43 © Der/die Autor(en), exklusiv lizenziert an Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2023 S. Fink und R. Rollinger (Hrsg.), „Krisen“ und „Untergänge“ als historisches Phänomen, Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37041-1_3 1 Introduction The word crisis derives from the Ancient Greek krisis which is in turn a derivation from krino—to separate, distinguish, judge, decide. Krisis thus means above all a judgement, or trial, and is the regular word for trials and judgements of courts. It could have been used for an event or issue decided by war, but it was not the usual term for the critical situations in social and political life, the conditions of instability and danger leading to decisive changes, which we usually mean when speaking about a crisis in history. For social and political instability and historical turning points the Greeks used a variety of different words. Thus stasis was the regular term for political sedition and discord, meaning also the factions causing this, instability and lawlessness was known as anarchia (the lack of rule), anomia, dysnomia (both meaning lawlessness) or kakonomia (condition of bad laws), the usual word for political change was metabole (change), an attempt for a political alternation was neoterismos (innovation; from neoterizo—to make changes, to try something new), and a disastrous end could have been described as katastrophe (literally a turn downward). Crises in Archaic and Classical Greece: The View of the Ancients Mait Kõiv M. Kõiv (*) Institute of History and Archaeology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia E-Mail: mait.koiv@ut.ee I wish to thank Janusz Peters for his help with my English text.