A Model of Conflict: The Metonymic Function of stasis in Xenophon's 'Hellenica'

My dissertation is a literary analysis of how the frequent depictions of local factional conflict (stasis) in Xenophon's history of fourth-century Greece advance and link its central themes. I argue that stasis is introduced primarily as an occasion for staging and analyzing the importance of leadership grounded in virtue, one of the work's two broadly acknowledged central focuses. Specifically, Xenophon repeatedly depicts prominent figures, embodying qualities of selfless leadership which the author advocates throughout his writings, as able to inspire voluntary unity within local communities (poleis) previously divided through stasis. At the same time, Xenophon and the characters in his history conceptualize stasis in a manner that reflects a perspective dominant since the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In this view, stasis is both an instance of and a metonym for the broader and endemic conflict between leading poleis for control over the Greek mainland---with metonym understood in the traditional rhetorical sense of one object standing in for another with which it is contiguous. Thus, local struggles between oligarchic and democratic factions for control of an individual polis mirror and affect the larger wars for dominant influence over all the poleis of Greece fought between oligarchic Sparta and its successive democratic rivals. Throughout the Hellenica, however, no leading polis proves able to impose a lasting hegemony, and this recurrent failure is the other area seen by scholars as a central focus of the text. As a metonym for this larger struggle, stasis and the ability of virtuous leaders to resolve it becomes a critical locus for reflecting on and modeling the leadership qualities that would prove capable of implementing a successful Greek hegemony. Through stasis-sequences, Xenophon therefore provides a paradigm for a selfless leadership style that, mutatis mutandis, could unite Greece under itself, in contrast to the frequently despotic and continuously failed attempts at hegemony chronicled in the text. Stasis thus provides a link between the themes of virtuous leadership and political hegemony that have proven the most important but consistently separated points of focus in modern analyses of the Hellenica.