Instruction

When the leaders of the English, American and French revolutions argued about rights, they reached back two thousand years for their arguments. Four ancient traditions mattered most: Greek philosophy, Roman law and Stoic thought, Judaism and Christianity. Historians often call the first two Greco-Roman and the second two Judeo-Christian. They agreed on some things and disagreed sharply on others.

Greece: reason and the city. Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle asked what a good life and a good city look like, and they answered by reasoning, not by revelation. Aristotle called the human being a “political animal”: we become fully human only by taking part in the life of a polis, a self-governing community. For him, duty meant civic duty — serving in the assembly, the jury and the army. But Greek citizenship was narrow. In Athens, women, enslaved people and foreigners could not vote.

Rome: law and natural law. Rome gave the West a written legal system, starting with the Twelve Tables (about 450 BCE), and the idea that law should bind everyone in the same way. Roman Stoics such as Cicero added natural law: a law built into nature itself, which human reason can discover and which is the same in every place. Cicero’s line in the reading, “true law is right reason in agreement with nature,” means that a ruler’s command is not truly law if it violates that higher standard. That idea would later justify resistance to unjust kings.

Judaism: covenant and justice. The Hebrew Bible grounds law in a covenant between God and a people. The Ten Commandments bind everyone, including kings; the prophets, such as Nathan confronting King David and Micah demanding justice, show rulers being judged by a law above them. Two ideas stand out: every person is made “in the image of God,” so every person has worth; and duty is owed to the neighbor and the stranger, not just to the city.

Christianity: universal dignity and two authorities. Christianity grew out of Judaism inside the Roman Empire. Paul’s letter to the Galatians declares that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek” — a claim of equal spiritual worth that crossed ethnic lines. Jesus’s teaching to “render unto Caesar” what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s suggested two separate authorities, an idea that later helped Europeans argue that rulers do not control conscience.

Comparing them. Here is a worked comparison on one question, where does law come from? Greco-Roman thinkers answer: from nature, discovered by reason. Judeo-Christian texts answer: from God, revealed in scripture. Both answers put law above the ruler — and that shared idea is the root of the rule of law you will study next. They differ on the individual: the Greek citizen’s worth came from membership in the city; the biblical person’s worth came from being created by God, whatever their status.

Reading with care (RH.9-10.1). These texts were written for audiences very different from you. None of these societies practiced equality as we mean it: slavery existed in ancient Israel, Greece and Rome, and Christian Europe later used scripture to defend hierarchy as well as to challenge it. When you cite a source, cite what it says, then note who was included and who was left out. Remember too that this is only one set of roots. Confucian ideas of the ruler’s duty to rule virtuously, and Islamic law, which also placed rulers under a higher law, shaped other parts of the world you will study this year.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.