class exploitation originated in Engels.34 However, as

Ste. Croix rightly observes, the idea that the (agrarian) State was an instrument
for the appropriation of surplus production is not confined to Marxists, and it

is agreed today that the early State played a significant role ‘in the direct
exploitation of the producers through taxation, compulsory labour and other
obligations’.35 Seeing the polis as a State, Ste. Croix defines State and polis
exploitation ‘as when taxation, military conscription, forced labour or other
services are exacted solely or disproportionately from a particular class or
classes . . . by a State dominated by a superior class’.36
However, a corollary of the statelessness of the polis is that it could not have
been an instrument for the appropriation of surplus production; ‘controlling’
the polis or its constitution could not have resulted in the direct appropriation
of a certain class or segment of its citizen body by another, and the modes of
exploitation considered as characteristic of the early State were absent in the
case of the Greek polis. The absence of direct taxation of citizens has been a
recognized feature of the polis.37 Taxation usually characterized tyrannies, yet
33
Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, p. 287.
34
See F. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 228–30.
35
A.M. Khazanov, ‘Some Theoretical Problems of the Study of the Early State’, in
The Early State, ed. Claessen and Skalnik, p. 87. In their Pre-Capitalist Modes of
Production Hindess and Hirst include direct state taxation, appropriation and compulsory
labour in the ancient mode of production: B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes
of Production (London, 1985), pp. 86–7.
36
37
Ibid., p. 206. M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of
Ancient Greece: An Introduction (London, 1977), p. 121. By contrast, there was no
hesitation in taxing non-citizens. Thus metics in Athens had to pay regularly a special
polltax, the metoikion, which was admittedly moderate, but which symbolized their
inferior status as compared with citizens (ibid.). Though the metoikion might have been
economically important for the polis, the fact that it was moderate and symbolic meant
probably that it did not bear heavily upon the metics (who could freely migrate if they
felt oppressed). Indirect taxes (usually on trade) were frequently resorted to and were
one of the main sources of revenue. Those usually did not distinguish between citizens
and non-citizens and even between Greeks and non-Greeks (ibid., pp. 122–3).
the latter were indeed attempts to centralize power. Further, not only was direct
taxation not imposed (on the poor of Athens), it was also the legal duty of the
rich to undertake liturgies. The liturgy-system was a system whereby the rich
carried a large financial burden of public life and were recompensed by corre-
sponding honours. Military service (the hoplite army) was also a ‘liturgy’
expected of the ‘propertied classes’.38 All these point to the fact that generally
speaking, the economic burden of the polis fell directly upon the rich rather
than the poor citizens and, further, to the fact of the Greek polis being a koinonia
(that is, association or partnership) rather than a State. Of course, it could be
still claimed that the economic burden fell indirectly on the poor — the rich
exploited the poor. Yet this was what Ste. Croix rightly calls ‘individual
exploitation’ (wage-labourers, slaves, serfs, debtors etc.) based on laws and

ideology which were backed by self-help, rather than what he and others define
as ‘State-exploitation’. Nor was the ‘control’ of the polis a means for the direct
appropriation of the work of slaves who were mostly individually owned and
controlled.
We must conclude, then, that stasis could not have been a means for acquiring
wealth by direct appropriation of surplus production. What was, then, the
(economic) raison d’être of stasis?
In Book V of the Politics Aristotle suggests that the objects of stasis were
profit and honour (kerdos kai time).39 The fact that he discusses both stasis and
constitutional change (metabole politeias) in the same book points at the fact
that Aristotle considered stasis mainly as a struggle over the constitution and
that it is through the imposition of their desired constitutions that the staseis
were expecting to gain profit and honour.40
How were kerdos and time linked to the constitution? The most obvious
aspect of a constitutional change was a decrease or increase of the citizen body.
Citizenship, quite apart from the implications of political, legal and religious
status, carried with it substantial economic gains. Thus only citizens could own
land, in the Athenian case only citizens could share the profits of the mines.
Only citizens had access to public funds (liturgies, booty and (in the Athenian
case) the levies that came from the empire). Only citizens had the right to
assistance with respect to food supply. Further, as Aristotle tells us, the consti-
tution was an arrangement of offices and it determined the offices and their
distribution within the various ‘elements’ of the citizen body. Sometimes offices
carried with them profits, as in the case of the Athenian juror, the dikastes.41
38
39
Aristotle, Politics, V.1, 1301b36. Compare with Thucydides who speaks about
ambition (philotimia) and greed (pleonexia) as the causes of stasis (3.82.8).
40
However, while stasis and metabole politeias are intimately connected, they are
not identical. It was possible to achieve constitutional change without stasis and some-
times stasis may occur which is completely divorced from the desire for metabole. See
Wheeler, ‘Aristotle’s Analysis of the Nature of Political Struggle’, p. 161.
342 M. BERENT
Not necessarily related to their profitability, certain offices were considered

honourable, and thus could have been objects of sedition. Consequently Aris-
totle points out that sometimes the purpose of the seditious party was not to
overthrow or change the constitution but to leave it intact to get the various
offices into the hands of its members.42 This seems less so for most of the fifth-
and fourth-century Athenian offices which were manned by ordinary citizens
chosen by lot for one year which ‘leads to the elision of anything that could
properly be termed an executive power’.43
The next question that we must address is, how was stasis related to consti-
tutional change (metabole politeias)?
In the stateless polis the resort to stasis was immanent in the case of a demand
for constitutional change, because the absence of public coercive apparatuses

made peaceful reforms difficult. There was no constitutional means to enforce
the decisions of the majority upon the minority. As Finley has pointed out:
Neither police action against individual miscreants nor crisis measures
against large scale ‘subversion’ tells us how a Greek city-state or Rome was
normally able to enforce governmental decisions through the whole gamut
from foreign policy to taxation and civil law, when they evidently lacked the
means with which, in Laski’s vigorous language, ‘to coerce the opponents of
the government, to break their wills, to compel them to submission’.44
Yet the answer to this question must be that since there were no means to
enforce legislation, constitutional reforms had to be accepted almost unani-
mously. Hansen indeed points out that unanimity characterizes most if not all
the decisions of the Athenian assembly, which indeed points to a high consen-
sual community and could partly explain the relative stability of Athens.45
Unanimity was essential since in stateless conditions even the objection of a
tiny minority could have led to a constitutional stalemate and stasis. Ober
stresses the importance of consensus or homonoia, which means literally ‘same-
mindedness’, in the Athenian ideology where ‘social and political differences
41
Finley, ‘Freedom of the Greek Citizen’, pp. 81–2. P. Garnsey, Famine and Food
Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge, 1988),
p. 80.
42
Aristotle, Politics, V.1, 1301b10–20.
43
R. Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985), p. 9.
However, this might not be true for the archaic Athenian polis. Aristotle points out that
after Solon left Athens the office of the Archon wielded the greatest power (dunamis)
and was one over which strife always arose (Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, 13.1).
44
Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, p. 24.
45
M.H. Hansen, ‘How Did the Athenian Assembly Vote?’, Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Studies, 18 (1977), p. 128; reprinted in The Athenian Ecclesia (Copenhagen,
1983). M.H. Hansen, ‘The Athenian Ecclesia and the Swiss Landsgemeinde’, in The
Athenian Ecclesia (Copenhagen, 1983), pp. 214–15.
are submerged in a unified community of interest. Hence, the state becomes an

organism with a single mind and a single will.’46
Consequently, a division in the assembly was considered to be dangerous, as
something that might lead to stasis. Nicole Loraux notes that it is strange that
‘one of the names given to the vote, diaphora, ‘‘disagreement’’ or ‘‘difference’’,
should imply so close a relationship between this regulated process and the
phenomenon of discord in general’:
Diaphora, then: disagreement or difference. In one case, the word denotes
the division of the civic body into two in the assembly, along a line marked
out by two conflicting options confronting each other. The risk in this case
is that if the situation reaches a deadlock the opposition between the two
different opinions can slide towards civil war.47

As we have already seen, stasis meant also a ‘position’ in politics, and we

can understand now why having a political standing was considered dangerous
and literally identified with civil war. People who have political standings tend
to disagree, and disagreement always carried with it the danger of stasis. Thus
we have what Nicole Loraux calls a ‘strange contradiction’, where politics
actually means its denial.
Yet, the relation between stasis and metabole politeias was somewhat more
complicated. As Finley (following Loenen) emphasized, ‘illegality is precisely
not the constant hallmark of stasis’.48 In fact, stasis could be seen not only as
a destabilizer of constitutions, but also as a semi-constitutional means to reform
them. It is important to stress that stasis did not necessarily involve violence,
but in some cases it was a threat or situation and state of mind of the citizens
where the recourse to violence was potentially immanent.49 In certain cases,
where the outcomes of stasis could be foreseen in advance, the threat of stasis
could be enough to bring about the constitutional preferences of the dominant
group. Thus Aristotle tells us that ‘where either side has a clear preponderance,
the other will be unwilling to risk a struggle with the side which is obviously
the stronger’.50 Yet, in the case of violent struggle a victory for one group could
lead to the acceptance of its constitutional preferences, or a constitutional
compromise. Unless the victorious group wanted to establish a tyranny, it
dissolved itself and vanished within the citizen body; the staseis were armed
and active as long as the conflict lasted, and then the community would return
to its stasis-free stateless condition until the next stasis. What should keep the
46
J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power
of the People (Princeton, 1989), p. 297.
47
Loraux, ‘Reflections of the Greek City on Unity and Division’, pp. 39–40.
48
Finley, ‘Freedom of the Greek Citizen’, p. 82. Loenen, Stasis, p. 5.
49
Mark A. Barnard, Stasis in Thucydides: Narrative and Analysis of Factionalism
in the Polis (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill PhD Thesis, 1980), pp. 51–7.
50
344 M. BERENT
community peaceful after stasis is not a government which imposes law and
order, but the vivid memory of the outcome of the last stasis plus the new
constitutional arrangements. In this way stasis (or the threat of stasis) could act
as a semi-legal means for constitutional changes and stabilization of the politi-
cal community. The fact that only citizens were allowed to engage in stasis
points further to its being a sort of constitutional instrument.
C. Stasis and Stability: The Polis and the Tribe
Traditionally stasis has been considered as both a peculiar phenomenon of the
ancient Greek cities and as the cause of their destruction. Runciman challenged
this tradition, suggesting that ‘it is not stasis which of itself drives any given
type of society into extinction’, pointing to Korea, Mamluk Egypt and Haiti as
‘societies whose exceptionally high level of internal violence did not prevent
their institutions from reproducing themselves quite stably enough’. However,

one should bear in mind that, unlike the polis, all these three were State-
societies, and as such they could have withstood a high level of internal
violence.51 Thus Ronald Cohen says that ‘to be a ‘‘true’’ state the system should
exhibit some stable or permanent hierarchy that can withstand the disruptive
effects of succession struggles’. Cohen suggests that the diagnostic key of the
State is that of fission:
All political systems except true states break up into similar units as part of
their normal process of political activity . . . The state is a system specially
designed to restrain such tendencies. And this capacity creates an entirely
new society: one which can expand without splitting, incorporate other
polities and ethnic groups, and become more populous, more heterogeneous
and more powerful, with no known upper limit on its size and strength.52
Those political systems which, unlike states, break up into similar units are
tribal communities. Indeed, social anthropologists tend to describe the agrarian
world as if it were composed of two kinds of political systems: agrarian States,
on the one hand, and acephalous tribal communities, on the other. The state-
lessness of the Greek polis suggests that comparison between conflicts in tribal
communities and stasis could be helpful for the better understanding of the
latter. The study of tribal conflicts shows that, unlike stasis, horizontal conflicts
need not necessarily be explosive. Segmentary theory which is associated with
the works of Evans-Pritchard and Gellner, suggests that in tribal communities
51
Runciman, ‘Doomed to Extinction’, pp. 349–50. The Mamluk system, though it
originated in tribal conquest, used individually recruited armed forces and bureaucrats
composed of mercenaries and slaves. See E. Gellner, ‘Tribalism and State in the Middle
East’, in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph
Kostiner (London, 1991), pp. 113–16. Also see Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The
Evolution of Islamic Polity (Cambridge, 1980).
52
Ronald Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Politi-
cal Evolution, ed. R. Cohen and E. Service (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 4.
fission and fusion are part of the normal process of political activity. Thus
Evans-Pritchard observes:
The reason why we speak of Nuer political groups, and of the tribe in
particular, as relative groups and state that they are not easily described in
terms of political morphology, is that political relations are dynamic. They
are always changing in one direction or the other. The most evident movement
is towards fission. The tendency of tribes and tribal sections towards fission
and internal opposition between their parts is balanced by a tendency in the
direction of fusion, of the combination and amalgamation of groups. This
tendency towards fusion is inherent in the segmentary character of Nuer
political structure, for although any group tends to split into opposed parts,
these parts tend to fuse in relation to other groups.53
In fact, according to segmentary theory, conflict is built into tribal commu-

nities in the sense that they retain a relative order through balanced opposition
created by warring factions. Thus Gellner observes:
. . . the order which was there to be found in an anarchic, ungoverned social
environment was produced by balanced opposition, by a balance of power
. . . in this kind of society units of different size are, as it were, nested in each
other; the tribe divides into clans, clans into sub clans and so on . . . No
particular level of size is in fact much more important than any other. At each
and every level, there is opposition between groups of that particular scale,
and the rivalry and opposition of two sub-clans, which keep each of them
internally cohesive, does not preclude co-operation as fellow units of the full
clan. Balanced opposition can only be sometimes like an adequate explana-
tion of order, if units do exist at every level of size at which conflict is liable
to arise.54
The polis, though stateless, was not a ‘relative group’ and could ‘easily be
described in terms of political morphology’ as a political community. As
stateless communities, the poleis indeed tended towards fission, though unlike
tribal communities, fission, or stasis, was not ‘part of their normal process of
political activity’ and consequently the poleis did not break up (or integrate)
into similar units, as tribal communities do. In other words, the polis, though
stateless, was different from the stateless communities studied by anthropolo-
gists, because it was not tribal, and it is today very doubtful whether tribal
forms ever existed, even in archaic Greece.55
53
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘The Nuer of the Southern Sudan’, in African Political
Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans Pritchard (Oxford, 1940), p. 284.
54
Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 189–90.
55
For a detailed refutation of the notion of the ‘tribal polis’ see: D. Roussel, Tribu
et cité: études sur les groupes sociaux dans les cités grecques aux époques archaïque et
classique (Paris 1976); Félix Bourriot, Recherches sur la nature du génos: étude
d’histoire sociale Athénienne — périodes archaïque et classique (Lille and Paris, 1976);
Walter Donlan, ‘The Social Groups of Dark Age Greece’, Classical Philology, 80 (1985);
Richard C. Smith, ‘The Clans of Athens and the Historiography of the Archaic Period’,
346 M. BERENT
The non-tribal nature of the polis meant that there were not any built-in
divisions which, in times of civil conflict, could regulate the conflict and thus
promise the relative stability which is created by balanced opposition. Generally
speaking, a stasis was any organized group which tried to achieve political goals
by force. The struggle between the ‘classes’, that is between the rich and the
poor, or between the oligarchs and the demos, was a main source of stasis.56 A
very important kind of faction was the upper class oligarchic faction which
drew its power also from alliances outside the boundaries of the polis.57
However, what characterized the Greek faction was that, unlike the tribal
kinship unit or the modern parties, they were not corporate bodies. Thus though
certain factions might have been rooted in the social ‘classes’, the Greek staseis
were not parties, and it is the fluidity and the ad-hoc character of the Greek
faction which should be stressed. Thus the following quotation by Marcus
Wheeler seems to summarize adequately the phenomenon of stasis:

. . . superficially, stasis is a situation occurring in the public life of the greater
number of the Greek city-states at larger or smaller intervals of time. It results
from temporarily organized groups of citizens, and its characteristic feature
is ‘illegality’ of behaviour, which may range from minor infringements of the
‘constitution’ to wholesale massacre of opponents.58
Although the absence of any built-in divisions and loyalties could have posed
a problem to the organization of the Greek staseis in the first place, the
voluntary character of the staseis also made it very difficult to know in advance
how many people would actually engage in open hostilities, which made it a
constant temptation for minority groups to try their luck and engage in stasis.
Further, this difficulty in organizing private armies was somewhat compensated
by the availability of standing armies nearby, which was also a constant
temptation for various staseis to increase their power by inviting those armies
to meddle in the city’s affairs. Such were the armies of outside powers such as
Persia and Macedon, but also local powers during the Peloponnesian War, when
mobilized polis-armies were available for considerable periods.59
While the absence of built-in divisions, and the voluntary character of the
Greek staseis, meant that stasis could not have been regulated as in a tribal
community, it also meant that, unlike in a tribal community, conflict was not
Classical Views, n.s. 4 (1985); Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, pp. 44–5; see also
M.I. Finley, ‘Max Weber and the Greek City-State’, in Ancient History: Evidence and
Models (London 1985), p. 91. O. Murray, ‘Cities of Reason’, in The Greek City: from
Homer to Alexander, ed. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford, 1990), p. 13.
56
M.I. Finley, ‘The Ancient Greeks and their Nation’ (1954), in The Use and Abuse
of History (London, 1986), p. 130.
57
G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship & the Greek City (Cambridge, 1987), p. 155.
58
Wheeler, ‘Aristotle’s Analysis of the Nature of Political Struggle’, p. 168 (empha-
sis added). (Indeed ‘illegality’ is a problematic term for describing stasis. See below.)
59
See Luis A. Losada, The Fifth Column in the Peloponnesian War (Leiden, 1972).
normal and that the stasis-free society could be achieved, or at least set up as
a goal. A stasis-free society did not necessarily mean one without groups or
‘elements’. As Aristotle points out, if the middle class is clearly dominant in
any possible combination of the ‘elements’ of the polis, stasis could be pre-
vented. In another place Aristotle says:
Revolutions also occur when the sections of the polis which are usually
regarded as antagonists — for example the rich and the common people —
are equally balanced, with little or nothing of a middle class to turn the scale;
for where either side has a clear preponderance, the other will be unwilling
to risk a struggle with the side which is obviously the stronger. This is the
reason why men of pre-eminent merit do not, as a rule, attempt to stir up
sedition: they are only a few against many.60

Aristotle states here a very important rule for stateless communities. In the
latter, conflicts arise between equal and similar groups, and where sharp in-
equality between the potential factions exists, the conflict disappears. The
kinship ‘tree’ structure of tribal communities promises that at each and every
level (clans, sub clans and so on) there is opposition between groups of that
particular scale, while in Greek society a sharp inequality between the potential
factions was possible. Thus while the tribal structure regulates conflict, it also
promises its perpetuation.
The absence of natural divisions within the polis, or the ad hoc nature of the
Greek faction, could clarify further the reasons behind the so-called ‘Solonian
law of stasis’. This law, which threatened to punish with atimia (disenfrachise-
ment) people who would not participate in a stasis, is not necessarily at odds
with the general fear and condemnation of stasis. For the law speaks about a
city which is already torn by civil strife, that is, where at least one faction was
set on its course. In this case the only way available to check it would be by
another faction.61 Punishment by atimia meant that it was the privilege only of
citizens to engage in stasis and that ideally the answer to sedition should have
been the creation of a counter-association of highly motivated citizens. As it
was put by Edmund Burke, ‘when bad men combine, the good must associ-
ate’.62 Yet it is right here, in the voluntary character of the staseis, that their
explosive nature lay. Ideally the ‘good’ must be determined to fight the ‘bad’
association and risk their lives for the public good (assuming that it is possible
to distinguish, as Aristotle does, between the interest of the community and that
60
61
As Loenen rightly observes, this law was not a recommendation for the citizen to
join any faction. However, I think Loenen is wrong when he says that the context of this
law implies that it was very clear to every citizen which stasis he belonged to, because
this would mean that the polis was divided into factions which indeed created a sort of
equilibrium. Loenen, Stasis, p. 5.
62
Quoted in Terence Ball, ‘Party’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change,
ed. Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge 1989), p. 174.
348 M. BERENT
of the dominant group). Such a ‘good’ association was probably as difficult to

find as it is for a sheriff in the Western movie to enlist citizen-members of the
(stateless) community as deputies in order to fight the bad guys. In other words,
if apathy was the rule, what would normally happen is that a faction which tried
to disturb the political balance would be opposed (if at all) by another interested
faction, that is, a faction that was motivated by factional interest or by sheer
hatred of the other faction, rather than by the public interest. Because partici-
pation in staseis was voluntary, it was in the nature of stasis to draw into the
conflict groups which were motivated by narrow self-interest, which increased
its explosive character. Loenen claims that most staseis were opportunistic
groups, and that we are unable to name a conflict in Greece in the field of
domestic or foreign politics that was originated from and was fought over the
realization of an abstract idea.63 Finley adopted a sort of Marxist attitude
towards stasis, claiming that ‘substantive issues . . . lay behind popular interest
in constitutional reforms and elections, in political conflicts’ and that, though
‘stasis was a permanent threat, appearing in the record, when it does, as a
political or constitutional conflict’ ‘stasis was avowedly a clash of interests,
nothing more, whether it was covered by rhetoric about justice or ‘‘true’’
equality’.64 Others objected to the substantive approach and suggested that
conflict was less social and ‘more a matter of individual decisions over choices
in policy’.65
The substantive and political approaches to the explanation of stasis are not
necessarily contradictory: membership in the polis carried with it ‘substantive’
benefits, and constitutional changes also meant substantive ones. Consequently,
it was probably obvious to every Greek that talk about ‘justice’ and ‘constitu-
tional reform’ was also about substantive issues. On the other hand, to the extent
that ‘justice’ and ‘constitutional reform’ did carry with them a moral or civil
connotation, it was probably true that those tended to be blurred with substan-
tive issues. In times of constitutional crisis, the resort to stasis in order to decide
the constitutional issue was probably immanent. This meant that only either
highly motivated citizens or highly self-interested ones would be involved in a
stasis which would aim at constitutional reforms. Since the latter are usually
found more readily than the former, narrow interests were a main instrument
for constitutional reform.
63
Loenen, Stasis, p. 2.
64
Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, pp. 110–11 (emphasis added), p. 134. I am
following here a discussion by Nicole Loraux, ‘Stasis Ancient and Modern’ (unpublished
conference paper, Cambridge, 1992), p. 4.
65
Thomas J. Figueira, ‘A Typology of Social Conflict in Greek Poleis’, in City-States
in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen, p. 296.
Wheeler, ‘Aristotle’s Analysis of the Nature of Political Struggle’, p. 169.
II
Stasis and the Nature of Greek Politics
A. Stasis and the Greek Invention of Politics
Social anthropologists tend to describe the agrarian world as if it were com-
posed of two kinds of political systems: agrarian States on the one hand, and
acephalous tribal communities on the other. Paradoxically, within this agrarian
world view the polis has no place, since it was both stateless and non-tribal.
Indeed, as an agrarian society the Greek experience manifested in the polis
seems distinct and unique when compared with these two kinds of political
systems. To what extent, then, could the unique structure of Greek society and
that of social strife, stasis, help us to understand the uniqueness of the Greek
experience?
I would like to start with an observation made by Finley about the uniqueness
of the Greek experience:
. . . every society of any complexity requires a machinery for laying down
rules and administering them . . . But the Greeks took a radical step, a double
one: they located the source of authority in the polis, in the community itself,
and they decided on policy in an open discussion, eventually by voting, by
counting heads. That is politics, and fifth century Greek drama and histori-
ography reveal how far politics had come to dominate Greek culture.
Finley compares this with the decision-making procedure in the eastern em-
pires:
Of course there was a discussion about policy in neighbouring and earlier
societies, in the court circles of the kings of Egypt, Assyria and Persia, or on
lower levels, in the courts of the Persian satraps and the circles of the Homeric
‘heroes’. Such discussion did not constitute politics, however, for they were
neither open nor binding. The king or satrap received advice, but he was not
obliged to heed it or even to request it. Those with access to him planned,
manoeuvred, and sometimes conspired to direct his decisions, in a procedure
that has been called government by antechamber (rather than government by
‘chamber’). The same was true of the Greek tyrants, whose existence was
therefore a denial of the polis idea, and in whose regimes politics ceased to
exist. It must be acknowledged that there were also some early non-Greek
political communities, among the Phoenicians and the Etruscans, at any rate.
Nevertheless, it remains correct that, effectively, the Greeks ‘invented’ poli-
tics. In the western tradition, the history of politics has always started from
the Greeks; that is symbolized by the word ‘politics’ itself, with its root in
polis. In no Near Eastern society, furthermore, was the culture politicized as
it was among the Greeks.66
66
M.I. Finley, ‘Politics’, in The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal (Oxford, 1984),
ed. M.I. Finley, pp. 22–3.
350 M. BERENT
Finley expresses here the traditional view, which perhaps received its best
expression in Popper’s Open Society and which attributed the Greek invention
of democracy, politics and (political) philosophy mainly to Greek rationality.67
Yet this view seems to have a touch of what has come to be known today as
‘orientalism’. Thus when Finley says in the above quotation that ‘the Greeks
took a radical step’ towards democracy and politics, he seems to suggest also
that the choice was equally open for both, East and West, and that the Orientals
did not possess the same rationality or courage which were needed for this step.
Yet, since the Greek experience is indeed so unique, one must be very careful
with such an ‘idealist’ approach which might turn the argument on its head. In
other words, the Greeks did not so much choose democracy and politics, but
rather were pushed towards them by the decentralized unstratified nature of

their society. Where the means of coercion are distributed among armed or
potentially armed members of the community, where there is no means to

impose decisions upon the reluctant, everybody has to be consulted and every-
body has to agree. J. Ober draws a very interesting comparison between the
Athenian assembly and the eighteenth-century Massachusetts town meetings.68
In the case of the latter Michael Zuckerman has observed the relation between
the need for consensus and the absence of law-enforcement apparatus:
In the absence of any satisfactory means of traditional or institutional coer-
cion, a recalcitrant could not be compelled to adhere to the common course
of action. Therefore the common course of action had to be so shaped as to
leave no recalcitrant — that was a vital function of the New England town
meeting. To oversimplify perhaps, the town meeting solved the problem of
enforcement by evading it.69
Zuckerman concludes that the Massachusetts town was democratic not be-
cause of any zeal for democracy but because the absence of means of coercion
meant that any common action needed to be consensual, that is, that everybody
had to be consulted.70 Saying the same about Athens would be perhaps too
strong since, as Ober observes, whereas in Massachusetts democracy ‘occupied
a peripheral position in terms of social organization, for the Athenians, democ-
racy and equality became central organizing principles of their social as well
as of their political order’.71 Nevertheless, Zuckerman’s observation does point
to the tendency of stateless communities towards democracy, or ‘open govern-
ment’. This is exemplified by Aristotle who, in his discussion on (Greek)
67
K.R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. I: The Spell of Plato
(Princeton, 5th revised edn., 1966).
68
Ober, Mass and Elite, p. 71.
69
M. Zuckerman, ‘The Social Context of Democracy in Massachusetts’, The William
and Mary Quarterly, 25 (1968), pp. 523–44, p. 527.
70
Ibid., pp. 527–8.
71
kingship, points to the difficulty the king has to differentiate himself from the
people that surround him. The king, Aristotle says, ‘. . . cannot keep his eye
readily on a number of things at once. He will thus find it necessary to appoint
a number of officers to give him assistance.’72
Indeed it is actually the practice of monarchs to take to themselves, as it were,
many eyes and ears and hands and feet, and to use as colleagues those who
are the friends of their rule and their person. The colleagues of a monarch
must be his friends: otherwise they will not act in accordance with his policy.
But if they are friends of his person and rule, they will also be — as a man’s
friends always are — his equals and peers; and in believing that his friends
ought to rule he is also committed to the belief that people who are equal to
and like himself ought to rule like himself.73

We can see, then, how one-man rule actually melts before our eyes. Here it
would be very interesting to compare Aristotle with Ibn-Khaldun, the
fourteenth-century Arab sociologist, who had analysed the establishment of
tribal-States, that is, attempts of acephalous tribes to establish States or take
over existing-ones. The tribal ruler is in a somewhat better position than the
Greek one, for he has a ‘natural’ basis for his administration — his clan. Thus,
as the Greek ruler tries to create an administration out of his friends, the tribal
ruler tries to create it out of his clan:
A ruler can achieve power only with the help of his own people. They are
his group and his helpers . . . He uses them to fight against those who revolt
against his dynasty. It is they with whom he fills his administrative offices.74
While the clan supplies the power base of the ruler, ‘this applies as long as the
first stage of the dynasty lasts’, for soon the contradiction between centraliza-
tion and the egalitarian nature of the clan becomes apparent:
At the end of their power, dynasties eventually resort to employing strangers
and accepting them as followers . . . In taking them on as followers and
replacing his old clients and original followers by them, the ruler is motivated
by the fact that (his old clients and followers) have become overbearing. They
show little obedience to him. They look at him in the same way his own tribe
and relatives do. Close contact between him and them existed for a very long
time. They have grown up together with him, had connections with his
ancestors and older members of his family, and were aligned with the great
man and his house. As a result, they become proud and overbearing towards
him. This is why the ruler comes to shun them and use others in their place.75
72
Aristotle, Politics, III.16, 1287b9.
73
Ibid., 1287b28–35.
74
Ibn-Khaldun, The Muqaddima, trans. Franz Rosenthal, abridged and ed. N.J. Da-
wood (London, 1967), p. 146.
75
Ibid., p. 149.
352 M. BERENT
Thus tribal communities also tend to ‘open government’ in the sense that
they, like the polis, are blessed with a wide military participation, and conse-
quently also with wide political participation. However, their kinship structure
makes them less conducive to the development of ‘politics’. As we have already
seen, in segmentary tribal society when division occurs it is according to
lineage, thus promising a certain stability through balanced opposition. Accord-
ing to Gellner, a necessary condition for an equilibrium between factions is that
each and every member of the community knows to which faction he belongs.
This condition is satisfied by the ‘tree like’ structure of the tribe:
It is the formal property of ‘trees’ in the mathematical sense that there is only
one route from any point to any other point. Segmentary systems, as ex-
pressed for instance in the genealogies of persons involved in them, are also
‘trees’ in just this sense. On the genealogical tree, one way only leads from
any one man to any other. Hence, in so far as obligations and loyalties are
defined agnatically, there can be no ambiguity in the relationship between
two men located on the same ‘tree’, nor in the moral claims and expectations
generated by that relationship. The formal property of uniqueness of connec-
tion between any two points on a ‘tree’ has the important social correlate —
the social relation between any two individuals is (again, at least ideally)
unambiguous and unique.76
It is the unambiguity of the relation between the individual and the group
which makes politics redundant in tribal societies. Gellner says that ‘agrarian
man seems to face the dilemma of being dominated either by kings or by
cousins’,77 yet the Greeks were dominated by neither. Consequently, when the
ancient Greek community was divided it is very likely that the individual faced
conflicting moral claims, and thus that the question whether and, if so, which
stasis to join would turn into a moral and political dilemma. This explains how
relatively easy it was to switch loyalties in the ancient Greek world. The absence
of a central authority which symbolized and imposed identity, on the one hand,
and the absence of kinship identity (and, in fact, also a territorial one),78 left
much room for individual deliberations, and in fact for ‘politics’. The dilemma
76
E. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (Chicago, 1969), pp. 43–4 (emphasis added).
77
E. Gellner, ‘An Anthropological View of War and Violence’, in The Institution of
War, ed. R. Hinde (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 64.
78
That the polis, as a political entity or political system (to distinguish it from the
polis in the sense of the city), was not defined by territorial terms was pointed out by
Finley, Hansen and others. Finley says: ‘The polis was not a place, though it occupied a
defined territory; it was people acting in concert’ (M.I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks
(London, 1963), p. 56); M.I. Finley, Authority and Legitimacy in the Classical City State
(Copenhagen, 1982), pp. 3–4; M.H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of
Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), pp. 58–9.
was especially difficult for individuals from the aristocracy who faced obliga-
tions from both the polis and the guest-friend networks which it transcended.79
We come to a point where it is possible to understand how stasis had come
to mean both an organized political group and a political standing. The egali-
tarian non-kin nature of Greek society meant that nobody could initiate a stasis
or have a political standing by the right of his place in the social hierarchy,
because the latter simply did not exist, or was irrelevant. The absence of public
coercive apparatuses meant that within a polis force was always private and
never public, and that in order to have a political standing (which ultimately
must be backed by force), a group or faction of followers should have been
created to back that political standing. While politics implied faction the
opposite was also true, namely that faction implied politics: the only way to
organize a faction in an egalitarian stateless community was by politics (that
is, not by force but by persuasion).

B. Politics Ancient and Modern
The fear of faction was not confined to the ancient Greeks. Hobbes, for instance,
retained the Greek distaste for faction:
But if it be the duty of princes to restrain the factions, much more concerns
them to dissolve and dissipate the factions themselves. Now I call a faction,
a multitude of subjects gathered together either by mutual contracts among
themselves, or by power of someone, without his or their authority who bear
the supreme rule. A faction, therefore, is as it were, a city in a city . . .80
Hobbes’s solution to what he sees as the problem of faction is to dissolve
factions by the force of the State. The condemnation of party went further from
Hobbes to eighteenth-century thinkers, who rejected Hobbes’s absolutism. It
was a constant theme in the debate about the American Second Constitution
and was shared by both federalists and anti-federalists. The American Second
79
Thus Gehrke, in his Stasis, emphasizes the weight of personal ambitions and drive
for power of active politicians, almost exclusively of the upper class, and capable of
sudden switches of political alliances within and between close-knit groups in small
communities. See N.R.E. Fisher, Review of Gehrke’s Stasis, Journal of Hellenic Studies,
107 (1987), pp. 224–5. G. Herman says that ‘throughout its history, the Greek city was
torn by conflict between upper-class factions who derived their power and resources
from foci of power which lay outside its boundaries. Networks of alliances linked factions
from several cities and radiated from the great empires located at the fringes of the world
of the cities, creating a system of external friendships that could offer rewards — wealth,
fame, position — even more tempting than those of the city itself’ (Herman, Ritualised
Friendship, p. 155).
80
Hobbes, De Cive, XIII.13, in Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (De Homine and
De Cive), ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, 1991).
354 M. BERENT
Constitution, as it was introduced in the Federalist Papers, was in fact a

‘constitution against parties’.81 Thus we have James Madison saying:
By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whenever amounting to a
majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some
common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the right of the other
citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.82
Madison’s solution to faction was to create a constitutional balance between
the factions. In the absence of a State the Hobbesian solution to faction was not
available to the Greeks. As for Madison, his constitutional balance assumes
factions which are essentially different from the Greek ones in the sense that
they do not command physical force (and thus presupposes the existence of a
State which monopolizes this force). Madison’s solution for the non-constitu-
tional factions, the violent factions, is not different from Hobbes’s: they are
checked by the force of the (federal) State.
Thus the modern concept of politics, as it was introduced by the first modern
theorists of the State, dealt primarily with the regulation of force, since the State
was (to use Max Weber’s celebrated definition) an agency within society which
has the monopoly of the application of violence. The Greek concept was
different. If politics was the science of public affairs (ta politika), it could not
have been about the regulation of force, since in the Greek context force was
private and usually identified with the advancement of private and sectional
interests. Thus Greek political science was, as E. Barker observes, ‘particularly
and predominantly ethical’.83 This meant that the Greek solution to faction was
not based on coercion and conflict but was moral or educational. As Finley
observes:
No one who has read the Greek political writers can have failed to notice the
unanimity of approach in this respect. Whatever the disagreements among
them, they all insist that the state must stand outside class or other factional
interests. Its aims and objectives are moral, timeless, and universal, and they
can be achieved — more correctly approached or approximated, only by
education, moral conduct (especially on the part of those in authority),
morally correct legislation, and the choice of right governors. The existence
of classes and interests as an empirical fact is, of course, not denied. What
is denied is that the choice of political goals can legitimately be linked with
these classes and interests, or that the good of the state can be advanced
except by ignoring (if not suppressing) private interests.84
81
Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (Los Angeles, 1969), Ch. 2.
82
J. Madison, ‘Federalist no. 10’, The Federalist Papers (1788), ed. I. Kramnick
(Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 123.
83
E. Barker, Greek Political Theory, p. 6.
84
M.I Finley, ‘The Athenian Demagogues’, pp. 45–6, in Democracy Ancient and
Modern (London, 2nd edn., 1985) (emphasis added).
The conflict between factions, or private interests, and the public good is to
be resolved by the (moral) delegitimization of private (that is factional) interest,
or by setting as a goal the factionless society, a community of homonoia
(same-mindedness)85 and in which the co-ordination between the various
groups and individuals is achieved by the correct behaviour of each element.
The latter is not caused or induced by the State, or any external sources, but it
is rather the outcome of self-restraint whereby each member or element within
the community calculates carefully their position with respect to the commu-
nity.
Thus, when Socrates, in the Republic, launches his enquiry into the nature of
justice, one of the first theories which he discusses is that Justice is ‘to benefit
one’s friends and to harm one’s enemies’.86 This was a faction-centred justice
based upon retaliation or balanced opposition which characterizes stateless
communities in general. Socrates is seeking to replace it with self-restraint:

‘Then we ought neither to requite wrong with wrong nor to do evil to anyone,
no matter what he may have done to us.’87 Socratic self-restraint has been taken
usually as a moral principle ‘very similar to the Christian teachings’.88 Yet it
could be seen also as an expression of a political principle of a society whose
stability, in the absence of state-coercive apparatus, was always threatened by
individuals or parties who were seeking redress whenever they felt that they
were prevented from having what they considered was their due. From a
sociological point of view Socratic ‘self-restraint’ meant the existence of what
Radcliffe-Brown calls a ‘public sentiment’ or ‘moral coercion’ which turns into
an effective tool for preserving law and order.89
This Socratic concept of politics was antithetical to the one which was
introduced by Hobbes and Madison. In the case of the latter, politics was
reduced to conflicting interests and involved the application of (public) force.
The Hobbesian tradition clearly rejected a moral solution to the problem created
by conflicting interests. Thus Hobbes says:
But because ambition and greediness of honours cannot be rooted out of the
minds of men, it is not the duty of the rulers to endeavour it; but by constant
application of rewards and punishments, they may so order it . . .90
85
86
Plato, Republic, 334d.
87
Plato, Crito, 49C (trans. Fowler Loeb edn.). For the idea that the Platonic dialogues
reflect a struggle between traditional-Homeric values and new emerging polis-centred
values see A.W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford, 1960).
88
Popper, The Open Society, p. 105.
89
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Preface’, in African Political Systems, ed. Fortes and
Evans-Pritchard, pp. xv–xvi.
90
Hobbes, De Cive, XXXIII, 12.
356 M. BERENT
While Madison rejected the Hobbesian absolute State, he still maintained,

very much in the Hobbesian tradition, that ‘if the impulse and the opportunity
be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives
can be relied on as adequate control’. 91 As Madison put it ‘the causes of faction
cannot be removed and the relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling
its effects’.92 The Greeks, however, since they had no public means to deal with
the effects of faction, sought to deal with its causes. In this respect it is very
interesting to note that even Plato’s ideal city, which has the Guardians as a sort
of differentiated public agency which monopolizes the means of coercion, is
not ‘primarily a repressive agent’,93 but rather an educational system.
The distinction drawn by Robert Dahl between external and internal checks
could help us to understand further the difference between the Greek and the
Hobbesian solution to the problem of faction. The modern solution which was
proposed by Hobbes and by the fathers of the American constitution, who were
greatly influenced by Hobbes, was based upon ‘external checks’, that is, the
application of what Hobbes calls ‘rewards and punishments’ to the individual
(or, in the Madisonian case, also to the group) from a source which is external
to the individual or the group.94 Consequently it is based upon the idea of force
and conflict. By contrast the Greek solution was based upon ‘internal checks’
which means those moral inhibitions which are instilled in each member of the
community by a strong public sentiment, morality and education which aim at
self-restraint.
C. Intolerant Individualism
Through the ideology of self-restraint and ‘homonoia’, the community wished
to curb the outstanding individual. Nevertheless, in the absence of a profes-
sional agency which was responsible for public affairs (ta politika), those fell
directly to the citizen-body, which made the polis highly dependent on such
outstanding individuals.
Consequently, Greek ideology exhibits two complementary features which
are directly related to the statelessness of the Greek polis: a great nervousness
towards the eccentric, on the one hand, accompanied by a strong demand for
the moral ‘elevation’ of the citizen for the sake of the community, on the other.
The demand for participation is manifested, of course, in the law of stasis
attributed to Solon. It is also reflected in the Periclean Funeral Oration:
Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs
of the polis as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own
business are extremely well-informed on general politics — this is a peculi-
91
Madison, ‘Federalist no. 10’, p. 126.
92
Ibid., p. 125.
93
C. Starr, Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis 800–500 BC (New York,
1986), p. 46.
94
R. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, 1956), p. 6.
arity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a
man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at
all.95
Yet these demands for non-eccentricity on the one hand, and for participation
on the other, could sometimes contradict each other. For the demand for
participation meant that the individual should assert himself through public life,
yet it was this assertion that created the constant worry of stasis.96 Consequently
individual decisions were important (especially those of eminent individuals),
and at the centre of Greek political ideology was the individual who is facing
a moral dilemma. He should know his exact place — his rights and duties. He
must not exceed them, for then he would be hubristic and a threat to the
community; neither must he shrink from them, for then he would be blamed as
non-participating. Though the individual must know his place, with the exclu-
sion of Plato’s theory, his place is not defined for him by the constitution. It is
his responsibility or his moral dilemma to find his exact place and to act
accordingly, and he will be punished if he takes the (morally) wrong decisions.
We have met this moral dilemma already in Solon’s law of stasis. The context
of this law meant that the decision concerning which stasis to join rested upon
the individual, and so was his moral responsibility. Of course, one could abide
by this ‘law’ and join the losing party, and thus be punished by the victorious
one.
Probably one of the best illustrations of this dilemma is to be found in
ostracism. Through this institution it was possible to expel someone from the
community, not because of something that he had done, or intended to do, but
because of something he might do or cause others to do in his name. As Aristotle
notes, all kinds of constitutions benefited from this practice and he supports
ostracism as a part of good public policy, even though outstanding men might
be expelled:
A shipwright would not tolerate a stern, or any other part of a ship, which
was out of proportion. A choir-master would not admit to a choir a singer
with a greater compass and a finer voice than any of the other members. In
view of this general rule, a policy of levelling need not prevent a monarch
who practises it from being in harmony with his state provided that his
government is otherwise beneficial; and thus the argument in favour of
ostracism possesses a kind of political justice in relation to any of the
recognized forms of the pre-eminence.97
95
Thucydides, 2.40 (emphasis added).
96
See Kurt Raaflaub, ‘City-State, Territory, and Empire in Classical Antiquity’, in
City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen,
pp. 578–81; Ober, Mass and Elite, Ch. IV.
97
Aristotle, Politics, III.13, 1284b10–15.
358 M. BERENT
Thus ostracism is justified by the need for ‘levelling’ when harmony is

disrupted as one of the parts of the community exceeds its ‘natural’ borders. It
is very important to understand that, although it involves the application of
punishment, ostracism is a moral or, to use Robert Dahl’s terminology, an
internal restraint. Thus it is for the individual — and here we are talking, of
course, of the outstanding individual, the leader or the demagogue — to make
the moral choice of where and how he would like to assert himself in the
community. There was no way to know in advance whether what he was doing
at present would end in glory or ostracism. The decision and the assessment are
his own, and so is the responsibility.
Ostracism was used in Athens in the fifth century only. In the fourth century
another constitutional process became dominant (though ostracism was never

formally abandoned). This legal motion, the graphe paranomon, was initiated
in court in order to cancel decisions which had been passed (or were about to
be voted) by the assembly, on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. This
motion could be initiated in courts also against decisions made by the assembly
which were already carried out. Though the allegedly unconstitutional decision
was made by the assembly, it was its proposer who was sued. The fact that those
‘unconstitutional decisions’ were introduced and ratified by the assembly
shows that there was no way of knowing in advance whether a motion was
unconstitutional. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that there was no
way to know whether a certain proposal would receive eventually a graphe
paranomon. Probably some proposals carried with them the danger of being
‘unconstitutional’, yet the question whether someone would come forward and
propose a graphe depended on many other factors, such as what were the likely
and the actual outcomes of carrying out the proposal, or whether the proposer
had enemies who would come forward with the graphe paranomon (of course
there was no formal system of public prosecution). Again, what is obvious here
is that this is an internal restraint which the Athenian constitution placed upon
the Athenian leaders, or the demagogues (rhetores kai politeuomenoi), for it
was those people who usually made proposals in the assembly.98 The Athenians
thus acknowledged that popular assemblies could be carried away by gifted
orators against their better judgment and interest. It was for the leader or the
proposer to weigh his steps carefully, it was his moral decision and his respon-
sibility.
Nowhere is the importance of the individual and his moral decisions on the
one hand, and the demand for self-restraint on the other, more emphasized than
in the story of the death of Socrates. The dialogue between Socrates and the
Laws in Crito shows both the fear of the (outstanding) individual and the
importance of his moral decisions. What strikes one immediately in reading this
dialogue is the inferior position which is assumed by the laws, that is the ‘State’,
when compared to the position of the individual, Socrates. The Laws beg and
98
Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, p. 207.
persuade, they don’t command, which is quite obvious since these laws have
no State-power to back them.99
Tell me, Socrates, what have you in mind to do? Are you not intending by
this thing you are trying to do, to destroy us, the laws, and the entire state
(polis), so far as in you lies? Or do you think the state (polis) can exist and
not be overturned, in which the decisions reached by the courts have no force
but are made invalid and are annulled by private persons?100
What seems to be an absurd idea, namely that Socrates’ escape could destroy
the ‘State’, appears several times in the dialogue with the Laws. Most modern
commentators, prejudiced by the myth of the ‘Greek State’, have either dis-
missed the argument as invalid, or tended to interpret it as a moral rather than
a political or sociological one. Thus Woozley says:

The simple claim that a single act of lawbreaking by a single individual (e.g.
Socrates), will have as its immediate effect the collapse, like the walls of
Jericho, is too silly to be taken seriously; and there is no hint of it in the
Crito.101
Yet, although the argument seems silly or invalid in the modern context, it is
not so in the ancient Greek context in that it points to the general instability of
the polis as a stateless community, and the fear of the eccentric individual. In
fact, Socrates’ escape could have thrown the city into a turmoil: given his fame
and the fact that he could not have escaped without help it probably would have
renewed the fears of an aristocratic plot.
Another interpretation sees Socrates as the forefather of the famous Kantian
argument. Thus Kraut says:
the Crito seems to be the first document in Western philosophy to use the
form of reasoning that is now called a ‘generalization argument’. The basic
idea underlying such arguments is this: if the consequence of everybody
doing X would be bad, than no one ought to do X. Whether everyone will in
fact do X, or is likely to do, is irrelevant; what matters are the hypothetical
consequences of everyone’s behaving in a certain way. 102
99
In Plato, Crito, 51e the Laws say: ‘whoever of you stays here, seeing how we
administer justice and how we govern the state in other respects, has thereby entered into
agreement with us to do what we command’ (trans. Fowler, Loeb). Here the Laws indeed
command, but it is important to see that they command only those who ‘entered into
agreement’ with them, and are powerless concerning those who had not or those who
had broken or intend to break their agreement. They command those who consent to be
commanded.
100
Plato, Crito, 50b.
101
A.D. Woozley, Law and Obedience: The Arguments of Plato’s Crito (London,
1979), p. 112.
102
Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton 1984), p. 42; For a similar
argument see also W.K.C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV (Cambridge,
1975), p. 101; R.E. Allen, Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis, 1980), p. 85.
360 M. BERENT
However, while it is true that the modern lawbreaker would not usually want
everybody to be like himself, the question, for him, is theoretical: most of the
people are not, and one criminal more or one less could not usually affect the
community. Thus for him the question is purely moral: is it right to engage in
what, on the whole, he thinks that others should not do? Yet for Socrates the
question is not only moral, but also political: his escape could destroy the city.
The moral burden which is placed on the individual and so powerfully
described in the story of the death of Socrates could have resulted, on the whole,
in impatience and hostility towards people who were too weak to bear it, as we
can see from Protagoras. The latter is usually considered as closer than most
Greek philosophers to the Athenian democratic spirit. Thus he is hailed by
Popper as ‘a theorist of the open society’ and Guthrie attributes to him also
‘respect for the democratic virtues of justice, respect for other men’s opinions
and the process of peaceful persuasion as the basis of communal life’.103 In the
famous passage which has been traditionally considered as the manifestation
of his democratic spirit Protagoras maintains that the Athenians, rightly in his
eyes, seek the advice of professionals only in debates involving skill in building,
or any other crafts, while
. . . when the subject of their counsel involves political wisdom, which must
always follow the path of justice and moderation, they listen to every man’s
opinion, for they think that everyone must share in this kind of virtue;
otherwise the polis could not exist.104
What strikes one in this passage is the idea that it is a necessary condition for
the existence of the political community that all its citizens should have a share
in political wisdom. Anyone who lacks this wisdom endangers the ‘State’.
Consequently the measures which are taken against them are severe:
. . . it is this in which all must share and which must enter into every man’s
actions whatever other occupation he chooses to learn and practice; . . . the
one who lacks it, man, woman or child, must be instructed and corrected until
by punishment he is reformed; and whoever does not respond to punishment
and instruction must be expelled from the state or must be put to death as
incurable . . .105
See also G.X. Santas, Socrates’ Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues (London, 1979),
p. 18; R.R. Martin, ‘Socrates on Disobedience to Law’, The Review of Metaphysics, 24
(1970), pp. 24–7.
103
Popper, The Open Society, p. 189. W.K.C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy,
Vol. III (Cambridge, 1969), p. 268.
104
Plato, Protagoras, 323A, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (Harmondsworth, 1968) (empha-
sis added). Yet Protagoras diverges from the Athenian ethos by still maintaining that
political virtue had to be taught by teachers rather than be left to be acquired just by
political participation.
105
Plato, Protagoras, 325A. The quoted passage is a rhetorical question. Yet question
marks (two if’s) were omitted for the sake of clarity, since it is obvious that Protagoras
agrees with the measures prescribed in this passage.
In the Protagoras’s famous fable of creation, when Hermes distributes political

wisdom (that is conscience (aidos) and justice (dike)) among mortals, Zeus says
to him:
Let them all have their share. There could never be cities if only a few shared
these virtues, as in the arts. Moreover, you must lay it down as my law that
if anyone is incapable of acquiring his share of these two virtues he shall be
put to death as a plague to this city.106
It is no wonder that Protagoras’s position has seemed to be invalid or immoral
or both to most commentators.107 Thus, for instance, C.C.W. Taylor says that
Protagoras failed to distinguish between a universal normative requirement
(namely that civilized life requires that everyone be required to be good) from
a universal factual one (namely that civilized life requires that everyone be
good).108 However, I believe that Protagoras’s position should be taken literally,

and it expresses the danger to the political community from the eccentric
unrestrained individual.
It is important to see that the Greek reduction of politics to ethics and
education was in a sense incompatible with the modern concept of the private
realm. It was this ‘internalization of the policeman’ which had made it so
difficult to distinguish between the citizen and the person. Further, the nature
of morality and education is that they seem to be without limitations: there is
no limit to the amount that the Socratic citizen could elevate himself for the
sake of the public interest, and there is no limit to the amount one could be
educated. It is the moral responsibility which the community entrusts to its
individual members which prevents the emergence of a non-politicized private
realm within the political community. It is important to see how this moral
burden is lifted by the first theoreticians of the State, once a distinct coercive
agency which is responsible both for the stability and for the peacefulness of
the community is created. In a passage which looks as if it was written as an
answer to the Socratic dilemma Hobbes maintains:
A covenant not to defend myselfe from force, by force, is always voyd. For
. . . no man can transferre or lay down his Right to save himself from Death,
106
Plato, Protagoras, 322D.
107
In a similar manner Plato (Laws, 909a) demands the death penalty for those who
threaten the welfare of the political community by spreading atheistic and nihilistic
doctrines, to which he traced the decline of Athens. However, unlike the case of
Protagoras, the so-called totalitarian nature of the Platonic teachings has already become
traditional. See Popper, The Open Society; J. Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the
Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1953), pp. 15–16.
108
C.C.W. Taylor, Protagoras (Oxford 1976), p. 88. Kerferd suggests another way
to avoid the obvious difficulty: that the elimination of those who could not have a share
in political wisdom happened in the past, in the transitional stage from savage life to
political life, and it does not characterize political life. G.B. Kerferd, The Sophist
Movement (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 142–4.
362 M. BERENT
Wounds and Imprisonment . . . and therefore the promise of not resisting

force, in no Covenant transferreth any right; nor is obliging . . . And this is
granted to be true by all men, in that they lead Criminals to Execution, and
Prison, with armed men, notwithstanding that such Criminals have consented
to the Law, by which they are condemned.109
According to Hobbes, there is no moral dilemma for Socrates. On the
contrary, he must escape from prison and save his life. But, and this is important,
the political dilemma is solved as well. For the political role of the Socratic
citizen is now assumed by the State, or by the Sovereign. The State-jailer and
the State-hangman release the Socratic citizen from being his own jailer and
hangman.
Thus the comparison between Greek and modern notions of politics seems
to point to the interesting relation between the emergence of the notion of the
State and that of the private realm. Exploring that further would be a subject
for another paper.
Moshe Berent THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL
109
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), Book 1, ch. 14, p. 98.

Stasis, or The Greek Invention of Politics

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STASIS, OR THE GREEK INVENTION OF POLITICS*

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIX. No. 3. Autumn 1998

war’ implies that grouping was considered dangerous.

violent political struggles elsewhere) and as the cause of their destruction.

the officials but by the interested parties, sometimes by self-help.

elements of the State-hierarchy or because there are conflicts conducted be-

the same size, at least of a similar order of magnitude.

The situation in agrarian stratified State-societies is different. In the latter the

attempt to establish a tyranny: ‘When the Athenian coast-dwellers and those

The absence of any ready militia to crush slave-revolts is complementary to

State as an instrument of class exploitation originated in Engels.34 However, as

for the appropriation of surplus production is not confined to Marxists, and it

exploitation’ (wage-labourers, slaves, serfs, debtors etc.) based on laws and

Not necessarily related to their profitability, certain offices were considered

for constitutional change, because the absence of public coercive apparatuses

are submerged in a unified community of interest. Hence, the state becomes an

different opinions can slide towards civil war.47

As we have already seen, stasis meant also a ‘position’ in politics, and we

their institutions from reproducing themselves quite stably enough’. However,

In fact, according to segmentary theory, conflict is built into tribal commu-

Wheeler seems to summarize adequately the phenomenon of stasis:

sedition: they are only a few against many.60

of the dominant group). Such a ‘good’ association was probably as difficult to

rather were pushed towards them by the decentralized unstratified nature of

potentially armed members of the community, where there is no means to

and like himself ought to rule like himself.73

is, not by force but by persuasion).

Constitution, as it was introduced in the Federalist Papers, was in fact a

communities in general. Socrates is seeking to replace it with self-restraint:

While Madison rejected the Hobbesian absolute State, he still maintained,

Thus ostracism is justified by the need for ‘levelling’ when harmony is

another constitutional process became dominant (though ostracism was never

a political or sociological one. Thus Woozley says:

In the Protagoras’s famous fable of creation, when Hermes distributes political

good).108 However, I believe that Protagoras’s position should be taken literally,

Wounds and Imprisonment . . . and therefore the promise of not resisting

Moshe Berent THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL

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