Thucydides' History is about a war between cities, but a great part of his narrative, and many of the most memorable parts, take place inside cities: the debates, the epidemic, the staseis. Great battles and sieges are described, but the historian's acutest analysis is applied to the internal workings and disruptions of individual men and cities. In a time of languid peace the historian Tacitus excused his inglorius labor (Ann. 4.32). Thucydides had no such need, but his account of the “greatest kinesis” in history is characterized by a profound sense of loss.

In this chapter we examine Thucydides' presentation of individual staseis and find that he used the smaller civil conflicts to guide and organize his narrative of the Hellenic war. In what were highly original choices, he emphasized that the first casus belli and the first apparent incident of the war were staseis, he drew attention to staseis at critical junctures of the war, highlighting especially the cluster of staseis around the Peace of Nicias, and he used the Athenian stasis to organize the narrative after the Sicilian expedition. Not only did the larger war spawn staseis in the cities, but the war itself arose from and was fueled by smaller staseis. Stasis is ever before the reader's eyes and represents the very nature of the war.