This chapter uses the results obtained in Chapter 7 to develop a hypothesis regarding the frequency of staseis in poleis other than Thebes: namely, that most poleis experienced stasis at a similar rate of once every 6–12 years. It then subjects this hypothesis to a series of tests using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis at both the macro and the micro level. It shows that the working hypothesis does not hold for Athens, Sparta, or Syracuse, all of which are genuine outliers with respect to stasis; that it almost certainly holds for a small subset of prominent poleis, such as Argos and Miletos, whose political histories can be studied in detail; that it very likely holds for a larger set of 50 prominent poleis, such as Herakleia Pontike and Mytilene, whose political histories are relatively well documented; and that it probably holds for most of the other thousand or so poleis under consideration.

Ezra Pound felt that artists should command central roles in society and were prospectively, as well as historically, the most selfless and humane of citizens. No other social element exceeded the artist for perceiving beauty, enhancing empathy, or grasping the vital over sordid materialism. Advancement of the aesthetic, honest, and just constituted the human vocation. None was better suited to this cause than the artist, the true “scientist” of the soul. The inherent flimsiness of such romantic propositions eluded Pound, enthralled to the Duce, whom he took as a species of artist endowed with a rare gift. Pound remained uncomprehending of Mussolini’s Italy, from tawdry spectacle to Fascism’s convulsed end. Lost on Pound was a stubborn fact: Art at times has expressed the best of sensibility but has never stalled the worst. Pound’s loss of mental focus placed him with a duped multitude. Invoking the poet as patron spirit, in the early twenty-first century an Italian neo-fascist organization -CasaPound – re-harnessed his name to xenophobia and malice.

It is now time to offer an explanation for the results obtained in Parts II–III, regarding the frequency and intensity of stasis. Before I proceed, however, it is important to emphasize that I am not seeking to explain why the Greeks engaged in stasis or resolve the longstanding controversy regarding the true or root causes of the phenomenon; as indicated in Chapter 1, I believe that attempts to isolate a true cause – or even a limited set of root causes – for stasis are misguided. Rather, I seek to address two related questions that emerge directly from the analysis conducted in this book: Why did the Greeks participate in stasis so frequently? And why did staseis tend to involve such low levels of (lethal) violence?

An architect of the Black civil rights movement and its foremost theorist, W. E. B. Du Bois looked expectantly to Japan. Apart from having escaped China’s fate -humiliated, nibbled, reduced – it was the sole colored country able to check white global dominance. He wrote elatedly after the Russo-Japanese war: “For the first time in a thousand years a great white nation has measured arms with a colored nation and has been found wanting … The awakening of the yellow races is certain … the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time.” In 1936, Du Bois visited Japan and its continental provinces, which experience sealed his trust in Asian-African cooperation. Soon after Du Bois’s foray, Helen Keller went to Japan. Keller hoped, in what she thought would be a multi-month tour, to further the cause of people afflicted by disabilities, particularly blindness. Her 1937 excursion was additionally an exercise (albeit futile) in informal diplomacy, to avert the Japanese-US slide into a war trap. Neither did attempts in 1940-1941 by Bishop Walsh and Father Drought preserve the Pacific peace. These self-appointed emissaries had sought to lessen Japanese-US estrangement.

This chapter introduces a database of fifth- and fourth-century staseis that have been recognized by existing scholarship, as well as a set of proxies for what I call “prominence” in the evidentiary record: the amount of evidence concerning the history of a given polis that is available to modern historians. It then uses the database to reveal four striking trends in the frequency and distribution of attested staseis. Next, it uses the proxies to show that both the apparent trends exhibited by recognized staseis and existing scholarship on the frequency of stasis – most of which takes one or more of these trends to be historical – are products of evidentiary scarcity and bias. Finally, it identifies two other methodological issues that compromise attempts to study stasis on a macro scale and argues that new approaches are necessary.

This chapter surveys existing scholarship on the violence of stasis and outlines my approach to examining the types and (especially) the amounts of violence that stasis typically involved. Next, it introduces 14 types of violence that are characteristic of stasis: for example, surprise attacks, betrayals (prodosiai), and mass executions. Finally, it divides staseis into three broad categories vis-à-vis the types of violence they involved, elucidates these categories, and discusses their relation to each other.

The book’s emphasis is on Americans who in private capacities went overseas between 1935 and 1941. The quandaries faced within the United States and around its geostrategic edges are here probed with less reference than is usual in World War II historiography to holders of high office, military authority, or diplomatic responsibility. This approach allows two related things. First, the reader and I can contend with the churning national identity as it had evolved when the United States skirted around but then plunged into the Second World War. Albeit a nebulous concept, tied to eternal scholarly wrangles on “imagined communities” or Abraham’s Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory,” my use of national character/identity functions as shorthand for the contradictory US mood and attitudes of 1935-1941: earnest, avaricious, high-minded, sour, naive, shrewd, indecisive, provincial, universalistic. Second, this assemblage of expats is valuable in that it reflected, and lets us elucidate, the fault lines of political allegiance and personal preference that ran through the country before Pearl Harbor. In an important sense, this book destabilizes the notion of “American.”