Ancient historians often rely on arguments from silence but rarely discuss how or when such arguments can be responsibly employed. This chapter addresses this methodological shortcoming by examining the circumstances and ways in which Thucydides engages with staseis. It argues that Thucydides’ silence concerning the occurrence of stasis has far less value than is commonly assumed and develops a method to calculate the explanatory value of any narrative historical source’s silence concerning the occurrence of phenomena like stasis. It also shows that reading Thucydides with particular attention to stasis yields important insights into his narrative and historical methodologies, as well as his account of the Sicilian Expedition.

This chapter uses the results and understanding obtained in Chapters 9–11, together with a set of informed conjectures regarding the number of fatalities produced by staseis involving different types of violence, to reconstruct the broad outlines of the probability distribution function for stasis-induced fatalities. It then refines these preliminary results through statistical modeling. Broadly speaking, it argues that most staseis produced fewer than a dozen fatalities, while many produced no fatalities at all.

This chapter introduces the Greek concept of stasis, which is the term archaic and classical authors most frequently apply to episodes of regime-threatening political violence. It also reviews existing scholarship on the nature of stasis; describes the elements and dynamics that are typical of stasis; defines this commonly misunderstood term; and introduces a set of criteria designed to enable accurate diagnosis of as many staseis as possible, allow for consistent implementation in a broad range of historical and evidentiary contexts, map onto fifth- and fourth-century understandings of stasis as closely as possible, and ensure that, when departures from that emic understanding are necessary, they are implemented in a way that strengthens the validity of the results obtained in Chapters 2–12.

Regardless of whether their actions abroad were wholesome or repugnant, many seekers and partisans upon returning to America faced difficulties. Members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were pestered by counterespionage agencies concerned that they were virtual Stalinists. Chinese communist apologist Agnes Smedley was similarly persecuted. Radio Rome broadcaster Ezra Pound was committed to a psychiatric hospital. The FBI kept tabs on Nazi sympathizer Philip Johnson. At one time or another, Helen Keller, W. E. B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and Varian Fry fell under suspicion of Red taint and were monitored by the FBI. The State Department withheld Du Bois’s passport. Understandably, several seekers and partisans chose self-imposed exile to finish their days. Eulogized by local personages, John Robinson died in Ethiopia, Pound in Italy, Du Bois in Ghana, Baker in France, Strong in China. Fatal illness in Oxford thwarted Smedley from reaching Beijing. Only half of this book’s characters retired permanently to the United States. Their feelings for it extended from affection and respect to stoical resignation.

During the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Greeks inhabited more than a thousand poleis scattered across the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. The Greek term “polis” (plural, poleis) is often translated as “city-state,” and the translation is a good one: Poleis were states in that each of them was a sovereign political unit, independent of the others; and they were city-states in that they typically comprised a densely populated urban core along with its surrounding territory. By the standards of modern polities, poleis tended to be very small: Most had between 1,000 and 20,000 inhabitants and occupied between 10 and 100 square miles. Collectively, however, they housed a population of between 7 and 10 million. And, because the vast majority of poleis were situated on or near the coast, they occupied a substantial portion of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastline.

To nudge Marshal Petain away from an exclusive Berlin orientation, FDR pursued conciliation toward Vichy France. The hope was that Vichy cooperation with Berlin might be stymied. Unvarnished realpolitik vis-a-vis Vichy ruffled consciences in Capitol Hill and the State Department, though not enough to cause revision. The rival strategic and ethical tugs that agitated her compatriots struck writer Gertrude Stein as neither urgent nor interesting. To her, significance lay elsewhere. France had suffered, admittedly. Yet it would rise again. Stein’s France was perpetual, irrepressible, and safely sheltered under Petain. Entertainer Josephine Baker, like Stein a long-term resident of France, had a viewpoint different from Stein’s and worked as an undercover agent for the Free French. Meanwhile people in the United States anxiously followed the deteriorating human rights condition in France, but this did not convert into calls for action. Exceptions to this hesitancy clustered in private organizations, as in the Emergency Rescue Committee and Varian Fry. He went to Marseilles and managed to help organize the escape of roughly 2,000 people hunted by Vichy and Nazi authorities.

Thousands of African Americans hoped to travel to Ethiopia in 1935 to join its forces as they resisted the Italian invasion. Among these people were Great War veterans, doctors, nurses, and civil rights activists. Logistical problems thwarted these people, however. The Justice Department enforced prohibitions on enlistment in foreign armies warring against nations with which the United States enjoyed peace; the State Department refused to issue passports. Compounding matters, the cost of travel to Ethiopia exceeded the resources of most African Americans or potential sponsoring agencies. Still, in August 1935 Emperor Haile Selassie entrusted the fledgling Imperial Ethiopian Air Force (IEAF) to John Robinson, a Black aviation pioneer, originally from Mississippi. Commissioned chief of the IEAF with a mandate to make it ready for war, Robinson enjoyed good relations with principal members of the royal household, despite language barriers and yawning differences in habits of mind and culture. To the IEAF pilots and ground crews, he gave coaching and encouragement.