The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights 9781477322925

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The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

Plato on the Promontory of Sunium, Discoursing to His Disciples, from Jean-­ Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece: Maps, plans, views, and coins, illustrative of the geography and antiquities of ancient Greece (1806). Villanova University Digital Library.

The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

rachel hall sternberg

University of Texas Press   Austin

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 This book has been supported by an endowment dedicated to classics and the ancient world and funded by the Areté Foundation; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Dougherty Foundation; the James R. Dougherty, Jr. Foundation; the Rachael and Ben Vaughan Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Sternberg, Rachel Hall, author. Title: The ancient Greek roots of human rights / Rachel Hall Sternberg. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051342 ISBN 978-1-4773-2291-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2292-5 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2293-2 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Human rights—Philosophy—History. | Civilization, Classical— Philosophy. | Enlightenment—Philosophy. | Compassion—Philosophy— History. | Empathy—Philosophy—History. | Intellectual life—History. Classification: LCC JC571 .S813 2021 | DDC 323.01—dc23 LC record available at https://  lccn.loc.gov/2020051342 doi:10.7560/322918

To the best father

πάντα ῥεῖ

Contents

Timeline for Greece ix Key to Abbreviations xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1

Exploration A. Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 9

PART I. PARALLEL WAVES

1. The Turn toward Reason 21 2. Warfare 31 3. Empathy and Tears 41 4. Humane Discourse 51

Exploration B. Cyrus the Great 61

PART II. ANCIENT GREEK ROOTS

5. Elements of Respect 71 6. Paths through Time 91

viii  Contents



Exploration C. Tensions 107

Conclusions 121 Notes 127 Works Cited 137 Subject Index 151 Index of Ancient Passages 159

Timeline for Greece

Note: All dates are BCE; the timeline is based on Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan, Roberts, and Tandy 2012. Early and Middle Bronze ages ca. 3000–1600 Late Bronze Age (Mycenaeans) ca. 1600–1200 “Dark Age” of Greece ca. 1200–750 Eighth-­century “Renaissance” ca. 750–700 Archaic Greece ca. 700–480 First Persian War 490 Second Persian War 480/479 Classical period 480–323 Delian League and Athenian empire 477–404 Peloponnesian War 431–404 (ending with defeat of Athens) Age of shifting hegemonies 404–338 Rise of Macedon under King Philip II ca. 357–336 Greek city-­states lose to Philip II at Battle of Chaeronea 338 Alexander the Great reigns 336–323 Hellenistic period 323–30 Romans gradually conquer Greece 196–146

ix

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Key to Abbreviations

I. Ancient Authors and Works In this section, explanations are drawn from the OCD; all dates are BCE unless otherwise indicated Aesch. Aeschylus, fifth-­century Athenian tragic dramatist, d. 456/455 Ag. Agamemnon, the first play in the trilogy Oresteia by Aeschylus Pers. Persians Prom. Prometheus Bound Aeschin. Aeschines, Athenian orator (ca. 397–­ca. 322) Ant. Antiphon, Athenian orator (ca. 480–411) Arist. Aristotle, philosopher (384–322) EN Nicomachean Ethics Poet. Poetics Pol. Politics Rh. Rhetoric Ath. Athenaeus, fl. ca. 200 CE in Egypt. Bacchyl. Bacchylides, lyric poet from Ceos (ca. 520–450) Dith. Dithyrambs, choral songs in honor of Dionysus Cic. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator; also wrote on philosophical subjects (106–43) Off. De officiis, a moral treatise on duties or obligations Q. fr. Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem, letters to his brother Quintus Dem. Demosthenes, Athenian orator (384–322) Ep. Epistle (Letter) Din. Dinarchus, an orator in Athens (ca. 360–­ca. 290) Diod. Sic. Diodorus Siculus, historian (90–30) Diog. Laert. Diogenes Laërtius, biographer (3rd century CE) Eur. Euripides, Athenian tragic dramatist, d. 406 El. Electra

xi

xii  Key to Abbreviations

Hec. Hecuba Tro. Trojan Women Hdt. Herodotus, fifth-­century historian who wrote about the Persian Wars Hor. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), important Roman poet (65–8) Epist. Epistles, letters in verse on ethical and literary topics Isoc. Isocrates, important fourth-­century Athenian orator (436–338) Lyc. Lycurgus, fourth-­century Athenian statesman and orator (ca. 390–­ca. 325/324) Lys. Lysias, fifth-­century orator (ca. 459/458–­ca. 380) Nep. Nepos, Roman biographer (ca. 110–­ca. 24) Paus. Pausanias, Greek geographer (fl. 2nd century CE) Pl. Plato, Athenian philosopher (ca. 429–347) Ap. Apology Euthphr. Euthyphro Phd. Phaedo Resp. Republic Tht. Theaetetus Plut. Plutarch Ps.-­Xen. Pseudo-­Xenophon, aka Old Oligarch [Ath. pol.] Constitution of the Athenians, an antidemocratic treatise Soph. Sophocles, fifth-­century Athenian tragic dramatist, d. 407/406 Aj. Ajax Ant. Antigone OC Oedipus at Colonus O.T. Oedipus the King Phil. Philoctetes Trach. Women of Trachis Thuc. Thucydides, fifth-­century historian who wrote about the Peloponnesian War Xen. Xenophon, fourth-­century soldier and writer of histories and other works (born ca. 430) Ages. Agesilaus, posthumous encomium of Spartan king Agesilaus An. Anabasis, a memoir of a Greek mercenary adventure in Persia Cyr. Cyropaedia, a pseudohistorical account of the life of Cyrus the Great (d. 530) Hell. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs 411–362 Oec. Oeconomicus, reported conversation regarding household organization

II. Reference Materials JHS  Journal of Hellenic Studies K.-­A. Rudolf Kassel and Colin Austin, eds., Poetae Comici Graeci LSJ  H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-­English Lexicon, edited by H. Stuart Jones OCD  Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary

Key to Abbreviations xiii

III. Latin Words and Assorted Abbreviations b. born (+ date) BCE Before the Common Era (formerly BC) CE  Common Era (formerly AD) ca. circa around, about, approximately d. died (+ date) et and ff. “and the following lines” (or pages) ibid. ibidem (“in the same place”) fl. floruit (flourished) pace in peace, with all respect [to X] passim here and there, far and wide sic thus s.v. sub verbo (under the word) trans. translator

IV. Other EPM An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (David Hume) F Forster, Michael N., ed. and trans. 2002. Herder: Philosophical Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fr fragment G Gaier, Ulrich, et al., eds. 1985. Johann Gottfried Herder: Werke in zehn Bänden. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. GMS Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Immanuel Kant) TMS The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Adam Smith)

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Preface

I am a classical scholar devoted to the social history of Classical Athens. My specialty is Greek pity or compassion; it is this body of primary philological research, starting with my 1998 Bryn Mawr dissertation, that I bring to bear when discussing Athens. Regarding eighteenth-­century Europe, on the other hand, I am but lightly acquainted with the primary sources, and so I rely on the research of historians with that specialty. I have sought help with fundamental concepts, such as human dignity, from the writings of contemporary philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum and Michael Rosen. At every step, my goal has been to produce a succinct, accessible book rather than a weighty tome, with a suggestive rather than a comprehensive treatment. As an undergraduate majoring in history at an Ivy League university in the 1970s, I noticed a lack of room for the role of emotion in historical explanation and was silently appalled by the dry logic-­chopping and false objectivity that characterized most of the scholarship I encountered. It seemed to me that something big was missing, especially from the monocausal explanations that seemed to dominate the field. And then, causes of events were always military, political, economic, or social, but nowhere was there explicit interest in how emotion shaped human events. That situation has changed refreshingly, as evidenced by the last thirty to forty years of rich interdisciplinary work on emotion,1 the so-­called affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. Now there is an Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History, to put beside the hefty Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette M. Haviland-­Jones, and much more. We seem at last to have gotten past a Manichaean divide between reason and passion, in part by understanding that thoughts and feelings all arise within the brain. xv

xvi  Preface

In these pages I offer new ways to gauge the ancient Greek contribution to human rights. Based on recondite research, this slender volume sums up about fifteen years of effort on my part, which I will strive to make transparent to the uninitiated and (simultaneously) interesting to other historians.

Acknowledgments

I thank Corey Brennan both for advising me to abandon this project and for supporting my efforts anyhow. Michael Scharf said that a book like this could be useful. David Konstan graciously read every chapter as I wrote it. J. B. Shank read some of them. Sharon James and Timothy Wutrich were good writing buddies. Kevin Houser generously shared his philosophical vantage point; Sheila Murnaghan, her paper on Ajax; Amy Cohen, her paper on Athenian masked drama; and Angeliki Tzanetou, her pivotal insights. I thank Cornell’s John Coleman, who first taught me how to be a scholar, and also Gordon Kirkwood, whose wise and gentle erudition made me fall in love with Ancient Greek long ago. For reasons they may recall, I thank Martha Malamud, Don McGuire; Mary Nicholas, John Smith, Kim Carrell-­Smith; Dina Berger, Tom Falkner, Matthew McGowan, Greg Shaya; Timothy Beal, Jeremy Bendik-­Keymer, John Broich, Charles Burroughs, Bill Claspy, Michael Clune, Georgia Cowart, Martin Helzle, Chris Haufe, Paul Iversen, Don Laing, Jenifer Neils, Almuth Riggs, Jonathan Sadowsky, Peter Shulman, Bill Siebenschuh, Cyrus Taylor, Gillian Weiss; Beatrice Rehl; Alexander Moseley, Ted Parker, and Jonathan Kent Wright. I am very grateful to Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press for his fine mind and for his advocacy. After so long a sea voyage, it is impossible to name every port of call, every companion, every helper. Claire and Audrey Hall saved my life. Leslie Lebl stayed at the rudder; Joseph Sternberg the Elder was often bailing; Matthew and Libby Sternberg stood as beacons on the shore. Jack Hall kept up my spirits. I am grateful to the International Center for Jefferson Studies for a travel fellowship and for Jack Robertson’s help. And finally, I salute both of my xvii

xviii  Acknowledgments

institutional sponsors: Case Western Reserve University, with its Baker-­ Nord Center for the Humanities, and the Cleveland Clinic, sine quibus non. I also thank attentive listeners and questioners at talks and conferences over these many years as well as anonymous evaluators who furnished helpful comments.

The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

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Introduction

Ancient Athenians thought their city exceptional, and of course in many ways it was. As most people know, its vibrant, creative culture gave Western society a brilliant start in art, architecture, medicine, drama, mathematics, philosophy, education, the art of persuasion, democracy, and more. But few people, perhaps, realize that compassion, blended with kindness and generosity, was a crucial facet of the self-­image of Classical Athens. To pick an egregious example, the writer Isocrates, in his fulsome praise of Athens titled Panegyricus, boasted that the city had won its short-­lived fifth-­century empire through kindness (Isoc. 4.80). That’s certainly not what Thucydides says in recounting the threats and massacres that secured the subjection of “allies.” We may well ask: How did Isocrates come up with that? It seems a curious conceit. And given that Athenian society depended on chattel slavery and the suppression of women, how did he and other Athenians come to articulate the humane values that today are codified in human-­ rights law? This book on the deep origins of human rights seeks to buttress the practice of human-­rights law by demonstrating its indebtedness to the ancient Greeks. As a classical historian, I provide a unique perspective on the Western strand in human rights by highlighting moments when the currents of empathy and kindness that flow or at least trickle through most epochs of human history emerge with exceptional clarity. In brief: humane discourse, distinct from “rights talk,” arises specifically from cultural history and has occurred in waves: in ancient Athens (where humane values emerged) and in the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment (when humane discourse reemerged and human rights were now articulated). The better we understand these two waves, the better we can sustain humane efforts today. As I explore this underrated aspect of the Greek legacy—its compassion1

2  Introduction

ate element—let me be very clear from the outset on one point: The ancient Greeks never formally recognized human rights. I am not at all suggesting that they did, nor am I replicating others’ meticulous and controversial efforts to trace the philosophical roots of natural rights back to Greece.1 On the other hand, Athenians did develop cultural themes or elements that supported humane discourse in their own society as well as the articulation of human-­ rights concepts in the eighteenth century. Those Greek elements included: the dignity and value of the human person, empathy and compassion, the human need for protection against tyranny and oppression, and the idea of freedom. The French historian Lynn Hunt (2007) has convincingly argued that human-­rights concepts were invented in the late eighteenth century against the backdrop of an emotional sea change in the culture of France, as people became more empathetic, sympathetic, and emotionally inclined to reject cruel practices that had long been accepted as normal. It was in this context that intellectuals formulated a discourse that praised kindness and benevolence and urged people to be “humane.” Emotional expression can trigger historical change, and the cultural anthropologist William M. Reddy urges scholars to seek “a unified conception of emotions as part of the historical unfolding of politically significant institutions and practices” (William M. Reddy 2001, 50). Human-­rights scholars sometimes allude to Greco-­Roman roots, but few classical scholars have tackled the subject. In doing so, I eschew utopian visions of ancient Greece and acknowledge its historicity. (Yes, I know they had slaves.) The Athens that has emerged from the latest generation of scholarship is less schematic and idealized, more detailed and gritty than it often was during the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth.2 The image of sunstruck marble columns against a lofty azure sky has given way to dark mixed with light, forming many shades of gray. Democracy and chattel slavery developed hand in hand; the civic prosperity that underwrote the Parthenon arose in part from silver extracted by thousands of slaves working under lethal conditions in state-­owned mines; women in Athens were demonstrably more oppressed than those in other Greek city-­states. Nevertheless, Athenians formed a community that somehow imagined itself to be especially civilized and compassionate. Indeed, compassion was central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city. Few people realize that Athenians of the Classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE) invented humane values, even though they conspicuously failed to live up to them. In this, they resemble Thomas Jefferson, who owned eighty-­three slaves when he wrote the Declaration of Independence

Introduction 3

(Stanton 1993, 148). Ongoing critiques of ancient and Enlightenment structures of power cannot nullify the positive significance of humane values. The first four chapters of this book, an extended comparison of Classical Athens and the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, will reveal similarities that place the present moment (early twenty-­first century) in fresh perspective. Each of these two periods is thoroughly wrapped up in the historical specificities proper to it. But the value of comparing the eighteenth-­century European Enlightenment with the Greek Enlightenment is enhanced by the fact that the eighteenth-­century philosophes made the comparison themselves. They thought that their Enlightenment was the second, not the first, in history. Peter Gay writes: “The Enlightenment . . . saw its own time struggling between superstition and reason; ancient Greece, it seemed, had been enmeshed in the same conflict. The Greeks had given criticism its first martyr [Socrates], but they had also given it its first practitioners—that is why the Greeks, for all their failings, were the true ancestors of the Enlightenment” (Gay 1966, 82).3 If this narrative displaced the Christian narrative long taught by the Roman Catholic Church, in which Christ was the light of the world, then so be it. The reasoning abilities of secular men (and it was almost always men) were elevated and praised in the Enlightenment, while identification with the Greeks further glorified their efforts. The eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, of course, has been challenged from seemingly every quarter: far from advancing the welfare of humanity, critics say, its sinister hypocrisy furnished an ideological cover story for the advance of the Eurocentrism, racism, imperialism, and colonialism that have afflicted the globe in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-­first centuries. The discerning reader will realize that I reject this etiology, along with Anthony Pagden, who writes in the preface of his The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters: “The line that supposedly leads from eighteenth-­ century rationalism and the apotheosis of modern science, via such atrocities as the massacres in the Belgian Congo and the Opium Wars in China, to the virtual domination of the world by the so-­called Great Powers of Europe and the United States is an illusory one” (Pagden 2013, xiii). I cannot and do not aspire to a global point of view. Obviously, my “parallel waves” of so-­called enlightenment are firmly situated in Western history. The elements of other world cultures that contribute to or support human-­ rights law do not fall within my purview. The process at the United Nations for writing the Universal Declaration that was adopted in 1948 contended with this problem more energetically than I can do, and up-­to-­date treatments are available.4 But if I am right about the parallel cultural waves, then the articula-

4  Introduction

tion of human rights in the eighteenth century was not without precedent. I show how humane values were first expressed, explicate their constituent elements, and point out paths of transmission from the ancient Greeks to eighteenth-­century Europe. My goal is to strengthen the philosophical foundation of human-­rights law by showing its indebtedness to Ancient Greece as well as its relation to cultural history. The approach I advance is very much in tune with the philosopher Richard Rorty’s view of human-­ rights culture as one of emotions nourished by literature (Barreto 2011). Overview of Parts and Chapters Three related essays (labeled Explorations A, B, and C) fall before part I, between parts I and II, and after part II; they offer deeper reflection on key points while demonstrating the intrinsic interest of the materials. In part I, “Parallel Waves,” I compare the parallel cultural waves involved in the emergence of humane discourse. Across this part’s four chapters, I argue that humane discourse in the late eighteenth century was a second occurrence, preceded by the invention of humane discourse in Classical Athens. Lynn Hunt, exploring how rights become “self-­evident,” describes an emotional sea change in eighteenth-­century France, when new cultural practices, including novels and portraiture, contributed to a sense of the separation and self-­possession of individual bodies, along with the possibility of empathy with others. The notions of bodily integrity and empathetic selfhood . . . have histories not unlike those of human rights, to which they are so intimately related. That is, the changes in view seem to happen all at once in the mid-­eighteenth century. (Lynn Hunt 2007, 30)

Interestingly, something similar happened in Classical Athens more than two thousand years earlier. To compare two vastly different periods is not to claim that they are exactly alike. To the contrary, I seek to convince the reader merely that the ancient Greeks and the eighteenth-­century Europeans witnessed a similar progression: a turn toward reason, the trauma of especially brutal warfare, the creation of a cultural genre that taught empathy, a widespread shift in emotion, the birth of humane discourse . . . all of which I suggest amounts to waves, which I call “cultural waves.” This is where the history of ideas, as it seems to me, merges with cultural history. So

Introduction 5

with a bow to Lynn Hunt and William M. Reddy, I theorize the following steps of this moral invention. Chapter 1, “The Turn toward Reason”: In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment philosophes famously turned their backs on irrational superstition and religious explanations that failed to satisfy. They embraced and enthroned reason, the unfettered operation of the human intellect. Evolving from the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the philosophes shifted the focus from the physical to the social world. The Greek Enlightenment (if I may) also evolved from a sort of scientific revolution. The very earliest Greek philosophers, the so-­called Presocratics, turned their backs on the fanciful mythopoetic explanations that had long prevailed in their culture, those enchanting stories of gods and heroes. Presocratic thinkers used their reason to create a protoscientific understanding of the physical world, of nature. Over time, the rationalizing impulse that began with them was eventually applied to the social world as well. Chapter 2, “Warfare”: Brutal warfare that excites the horror and compassion of key intellectuals is also a characteristic of both eras. The Seven Years’ War, of 1754–1763, was featured in Voltaire’s denunciation of cruelty (Candide, [1759] 2005). In antiquity, warfare among Greek city-­states was endemic and harsh, but the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) was unusually shocking, if we are to judge by Thucydides’ understated horror as well as by more objective measures (Hanson 2005). Here my suggestion intersects with that of Alan Dershowitz, who argues (2004) that new claims of rights very often emerge as a response to outrageous wrongdoings. Chapter 3, “Empathy and Tears”: Many scholars have noted how the eighteenth-­century novel (especially Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Heloïse) taught readers empathy. Athens in the fifth century BCE likewise had a new literary genre, tragedy, that taught empathy and encouraged spectators to enter into the anguish of protagonists and victims. In France, there occurred an emotional sea change: men became tender, tearful, compassionate. In late eighteenth-­century France, one finds tear-­stained letters and novels; in early fourth-­century BCE Athens, the weepiness that Plato condemns and an overall softening in the literary culture, which the French classicist Jacqueline de Romilly (1979) dubbed la douceur (softness) and explored at length. What happened next in eighteenth-­ century France was a wholesale turn toward softness and sentiment, a willingness to empathize, sympathize, to share the pain of others. I suggest that tragic drama accomplished something similar for fifth-­century BCE audi-

6  Introduction

ences in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens: tragic poetry, as Aristotle suggests (Poet. 6.1449b), furnished an education in compassion. Plato had earlier excluded poets from his ideal republic on the grounds that poetry softens and weakens men, making them prone to tears (Resp. 605b).5 I propose that Plato, far from being a mere crank, is complaining about a real shift he witnessed in his own lifetime: that men had indeed become more sympathetic and more prone to weeping, largely through their exposure to tragic poetry. Chapter 4, “Humane Discourse”: In the late eighteenth century, the Declaration of Independence in America (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France (1789) crystallized a new perception of the human being, of human dignity and value, and evinced compassion for suffering. In Classical Athens, one conspicuous feature of the “softening” was freshly coined humane discourse: the word philanthrōpia (love of humanity) suddenly entered the scene. And when Isocrates (15.20) called Athenians the “most compassionate,” this was something new: a term of approbation that would not have been heard a century earlier. In part II, “Ancient Greek Roots,” I look more closely at themes in Ancient Greek literary culture that supported human dignity and outline how they were transmitted into later European culture. This part contains two chapters. Chapter 5, “Elements of Respect”: Here I identify elements in Athenian literature that encouraged humane attitudes. Sophocles’ character Antigone epitomizes and embodies human dignity and value. The need for protection from violence is illustrated with help from legends of Theseus and Athenian constitutional law. Human freedom is explored through Solon and through Herodotus’s Histories; Orlando Patterson’s scholarship is helpful here. I consider what makes a person a person. The idea of the soul is crucial in ancient Greek philosophy, as seen in Plato’s Phaedrus and Republic, for example in book 4, where Socrates argues that in a well-­ordered soul, reason rules the appetites with the assistance of the soul’s spirited element (4.434d–­441c).6 Greek literature starting with lyric poetry is populated by individual characters who matter, who have carefully crafted inner lives. This phenomenon, well illustrated in Sophocles’ Ajax, antedates Socrates’ seminal invention of moral philosophy (“The unexamined life is not worth living” [Plato, Ap. 38a]). A concern for suffering permeates Greek tragic plays, especially Euripides’ Trojan Women and Hecuba, while compassion is very nearly a virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes. By the fourth century, prose genres show that love-­of-­humankind (philanthrōpia) had evolved from an attribute of the gods (in Aeschylus’s Prometheus) to an admirable trait in leaders (in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia).

Introduction 7

Chapter 6, “Paths through Time”: Here I trace some of the paths of transmission of these ideas through time and across space, via Christianity, classical learning, and more. A further question, which cannot be addressed here, is this: Did eighteenth-­ century thinkers consciously notice this facet of Classical Athens? Were they aware, as Cicero was in the first century BCE, that the Greeks had brought in the theme of humanity, placing a positive value on kindness and compassion? Philanthrōpia was never the most conspicuous word in Greek literature, including philosophy, nor was it a highlighted feature of paideia, the famous Hellenic education, although Eurpides in his Electra (lines 294–295) has Orestes say that compassion (oiktos) is a result of education. What does it mean, or what has it ever meant, to be civilized? I do not accept that civilization is mainly a question of manners, pace Norbert Elias (2000). Rather, one might recognize that despite differences in manners, some cultures practice compassion more than others do. Our terms “humane” and “humanities” derive from the Latin humanitas, which denoted either refined learning or human kindness, with the implication that refined learning—the humanities—could inculcate kindness. Perhaps sometimes it can. In the United States, where curiosity about the ancient Greeks is strong and admiration for them widespread, nonclassicists are sometimes surprised to learn that classical scholarship is only just emerging from a phase of polemical disdain for and partial rejection of the Greeks. Let’s go back a little. Nineteenth-­century intellectuals tended to idealize the Greeks. The Victorian cultural critic Matthew Arnold, for example, famously attributed to them “sweetness and light.” Twentieth-­century scholars refuted and derided Arnold’s praise. Alongside their Apolline reason, E. R. Dodds showed (1951), the ancient Greeks were also filled with Dionysiac irrational darkness. Nowadays we notice that Athens, the city-­state that invented democracy, oppressed women more than did other ancient societies, including rival Sparta. The Athenians built their beautiful buildings (the Parthenon) and thought their sophisticated thoughts (Plato’s Republic) on the backs of slaves. Theirs was a slave economy structurally similar, as M. I. Finley found (1959, 151–152), to the slave economy of the antebellum American South.7 And the Athenians ruled their short-­lived empire with an iron fist. As lofty as their philosophy was, were the Greeks not the first and most profound hypocrites of history? Perhaps so, but we cannot on that account give up on them and purge ourselves of their influence. We could not even if we wanted to. They are

8  Introduction

in our cultural bloodstream. Similarly, revisionist history can uncover the shocking hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson, opponent of miscegenation,8 who fathered slave children on his slave concubine; but what American citizen would therefore tear up the Declaration of Independence? Bitter denunciations of the Enlightenment have not undone what reason and the hope in progress wrought at vast human expense. For all our political correctness or genuine Angst, for all the fashions and foibles of the scholarly world, we remain what we have been: the inheritors of a dark-­and-­light history that is arguably more dark than light. We can rewrite it, but we cannot erase it. Mistakes were made, and in abundance. Nevertheless, this heritage has borne important fruit, human-­rights law, that we need today more than ever. And now, the reader can decide whether to march directly into part I, chapter 1, or first take a detour through Exploration A, which illustrates the tendency of eighteenth-­century intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to align themselves with Classical Athens. This is the first of three such detours (Explorations A, B, and C) that I took on the way to discovering my thesis during the early phases of this project.

Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are entitled to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” yet he owned more than six hundred slaves over the course of his life.1 A great deal has been said about Jefferson’s hypocrisy, his chronic failure to match deed with word: he always remained wedded to sectional interests, and personally, he depended on slaves to support his aristocratic lifestyle. The inconsistencies we notice today he also noticed himself. But Jefferson was born into a slave society. He saw no immediate way to abolish the evil he saw, and so he simply lived with this deep tension between humane ideals (verging on human rights) and the practice of chattel slavery.2 It is also worth noting, as this “Exploration” will do, that Jefferson’s approach to slaveholding was consistent with the moral guidance he received from one of his most cherished sources: Classical Athens. In many ways, eighteenth-­century America was a place to start over, to invent a new and better future. America differed dramatically from Europe: seemingly uncorrupted by history, it was unstained by the ruinous bloodshed of the Old World. It had never known feudalism, or religious warfare, or the treachery of princes and pretenders, or the insult of social caste. America, of course, lacked any physical connection to the lost Greco-­Roman world, with its poignant ruins and timeworn but inspiring artwork. America also lacked the infrastructure for classical scholarship: cloistered universities, presses. Nevertheless, Jefferson and most of the other Founders were classically educated (see Winterer 2002), much like the aristocrats of England and France. And while the Founders worked with the Enlightenment ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, they also embraced the democratic ideas and republican traditions of Classical Antiquity. They 9

10  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

paid most attention to Rome, where a republican system endured for five hundred years; they dismissed the short-­lived, raw, and turbulent democracy of Athens as a failed experiment.3 For moral lessons and concepts of civic virtue, however, Jefferson and his friends looked to the philosophers and “great men” of Greece as well as of Rome. Generally speaking, they admired the Spartans for their discipline and martial valor. But they admired the Athenians for their intellectual and artistic achievements. Indeed, they thought of Athens as enlightened. Athenians in the Classical period, the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, thought of themselves as civilized and humane. They took pride in their capacity for compassion; they cared deeply about justice.4 Yet slavery was an indispensable feature of Athenian society, and slave torture was intrinsic to the Athenian legal system.5 It would be interesting to know whether Jefferson noticed this contradiction, so similar to the one he faced. In his writings, his mentions of ancient slavery, including a long passage in his Notes on the State of Virginia, refer to Rome rather than to Greece. Overall he says very little about Greek history, although he loved Homer above all other poets. Scholars have long since demonstrated that Jefferson’s classicism was no mere window-­dressing, no superficial use of ancient commonplaces: he read Greek and Latin authors in the original as well as in translation and reflected on them deeply.6 Classicists including Meyer Reinhold (1984) have justifiably emphasized Jefferson’s direct encounter with the ancient texts, but that encounter would have been shaped by his more general understanding of ancient history. So it is worth examining the visions of Athens that prevailed in the Age of Jefferson, which means remembering that Jefferson, even when ensconced in the library at his lovely and remote Monticello, was closely linked to Europe. Among the books on ancient history by French and English authors that he purchased and read are the extraordinary writings of Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy. Barthélemy was an erudite French abbé, a scholar and numismatist who ran the king’s bureau of medallions. But his real life’s work, to which he devoted thirty years, was an eight-­volume set called Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, during the Middle of the Fourth Century before the Christian Era, which purports to be a first-­person travelogue kept by an imaginary Scythian traveling through Greece. (Yes, this is strange, even alarming.) Volume 1, by way of introduction, sets forth Greek history from the earliest times, and here we read that even in tribal times the earliest Athenians “were more enlightened, and consequently more powerful than the other savages” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 1:63). Volumes 2 through 7 take readers on a tour from Byzantium, through the Aegean islands, and all over Attica,

Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 11

the Peloponnese, Thebes, Delphi (see figure 2); these volumes allow us to eavesdrop on conversations Anacharsis supposedly had with Plato, Epaminondas, and so forth. Volume 8 contains maps and engravings of the places our fictitious Anacharsis visited (three of which illustrate this book). The amazing thing is that Barthélemy, the author (1716–1795), had been to Italy but never set foot in Greece. He simply wrote this from his study; the entire work is heavily footnoted with references to ancient texts. It was published in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, when Jefferson was finishing up his stint as American ambassador to France. Barthélemy and Jefferson apparently met, perhaps in the salon of the abbé’s patroness, the Countess Choiseul-­Gouffier, where stood models of ancient buildings fashioned by craftsmen in Greece (Lehmann 1947, 55). Travels of Anacharsis the Younger was wildly popular, a huge success. It ran to forty editions and was translated into eight European languages, including not only German and Spanish but also Danish, Armenian, and modern Greek. Jefferson in December 1788 purchased a set for his library at Monticello as well as a second set for James Madison because, as he wrote his friend, “the whole impression was likely to be run off at once.”7 Anacharsis, then, allows us to explore the historical imagination of the eighteenth century through a work that spanned the Atlantic: it became the property of men of letters in the New World as well as in the Old. To place Anacharsis in context, one must consider the state of knowledge about Greece that obtained when Barthélemy was writing. He began in 1757, within a decade after the first excavations at Pompeii heightened the craving for antiquities in Western capitals (Coates and Seydl 2007), and during the same years when the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann was praising the perfections of the Greek aesthetic. (See also chap. 6, §C, in this book.) Broadly speaking, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the birth of Hellenism, the passion for Ancient Greece, and then sometimes its development into Philhellenism, the movement to liberate contemporary Greeks from Ottoman rule.8 That liberation was not accomplished until the 1820s, in Jefferson’s old age, but the struggle started in 1769, and Philhellenic interest was building in the 1770s and 1780s, while Barthélemy was writing. Intrepid travelers to Greece described what they found there, geographers drew maps, architects made measured drawings of the monuments, while artists depicted those same ruins in wild and romantic settings. Watercolor paintings from the era typically show men in exotic native garb clustered around Classical ruins near Athens. As J. Mordaunt Crook says, “The rediscovery of Greece in the late eighteenth century (the crux of the whole neo-­classical phenomenon) was

12  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

fundamentally a romantic—even a Byronic—gesture” (Crook 1989, 44; see also Tsigakou 1981; Webb 1993). An engraving depicting the Erechtheum on the Acropolis at Athens was published in 1758 by Julien-­David Le Roy, who was competing with the more famous James “Athenian” Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Indeed, all sorts of maps and measured drawings, as well as the standard ancient texts, were available to the learned abbé. He used them all. The first few figures from Anacharsis are maps of Greece, impressive in their detail and accuracy. Barthélemy’s illustrator, J. D. Barbié du Bocage, explains in a 102-­page preface to volume 8 that he worked from the plans and surveys of the Count de Choiseul-­Gouffier (1752–1817); Meletius, an archbishop of Athens (1661–1714), whose Geography was published posthumously in 1728; the king’s cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782); and Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749). Parenthetically, it is worth noting that Fréret, while a young man, had no sooner entered the Academy of Medals and Inscriptions than he landed himself in the Bastille for six months.9 Why? Because he treasonously disputed the commonly held notion that the Franks were descended from a band of Greeks or Trojans. That was in 1714. It would be interesting to know how much later Fréret’s then-­controversial claim that the Franks were actually a South Germanic tribe met with general acceptance. It seems possible that some men and women in eighteenth-­century France who read Anacharsis may have regarded the ancient Greeks not only as their cultural progenitors but also as the literal founders of their bloodline. To appreciate the flavor of Anacharsis, one may examine the engraving of Sunium, a famous cape at the southernmost tip of the Attic Peninsula. The plate (my frontispiece) is keyed to several pages of text and illustrates the visit that Anacharsis paid to Sunium during a thunderstorm: remember that we are viewing the scene through his fourth-­century eyes. The unblemished Temple of Poseidon (or Neptune, as Barthélemy would have it) stands on a rugged promontory beneath a sweeping sky that is rent by lightning. Several men are seated on the rocky ground. The legend states that this is Plato discoursing with his disciples. From the punctilious attention to factual detail, to highly imaginative attempts at reconstruction—Anacharsis has it all. It is hard to capture the light. But Barthélemy, in his own way, and at a great remove from ancient Greece in both time and space, did the best he could. His sources ranged from the epics of Homer, written down in the eighth century BCE, to fifth-­century tragedy and history, to fourth-­century philosophy and rhetoric, right through the Roman era to the learned disquisitions of Byzantine scholars in the tenth century CE. Barthélemy seems

Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 13

to have made no invidious distinctions among his sources. Rather, he took them all at face value. Myth is treated as fact: the Trojan War really happened, Clytemnestra really killed Agamemnon, Oedipus really put out his own eyes. The battle of Marathon unfolded exactly as Herodotus says it did (a view with which no twenty-­first-­century historian would agree), and so on. All this makes for entertaining reading, and one can easily imagine that Parisians during the French Revolution may have preferred to spend time with Anacharsis rather than dwell on what was happening in their own world. Barthélemy, taking on the voice of a fourth-­century BCE traveler, tries to block out eighteenth-­century CE France: but of course it’s still there, especially in the highly sentimental tone of his discourse. For example, describing the development of family life in earliest times, he writes: “The father heard the secret voice of nature in the recesses of his heart; he heard it in the heart of his spouse and of his children. He surprised himself shedding tears, no longer wrung from him by suffering; and learned to esteem himself by the exertion of sensibility” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 1:7–8). Indeed, Barthélemy’s English translator confesses that “the sentimental ardour of the nation [France] continually produces a style which to an English reader will appear to border on inflation and bombast” (1793–1794, 1:ix) . . . but not so much in Anacharsis, he avers, since Barthélemy “formed his taste on the correct and chaste models of antiquity.” For a really heavy dose of sentimental discourse, one can read Barthélemy’s romantic novel, Carité and Polydorus, published posthumously, set in the heroic age of Greece and featuring the picaresque adventures of two lovers separated because one of them was condemned to be fed to the Minotaur. A map of Athens, taken from a French edition of Anacharsis, shows the city connected to its port by the famous Long Walls. The Acropolis dominates; nearby is the Pnyx, and below, the Ceramicus. To the northwest, outside the walls, lay Plato’s school, the Academy. Even today, we don’t know what the original Academy looked like, but Barthélemy’s illustrator has confidently drawn it to resemble a French garden. Looking at a plan of Versailles from 1719, one can easily see how this Academy mimics the symmetrical layout at Versailles. The central section, in particular, shows a diamond figure crisscrossed with a rectangular grid of paths. There is also an affinity between the chateau at Versailles, its entrance flanked by symmetrical façades, drawn by Pierre Patel in 1688, and the reconstructed view of the Propylaea, gateway to the Acropolis, in Anacharsis. The eighteenth century is certainly present: the ancient Propylaea was not nearly so grand as this. Barthélemy was intrigued by the religious customs of fourth-­century Athenians. One engraving (see figure 1) depicts garlanded women and chil-

14  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

dren leading a sacrificial animal to the Temple of Theseus, also called the Hephaesteum, in front of which stands a tripod smoldering with a holy fire. The setting is all wrong: this temple, well preserved today, actually stands on a prominent hill overlooking the agora, the marketplace and civic center of Athens. These graceful people, elegantly draped, correspond to the Anacharsis text but not to the social realities of Classical Athens: in describing the agora, which he calls the “forum” (as if this were Rome), Barthélemy penned the following, sans footnotes: “At certain hours, the square, cleared from all the incumbrances of the market, leaves an open field for those who wish to entertain themselves with observations on the crowd, or make a display of their own persons” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:317). Indeed, in the chapters devoted to Athens, one may catch other glimpses of the elite, urbane society of eighteenth-­century Paris. For example, commenting on the literary accomplishments of Athens, Barthélemy says that an emphasis on style is deemed essential “and more especially among a people whose mind is levity itself, and whose senses are of the utmost delicacy” (1793– 1794, 2:23). Nowadays we pride ourselves on our theoretical sophistication and think we are the first to be self-­conscious about our constructs of the world. But the famous literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-­Beuve noticed more than a hundred years ago that Barthélemy had projected “enlightened” eighteenth-­century France onto Classical Athens: Aspasia, for example, celebrated mistress of the statesman Pericles, is imagined as running a salon. Such innocence was one cause for the nineteenth-­century dismissal of the abbé’s massive work. Still, Barthélemy’s portrait of Athens is less careless than Sainte-­Beuve suggests: though the abbé handles sources uncritically, he does stay close to them and rarely departs on unhinged flights of fancy. Moreover, Barthélemy ascribes an intriguing ambiguity to the ancient Greek painter Parrhasius, who “undertook in his portrait of the people of Athens, to trace out the character, or rather the various characters, of that violent, unjust, gentle, compassionate, vain-­glorious, crouching, haughty, and timid people” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:232, emphasis added). Turning from the overall nature of Anacharsis and the general view of Athens it conveys, we can now consider what Barthélemy says about slavery in Athens and judicial slave torture. His essential point is that although slavery is found nearly everywhere, the Athenians practice it more kindly than the Spartans do—and perhaps more kindly than they should: Throughout almost all Greece the number of slaves infinitely exceeds that of the citizens. Almost every where the utmost exertions are obliged continu-

Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 15

ally to be made to keep them in subjection. Lacedaemon [Sparta], by having recourse to rigorous measures to force them to obedience, has often driven them to revolt. Athens, wishing to secure their fidelity by gentler methods, has made them insolent. (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:98)

Athenian law protects slaves from undeserved abuse: When essentially deficient in their duties, their masters may load them with chains, condemn them to turn the millstone, prevent them from marrying, or separate them from their wives; but on no account may they attempt their lives. When treated with cruelty, they are driven to desertion, or to seek asylum at least in the temple of Theseus. In this case, they require to be transferred to the service of another less rigorous master, and sometimes are so fortunate as to be able to withdraw themselves from the yoke of the tyrant who oppressed them. (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:99)

He is probably referring to the same Temple of Theseus that is depicted in figure 1, which did indeed afford asylum to runaway slaves. Meanwhile, a hundred pages later, the narrator frets about slaves taking unfair advantage of a generous system, noting, “The forum [agora] has buildings that sometimes afford an asylum to the wretched, but which are too often a shelter for the wicked” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:209; emphasis added). There are material rewards for the best slaves, and upward mobility for a talented few, as explained by the fictitious Euthymenes (based on Ischomachus in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus): “We [Athenians] pay the same attention to those of our slaves who show zeal and fidelity in our service. They have better shoes, and are better clothed. These little distinctions render them sensible to honour, and retain them in their duty more effectually than fear of punishment” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 5:9). And elsewhere: Thus have the laws provided for [slaves’] safety; but when they are intelligent, or possessed of pleasing talents, interest proves a more powerful protector than the laws. With such endowments they enrich their masters, and themselves by retaining part of their earnings. These profits accumulated, enable them to procure patrons, to live in the most unbecoming luxury, and to unite the insolence of arrogant pretensions with sordidness of sentiment. (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:101)

This passage echoes the dour complaints of the so-­called Old Oligarch (Ps.-­ Xen. [Ath. Pol.] 1.10–12).

16  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

So the Athenians indulge their slaves too much, which leads to undesirable moral and social consequences: some slaves forget their place. This can happen in a society where slavery is not based on race. Meanwhile, Barthélemy, or rather our fictitious fourth-­century Scythian, is much struck by the contrasting fates of agricultural and mining slaves. The former have some pleasures; the latter, only pain: We entered these damp and unhealthy places, and witnessed what labour it costs to tear from the bowels of the earth those metals which are destined only to be discovered, and even possessed by slaves. . . . The traveller through Attica must be struck with the contrast presented by the two classes of workmen whose labours are employed on the earth. The one, without fear, and unexposed to danger gather on the surface the corn, wine, oil, and other fruits, in which they are permitted to participate. They are in general well fed and well clothed; they have their moments of pleasure, and in the midst of their toil breathe free air, and enjoy the splendour of heaven. [Could he be thinking of French peasants here?] The other, buried in quarries of marble or mines of silver, continually in danger of seeing the tomb close over their heads, are only guided in their incessant labours by dim and funereal lights, and are perpetually surrounded by a gross and frequently deadly atmosphere. Unfortunate spectres, to whom no feeling remains but that of their sufferings, nor strength but what must be employed to augment the pride and pomp of their masters, who tyrannize over them! (Barthélemy 1793– 1794, 5:36)

What was happening in the abbé Barthélemy’s world? There was, in theory, no slavery in France itself (see Peabody 1996), and the revolutionary ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity were about to inspire the successful slave revolution in Haiti, then called Saint-­Domingue; a decree of the National Convention a few years later, in 1794, would technically abolish slavery in all French colonies, though it was brutally reinstated under Napoleon. For Jefferson, his fellow Virginians, and also the French, the race factor figured very large. They feared black Africans; they looked down upon their culture. How different from the Greek situation, as Barthélemy makes clear from the outset: his fictitious Anacharsis, living in Scythia (modern-­ day Ukraine), first became interested in Greece after purchasing an equally fictitious Greek slave named Timagenes, who entranced and humbled him through charming conversation (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:2). Anacharsis therefore set Timagenes free, as the conceit would have it, and they traveled together. He, like the Romans, was captivated by his Greek captive (Hor.

Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 17

Epist. 2.1.156). Such a scenario could never be imagined for an eighteenth-­ century slavemaster in America or in the colonies of France—and especially not for Jefferson, who was convinced that blacks were decidedly inferior to whites in their intellectual, artistic, and emotional capacities.10 Barthélemy draws attention to the fact that Athenian slaves might seek asylum at the Temple of Theseus.11 Ironically, the temple was also a venue for slave torture, as evidenced by a passage from Isocrates 17.12 In Athens, slaves could be tortured in all kinds of private disputes, such as inheritance cases, not for any suspected wrongdoing on their part but simply to generate courtroom evidence. In fact, slave testimony was valid only if it had been obtained under torture. The abbé devotes exactly one paragraph to the subject. His account is blunt and matter-­of-­fact: he neither ignores, nor praises, nor strongly condemns the practice. He alludes to the torture as a “barbarity” an “inhumane proof,” “a cruel act” (Barthélemy 1793–1794, 2:301), but he by no means protests, as he does protest indignantly against two other Greek practices, infanticide and abortion, that incurred severe reproach from this Roman Catholic churchman (1793–1794, 2:69): “Whence is it that enlightened and sensible nations” he says, “thus violate the dictates of nature?” Barthélemy employs no such vigorous remonstrance in his discussion of torture. Why not? Again, what was happening in the abbé Barthélemy’s world? Well, judicial torture was still practiced from time to time in France. The men and women subjected to it either stood accused of a serious crime or had already been convicted and were being tortured for information that might implicate other suspects. This was a deeply controversial practice, one threatened by the Enlightenment project, and it ended only in 1788—­coincidentally the same year Anacharsis was published. So perhaps the abbé, writing in a nation that viewed itself as consummately civilized and yet used judicial torture, could frown on cruelty but accept the contradiction more readily than we can, and he made it all the easier for Thomas Jefferson to do the same. No one reads it nowadays, but Anacharsis remains a monument to the historical imagination of late eighteenth-­century Europe and America. It also expresses the moral sensibilities of its age. This sort of text is helpful in studying the history of emotion and in understanding the impact of emotion and moral sensibilities upon history. Richard Rorty, asking what remains of Enlightenment, begs us to remember one good thing: the dream of a less cruel world. For example: “Nothing should be allowed to displace utopian political hope except the glimpse of an even better utopia than the one previously imagined” (Rorty 2001, 21). Humane sensibilities and humane ideals are still with us, though too little practiced.

18  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

In this “Exploration” I have attempted to show that educated eighteenth-­ century Europeans thought of ancient Athens as an enlightened age much like their own, where one could observe the intellectual and moral progress of the human mind. Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders probably viewed Athens in the same way, for they read the same books. The revolutionary era witnessed a classical craze. Jefferson disdained sentimental romances such as Carité and Polydorus. Anacharsis contains novelistic elements; nevertheless, Jefferson not only owned Anacharsis but even admired it enough to purchase additional sets for friends. He also owned Oliver Goldsmith’s Grecian History, which praised the Athenians as “the instructors of all mankind” and credited them with being kind to their slaves: they were, the Anglo-­Irish poet and playwright Goldsmith says, “remarkable for their lenity to these unhappy men.”13 Barthélemy’s treatment of slavery is consistent with Goldsmith’s, and with Thomas Jefferson’s own attitude of worldly resignation and realism. If the Athenians practiced slavery, how could Americans expect to do better overnight? Jefferson felt that it would remain for future generations to correct this evil ( John Chester Miller 1991, 39, 45, 89–90, 96–97, 124, 206). So he continued to own slaves. Like the Athenians in Anacharsis, he simply treated them as kindly as possible. The precedent of enlightened Athens gave him a perfect out.

PART I

PARALLEL WAVES

Tout connaissance s’éclaire par la comparaison.

Jacqueline de Romilly, L’e � volution du pathétique, p. 1

Figure 1. View of the Temple of Theseus, from Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy, Travels

of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece: Maps, plans, views, and coins, illustrative of the geography and antiquities of ancient Greece (1806). Villanova University Digital Library.

CHAPTER 1

The Turn toward Reason

If we hazard a giant step backward into a naive appreciation for the glories of reason and science (without which I could not be composing this book on my sleek MacBook Pro), we might notice two significant moments in Western history when thinkers turned their backs on mythopoetic or religious explanations and sought new explanations based on reason and physical causes.1 These are, latterly, the so-­called Age of Reason of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, and, formerly, its less familiar Classical antecedent: the intellectual revolution that occurred with the dawn of Greek civilization and the original Age of Reason in Classical Athens, when logos (Greek for “spoken word, conversation, narrative, reckoning, reason, logic”) came to the fore, elevated and refined by philosophers, sophists, and poets, too. As J. B. Shank points out,2 intellectuals in both eras thought of human knowledge as universal and made reason a human tool for mastering the world. A. Reason (ho Logos) The Greek world witnessed with its Presocratic philosophers (sixth and fifth centuries BCE, so named because they antedated Socrates) a departure from mythopoetic and supernatural explanations of the world such as those found in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. Some of these thinkers declined to view the sun, for example, as a radiant anthropomorphic divinity driving his chariot across the sky every day. No, Empedocles of Acragas (b. 490) wrote (Fr 21): “Observe the sun, bright to see and hot everywhere, and all the immortal things [heavenly bodies] drenched with its heat and brilliant 21

22  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

light” (Freeman 1948, 54). And elsewhere (Fr 41): “But [the sun] collected in a ball travels round the great sky” (ibid., 57). Finally, from Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (Fr 18): “It is the sun that endows the moon with its brilliance” (ibid., 86). Moreover, according to the new field of medicine associated with Empedocles of Acragas and Hippocrates of Cos (b. ca. 460), illness was not an affliction visited by wrathful divinities. Rather, illness arose from imbalances within the physical body and could be treated via practical measures designed to restore balance. Rational explanations like these were protoscientific and initiated a tradition of “natural philosophy” that led eventually to the astonishing achievements of Greek science in the Hellenistic age, as when Eratosthenes of Cyrene (ca. 285–194 BCE), mathematician, poet, and head of the Alexandrian Library, used geometry to calculate accurately the circumference of the Earth. It is widely agreed that Western science started with the Greeks, especially on the eastern and western edges of the Greek world (the coast of Anatolia in the East; southern Italy and Sicily in the West),3 though Athens would become the focal site of many subsequent intellectual experiments, rather like a Paris, London, or New York City of the ancient Mediterranean world, attracting and intensifying talent. Greek religion, unlike Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox), had very little doctrinal dogma, so the shift toward reason did not dramatically challenge deep-­seated religious beliefs. Now we should leap ahead about two thousand years—after Athens, after the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Exploration—up to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including polymaths Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, and finally the Enlightenment thinkers ( philosophes) of the so-­called long eighteenth century (ca. 1660–1830 CE) who broadened the reach of new ideas that challenged a long-­established societywide Christian orientation toward God and Church.4 The first observers to compare the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment with the Greek Enlightenment were, precisely, the eighteenth-­century philosophes themselves (Gay 1966, 31–126). Their analysis recognized and emphasized the turn from mythopoetic thinking to reason. As reason is enthroned, superstition recedes and religious explanations of life give way to a quest for physical or worldly causes. Both in ancient Greece and in later Europe, the application of logical reasoning started with the physical world, the examination of nature, but then turned toward the social world: social organization, systems of government, and the problem of undeserved suf-

The Turn toward Reason 23

fering. Ethics became central to Greek philosophy in a way that may be compared to the social urges of Enlightenment science. Many intellectual and philosophical currents of the Enlightenment are well known, including the presence of the “Enlightenment of Sympathy,” which runs alongside the “Enlightenment of Reason” (Frazer 2010, passim), so I restrict this discussion to a nexus of concerns that prepares Europe’s intellectual soil for the germination of humane discourse: (1) the idea of progress; (2) the application of reason to the social world, addressing the unfairness of life; especially (3) unnecessary suffering. 1. The Idea of Progress

Nowadays we have ample grounds for questioning the idea of progress, which always had its skeptics but was not repudiated en masse until the twentieth century in the wake of World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weaponry (Meek Lange 2011). Hindsight, clearly, is 20/20. Early capitalism could produce churning social misery,5 however, and in the eighteenth century, one frequent goal of Enlightenment thinkers was to improve people’s lives. They extended the new “natural-­scientific model to a host of new social sciences, including economics, psychology, and sociology” (Wright 2005, xv) and strove to gain a deeper understanding of societies both familiar and exotic.6 While reason was unfolding in the eighteenth century, some philosophes thought that the significance of the Enlightenment transcended its historical moment by offering “the prospect of a new, explicitly modern understanding of human beings’ place in the world, and of radical improvement in the human condition” (Robertson 2015, 1). Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) was apparently the first to offer a comprehensive theory of progress in his pamphlet Digression on the Ancients and Moderns (1688). The visionary Charles-­Irénée Castel de Saint-­Pierre, usually known as the abbé de Saint-­Pierre, contributed his Observations on the Continuous Progress of Universal Reason (1737). Jonathan Israel (2011) describes the Enlightenment as “consciously committed to the notion of bettering humanity in this world through a fundamental, revolutionary transformation discarding the ideas, habits and traditions of the past either wholly or partially.”7 Thus the philosophes in general thought that European society would be ameliorated, without fully articulating the modern idea of progress, something accomplished in 1836 by Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism (Burkert 1997, 19).

24  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

An embryonic concept of human progress, or linear ascent, is certainly found in Greek thought (see Burkert 1997), expressed most beautifully in Sophocles’ “Ode to Man,” which praises human craft and cleverness in conquering nature: Many are the wonders; none is more wonderful than what is man. That it is that crosses the sea with the south winds storming and the waves swelling, breaking around him in roaring surf. He it is again who wears away the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied, as the ploughs wind across her from year to year when he works her with the breed that comes from horse. The tribe of the lighthearted birds he snares and takes prisoner the races of savage beasts and the brood of the fish of the sea, with the close-­spun web of nets. A cunning fellow is man. His contrivances make him master of beasts of the field and those that move in the mountains. So he brings the horse with the shaggy neck to bend underneath the yoke; and also the untamed mountain bull; and speech and windswift thought and the tempers that go with city living he has taught himself, and how to avoid the sharp frost, when lodging is cold under the open sky and pelting strokes of the rain. He has a way against everything, and he faces nothing that is to come Without contrivance. Only against death can he call on no means of escape; but escape from hopeless diseases he has found in the depths of his mind. With some sort of cunning, inventive

The Turn toward Reason 25

beyond all expectation he reaches sometimes evil, and sometimes good. (  Antigone 332–383, translated by David Grene)

Elsewhere in Greek literature, admittedly, one finds the opposite concept: of linear decline, sometimes precipitous, as with Pandora and the jar of evils that she releases into the world (Hesiod, Theogony 570–616, Works and Days 47–105), and sometimes gradual, as with Hesiod’s myth of the Five Ages (Works and Days 106–201), in which protohumans devalue step-­ by-­step from the first age, of shining Gold, to the last, of grim and heavy Iron. There are also recurring cycles of time: the cosmic cycles of Empedocles (Osborne 2004, 11–13) or the cyclical human affairs treated by Plato and Aristotle. But the Athenians in particular were excited and energized by the palpable advances they saw themselves making in all the arts, in crafts like potterymaking and metallurgy, in seafaring, in speechmaking, in finance, and in the overseas trading that brought luxury items to their city. Unlike the old-­fashioned Spartans, who rejected coinage and ate black broth, Athenians were quick-­thinking, educated, modern.8 Things were changing fast. 2. The Application of Reason to the Social World

Protagoras in the fifth century BCE had said, “The human being is the measure of all things,”9 and J. B. Shank observes that from this perspective, the turn to the applied and social in each era was simply the logical extension of a human-­centered natural science turning toward the solution of human problems.10 Things were changing very fast indeed in the eighteenth century—breathtakingly so in England, where the Industrial Revolution began transforming the landscape, the economy, the whole society. To choose one among many examples of the eighteenth-­century application of reason to the social world, let us notice Adam Smith, the Scotsman who authored The Wealth of Nations (1776), propounding that what holds society together is self-­interest regulated by competition. As Robert Heilbroner emphasizes, Smith did not espouse the interests of any particular class such as gold-­ hoarding kings or rich guilds; rather, Smith’s notion of wealth referred to the goods that everyone consumed. His was “a democratic, and hence radical, philosophy of wealth. . . . We are in the modern world where the flow of goods and services consumed by everyone constitutes the ultimate aim and end of economic life” (Heilbroner 1967, 48). Smith introduced The Wealth

26  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

of Nations with these words: “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always, either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations” (Smith 1776, 1). Coincidentally, the American Declaration of Independence was penned in that same year. History would soon show that the democratic projects of fairness and broad-­based improvement contributed to monumental results: the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789 (as dourly noted by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke), and the legal and social changes spread throughout Europe by Napoleon. In Classical Athens, the power of reasoning was applied to the physical world, to the metaphysical realm (Plato), and also to the social world of human events, with unsettling democratic implications. Hilary Putnam writes: “If we compare the seventeenth and eighteenth century enlightenment, the Enlightenment with a capital ‘E,’ with the earlier Platonic enlightenment, it is not hard to perceive both similarities and differences. On the side of the similarities, there is the same aspiration to reflective transcendence, the same willingness to criticize conventional beliefs and institutions, and to propose radical reforms” (Putnam 2001, 15). Walter Burkert agrees that “one may well speak of an intellectual revolution in Greece during the fifth century, an era of fundamental change that included the invention of isonomia [political equality], later called dēmokratia [popular rule]” (Burkert 1997, 25). Elated by their success at repelling the Persian incursions of 490 and 480/479 BCE, the Athenians also enjoyed an economic boom concentrated in their urban center. A rapid progression in the emergence of reason and the retreat of religious thinking can be seen in the works of the fifth-­century Greek historians Herodotus and his younger contemporary Thucydides. Herodotus, writing his masterful story of the confrontation between Greeks and Persians (from the Lydian subjugation of Ionian cities down through the Persian invasions), reports and synthesizes information available to him through oral interviews and imposes on it a compelling logic.11 Ultimately, however, he ascribes divine causation to events, namely the retribution of the gods. Xerxes, the Great King of Persia, aimed too high: he wanted to change land into sea (by digging a canal across the Athos Peninsula: Hdt. 7.22–24, 37) and sea into land (by bridging the Hellespont, Hdt. 7.25, 34–36). This was hubris (insolence) writ large. Then the Great King’s expedition into Greece

The Turn toward Reason 27

in 480 BCE met with disaster by sea at Salamis and on land at Plataea. Well . . . Xerxes overreached, so he had it coming! There was a Greek word for this, naturally, and also a female divinity to personify it: Nemesis (Retribution) brought down or flattened “all immoderate good fortune” (LSJ, abridged, s.v. nemesis). Grateful Athenians built a temple to her at Rhamnous, on the coast near Marathon. Thucydides in turn tackled the conflict that dominated his lifetime and his life, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BCE). He, like Herodotus, relied chiefly on oral sources—necessarily, as written sources were scarce. More so than his predecessor, however, he searched for the all-­too-­human logic of events and underlying laws of power politics that might enable humanity to learn lessons: Yet if [my results] are judged useful by any who wish to look at the plain truth about both past events and those that at some future time, in accordance with human nature, will recur in similar or comparable ways, that will suffice. [My work] is a possession for all time, not a competition piece to be heard for the moment, that has been composed. (Thuc. 1.22, translated by Steven Lattimore)

As the classicist Hunter Rawlings puts it, “Rather than an encomium to Greek heroism, the Peloponnesian War is testimony to man’s inhumanity to man, and a vivid portrait of the disintegration of values that hold civilization together.”12 This is why Thucydides remains relevant and difficult, while Herodotus makes for old-­fashioned fun reading. Meanwhile, a protoscientific interest in furnishing benefits for humankind sparked the beginnings of city planning and health sciences,13 anticipating the efforts of planners like the architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy, the secretary to the Académie des Beaux-­Arts (1816–1839) who urged the creation of wider public spaces in overcrowded Paris (a goal eventually realized thanks to Georges-­Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, under Napoleon III). In ancient Hellas (Greece), it was suspected that life could be better for city dwellers if streets were arranged in a rectilinear grid appropriately oriented within the local topography and microclimate, allowing winds to sweep away bad air and bring in fresh (  Airs, Waters, and Places, a Hippocratic treatise). Hippodamus of Miletus, a fifth-­ century architect and town planner, laid out the burgeoning port city Piraeus on an orderly grid, apparently emulating the layout of his hometown.14 The beginnings of medical science also date to this era, when Hippoc-

28  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

rates approached sickness and health in a systematic fashion based on precepts of regular observation and humoral balance, with close attention to the patient’s lifestyle, diet, and environment. The anonymity of the individuals whose case histories are contained in the three treatises known as Epidemics suggests that illness was an equalizer, as was certainly acknowledged by Thucydides in his famous eyewitness account of the unidentified plague that devastated the population of Athens in 430–426 BCE (Thuc. 2.51): “Some died in neglect; others [the rich?], when they had been given a great deal of attention.” Reason was very much brought to bear on the task of self-­government at Athens, where Cleisthenes in about 510 BCE invented a complicated machinery for the direct democracy of Athenian male citizens, rapidly advancing the fortunes of that city-­state. During the fifth century, subsequent reforms made the government of Athens ever more democratic under the leadership of Ephialtes in the late 460s and Pericles in the 440s and 430s. Another equalizing impulse was the expectation that all male citizens attend the dramatic festivals and listen to the poetry of tragic and comic poets. Poets were teachers: “For little boys / have a teacher who advises them, and grown-­ups have poets” (Aristophanes, Frogs 1054–1055).15 And earlier in the same play (Frogs 686–687): “It is right and just for our sacred chorus to advise and teach what’s good for the city.” The tragedian Euripides was known for his democratizing inclinations: he gave speaking parts to lowly characters, as emphasized in the hilariously imagined contest between two dead playwrights, Euripides and Aeschylus, in the underworld: Euripides: Then from the opening words I permitted nothing idle; my woman spoke, as did the slave as well, Or master, maiden, or old woman. Aeschylus: Then really shouldn’t you be put to death for daring this? Euripides: No, by Apollo, For this was a democratic thing I did. (Aristoph., Frogs 948–954, translated by Matthew Dillon)

In England, the eighteenth century was a time of intense study and experimentation in small manufacturing by people like the ceramics master Josiah Wedgwood.16 There was no industrial revolution in Hellas,17 but for

The Turn toward Reason 29

the Greeks, tekhnē (art; craft; cunning) was crucial.18 Ceramics masters in Athens were devising the technologies that yielded enthralling red-­figure vases and more. Thinkers were keenly aware of the benefits conferred by the development of civilization thanks to the skills that set human beings apart from other animals (Plato, Protagoras 320c–­321d). The inner dynamic of commerce and invention drove a quest for continuous improvement, sharpening the awareness of outdated “old stuff ” (ta arkhaia) and its displacement by the modern impulse, concentrated especially in Athens. Warfare, having long since abandoned an emphasis on the epic aspirations of aristocrats, enforced a rough equality across the tightly packed infantry soldiers (hoplites) fighting in phalanx formation. Military service was part and parcel of democratic Athens.19 Equalization brings some people down but lifts others up, so that the well-­to-­do and the poor were on increasingly similar footing. Invidious concentrations of family wealth that had unbalanced Archaic Athens and sparked the social strife addressed by Solon were gradually mitigated.20 The dwellings of fifth-­century elites were not necessarily conspicuous.21 To push for society as a whole to become better, however, the wealthy few were obliged to notice and respond to the rest of society beyond and below their immediate circle of privilege. Athenians were fairly good at this: it was the driving force in the development of an increasingly radical democracy.22 Pericles’ building program on the Acropolis can be thought of as a public-­works project, while the newly expanded Athenian fleet depended upon the rowing power of very poor men. All but the most destitute had a role in the Assembly and the law courts. The comedies of Aristophanes featuring preposterous scenarios in which women seize a role in public affairs (Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae) suggest, in David Konstan’s words, an “enlarging of the democratic impulse to include the voices of women,”23 although such an event never occurred in the real world. Athenians citizens, it seems, could hardly avoid being aware of those below them. The wealthy felt the fragile luck of their position, one reason for their fascination with “fall from fortune” scenarios in general (as in Euripides’ Trojan Women and Herodotus’s tale of Croesus, told intermittently in 1.26–91) and with the moment of enslavement in particular, that single moment when a man loses everything: freedom, family, comfort, his social identity. Slavery in antiquity was not race based, so even a rich freeborn man, if captured in war, would likely be enslaved.24 Random individuals were sometimes kidnapped and sold into slavery. Indeed, Plato himself was seized and sold on the island of Aegina in 388/387.25 A hefty ransom payment could restore a man’s freedom,26 but Pierre Vidal-­Naquet rightly

30  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

notes that “many Greeks . . . could envision enslavement as the boundary of their own individual fates” (Vidal-­Naquet 1986, 171). This must have been a thought-­provoking fear. 3. Unnecessary Suffering

Zeus established pathei mathos for mortals, wrote Aeschylus in 458 BCE (  Ag. 176–178): “In suffering, learning.” Christians also thought there were lessons to be learned from suffering: a very important lesson was to place one’s hopes not in this world but in the next. Warfare, which inflicted severe suffering, will be addressed in chapter 2. But with or without warfare, the problem of evil (defined here as unnecessary suffering) raises fundamental questions about the justice of divinity (theodicy) and the (un)fairness of life that arise prominently in both eras. The classicist Sir Hugh Lloyd-­Jones (1971) and the philosopher Susan Neiman (2002) consider these themes in ancient Greece and the Enlightenment, respectively. As thinkers turned their attention to human suffering, the causes of human suffering, and possible remedies for it, they drew closer to the moment when humane discourse would emerge. The Greek Enlightenment failed to relieve the situation of either slaves or women. The eighteenth-­century Enlightenment did hardly better in the short term, but Enlightenment ideas, in the fullness of time, abolished slavery and gave women the vote. As both eras developed humane discourse, the shortcomings in the application of that discourse grew strikingly apparent: to wit, there was a tension between what thinkers said and what they did. Warfare, the will of the gods or God, theodicy, the problem of evil. As answers to these conundrums veer away from an acceptance of human helplessness in the face of divinely imposed suffering and toward a quest for worldly causes and ways to prevent repetitions, empathy sharpens and humane values evolve. Meanwhile, the Greek poets, tragic and comic, kept saying, “Just imagine,” much as French and English novelists did in the eighteenth century. (See chapter 3.)

CHAPTER 2

Warfare

Alan Dershowitz in Rights from Wrongs (2004) argues that rights come neither from God nor from Nature nor from logic, nor from the law alone, but rather “from human experience, particularly experience with injustice. We learn from the mistakes of history that a rights-­based system and certain fundamental rights . . . are essential to avoid repetition of the grievous injustices of the past” (Dershowitz 2004, 8). It was patently the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust that inspired the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,1 cornerstone of today’s practice of international human-­rights law. Its hope-­filled preamble explicitly states: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people. . . .” With regard to myriad other horrors in history, a fruitful progression from wrongs to rights does not necessarily exist or lie open to view, but in this chapter, I begin to test Dershowitz’s thesis against evidence from both my eras while flagging a further circumstance they share: the practice of empire. In this regard, one must question which wars are comparable, and which empires. Is it even possible to do comparative history? I think not, because there are always steep differences between historical periods or events. The one thing they always do share in common, however, is the presence, actions, and reactions of human beings, so we can examine the past through the prism of cultural anthropology (the branch of anthropology concerned with the study of human societies and cultures and their development), following the lead of the cultural anthropologist William M. Reddy, who writes: “If emotions 31

32  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

operate like overlearned cognitive habits, as many psychologists would now agree, then they must be shaped, to a significant degree, by the environment in which the individual lives. What is culture, for the individual, if not a set of overlearned cognitive habits?” (William M. Reddy 2001, 34). Although leaning into another discipline entails risks, it also offers rich rewards. And now, on that basis, I attempt to compare warfare in Classical Athens and eighteenth-­century Europe. A. Athens Examining warfare in fifth-­century Athens, we confront the harsh, small-­ scale imperialism of bellicose Athenians over fellow Greeks in the Aegean, and also the ferocious Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, a contemporary observer and participant, describes the brutality of both phenomena in his monumental Peloponnesian War. This war was a protracted, far-­ranging conflict between Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies) that tore apart the Greek world between 431 and 404 BCE. It ended in the defeat of Athens, which lost its fleet at Aegospotami and was thereafter starved into submission. Victor Davis Hanson explains at length the conflict’s many exceptional features in A War Like No Other (2005). The response from Athenian writers was profuse: much of their greatest literature “either deals with issues of the war or employs the conflict as a dramatic landscape.”2 With so much to choose from, I focus selectively on the repressive policies of Athens in the context of the empire that developed after the Persian Wars. As ongoing conflict with Sparta weakened Athens, some of the latter’s subject-­ allies tried to pull away. The harsh repression and resubjugation of rebellious allies, especially at Mytilene, figure in Thucydides’ narrative. The Mytilene episode merits special consideration.3 In book 3 of Thucydides, the Athenians (contrary to usual practice) reopen debate on the fate of Mytilene, a city whose rebellion against the hegemony of Athens (428–427 BCE) has just been crushed. Should all male Mytileneans be put to death, or just the ringleaders? Cleon, whom Thucydides portrays as ruthless, urges extreme measures and disparages compassion as a weakness that places Athens in danger (Thuc. 3.37.2): “You don’t realize how dangerous it is for you, whether you go awry because you are persuaded by self-­interested arguments, or whether you yield to compassion. . . .” Later in the speech, Cleon warns the Athenians of the three things most prejudicial to rule, which he lists (Thuc. 3.40.2–3): “compassion, delight in argument, or reasonableness [epieikeia]. For compassion is right when given

Warfare 33

reciprocally to one’s peers, but not to those who will not show compassion in return [antioiktountas] and who are, by necessity, permanent enemies.” When the moderate Diodotus urges limiting the executions, he not only retains Cleon’s focus on expediency but also mimics his warning against the compassion and reasonableness (3.48.1) presumably promoted by other citizens (Kagan 2003, 110, referencing Thuc. 3.36.6). The Mytilenean episode epitomizes the ambivalence within fifth-­century Athenian culture with regard to compassion, for Thucydides frames the explicit rejection of compassion in the debate itself with a tacit acceptance of it in the passages immediately preceding and following. First, he implies that pangs of compassion were what caused the issue to be reopened on a second day, and he uses the adjective “savage” (ōmon) to describe the initial vote of the Athenian assembly that condemned the Mytileneans to wholesale destruction (Thuc. 3.36.4). Second, Thucydides implies that similar pangs slowed the progress of the first trireme sent to Mytilene with the terrible order (3.49.4). Both Cleon and Diodotus, then, reject compassion as a motive for decision and political action in Athens, yet their admonitions presuppose that the citizen body can easily be swayed by it. In the end, the Athenians executed “only” the top thousand offenders rather than every last male Mytilenean. Another famous segment of The Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 5.84–116) imagines the lead-­up to the monstrous destruction in 416 BCE of Melos, a tiny neutral island state that stubbornly refused to enter the Athenian alliance. Here on the lips of Athenian envoys is found the famous realist dictum “The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak give way” (Thuc. 5.89).4 But with Thucydides, we find that despite his reputation for dry commentary and matter-­of-­fact acceptance of raw power politics, he has a deep sense of humanity,5 as is expressed with brevity and poignancy at various junctures when he documents the civil war in Corcyra (Thuc. 3.69–244), where the collapse of norms common to civil society was especially horrifying; the Acarnanian ambushes that destroyed the flower of Athenian youth (3.98); the final debacle at Syracuse (7.71, 75, 84–85); the dreadful fate of captives imprisoned in a quarry (7.87); and the gratuitous attack on the Boeotian town Mycalessus by Thracian mercenaries returning home after service to Athens. Recounting this last, for example, Thucydides writes: The Thracians butchered the inhabitants. . . . There was confusion on all sides and death in every shape and form. Among other things, they broke into a boys’ school, the largest in the place, into which the children had just entered, and killed every one of them. Thus disaster fell upon the entire city,

34  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

a disaster more complete than any, more sudden and more horrible. (Thuc. 7.29, translated by Rex Warner)

The Athenians fought war after war, initiating conflict even when the odds were against them,6 but the Peloponnesian War seemed savage even by the standards of the day—vague as such standards were. The Norwegian philosopher Henrik Syse (2010, 105) emphasizes that a loose framework or code for ethical relations between Greek cities existed even before Plato, and that this was one reason for the moral reactions that were expressed from many quarters against the warring parties, not least the Athenians, when they were seen to break with that code. Thucydides’ history would not have been available to the masses, but the dramatic works of playwrights most emphatically were: Athenian citizens were expected to attend dramatic festivals, first and foremost the annual City Dionysia on the south slope of the Acropolis. In fifth-­century Athens, it was often poets who commented conspicuously on warfare. Aristophanes, the most successful comic poet of his day, wrote the antiwar plays Peace (421 BCE) and Lysistrata (411), while the tragic poets’ preoccupation with wartime suffering informed the plots of many plays. Aeschylus, who fought at Marathon and perhaps Salamis, memorably deflated the glory of combat in the following way, saying of the last stages in the legendary war against Troy: “And at large, in every house of all who went forth together from the land of Hellas, [430] unbearable grief is seen. Many things pierce the heart. Each knows whom he sent forth. But to the home of each come [435] urns and ashes, not living men” (Aesch. Ag. 429–436, spoken by the chorus).7 The reduction of strong men with individual personalities to indistinguishable gray ashes in funerary urns is a striking literary image but was also a grim fact of life for families and survivors. The tragedian Euripides produced The Trojan Women (415 BCE), which vividly depicts the devastation wrought by the Greeks at fallen Troy. With few exceptions, it should be noted, Greek tragedies were not given contemporary settings. Rather, they were set in the remote heroic past. The legendary Trojan War was the wellspring of many plots, as we just saw with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, and allowed writers to comment on war from a critical distance, without direct reference to actual events at the time of writing. In The Trojan Women, death and destruction are among the evils described. The widowed Hecuba, for example, says:8 I mourned their father, Priam. None told me the tale Of his death. I saw it, with these eyes. I stood to watch

Warfare 35

His throat cut, next the altar of the protecting god. I saw my city taken. (Tro. 481–484)

But what matters most is the psychological toll of defeat for these royal women who are being taken into slavery. Hecuba, to maintain her dignity, must rise above the loss of her husband, sons, throne, luxuries, and any control over her own destiny or that of her surviving daughters. Cassandra, her prophetess daughter, has gone mad, whirling with torches ablaze in what looks like a hallucinatory fit. But, as the audience knows, her ravings express a true and accurate vision of her own impending death. Andromache, beautiful young mother and widow, must hand over her small son, Astyanax, Hector’s heir, to the victorious Greeks, who will hurl him to his death from a high battlement: Talthybius [the Greek herald ]: They will kill your son. It is monstrous. Now you know the truth. Andromache: Oh, this is worse than anything I heard before. Talthybius: Odysseus. He urged it before the Greeks and got his way. Andromache: This is too much grief, and more than anyone could bear. (Tro. 719–722)

How can events go so badly awry? these anguished voices ask. It has been suggested that The Trojan Women, produced in 415 BCE, alluded to the Athenians’ destruction of Melos in the preceding year, 416. There is no way to know for certain, but the lead time for writing and producing a play at the City Dionysia renders the connection tentative at best. On the other hand, members of the audience could have held in their minds an awareness of Melos as they watched the play unfold. Some scholars have seen a more triumphalist attitude in Euripides than I do, and greater indifference to the fate of the captive women, but in my opinion he displays a vast sensitivity to their condition.9 After Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, its democracy gave way to oligarchy: to the infamous Thirty Tyrants, who put citizens to death in great numbers. This situation soon led to civil war. Democracy was restored, but resentments simmered, so the Athenians in 403 BCE, proving yet again that their reasoning abilities could lead to creative new solutions, enacted the earliest known political amnesty:10 “Oaths were sworn that there should be an amnesty for all that had happened in the past, and to this day both parties live together as fellow-­citizens and the people abide by the oaths which they have sworn.”11

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B. Europe As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, World War II was the breaking point for twentieth-­century thinkers, as the Peloponnesian War was for some Athenian thinkers. It is worth exploring whether any war could have had a similar impact on eighteenth-­century thinkers. Perhaps there wasn’t one, but in the seventeenth century, the notorious Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was a protracted, highly destructive conflict so widespread as to constitute an early world war. Starting out as a religious war,12 it gradually snowballed into many layers of meaning and spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Anthony Pagden notes that more than a third of Central Europe’s population was wiped out by the ensuing bloodshed, famine, and disease (Pagden 2013, 34–35). Voltaire, born long afterward, in 1694, described its horrors. Pagden reports his reaction: “As Voltaire remarked in astonishment on rereading his own description of all this butchery: ‘Is it the history of snakes and tigers which I have just written? No, it is that of men. Tigers and snakes do not treat their own kind in that manner’ ” (Hazard 1954, qtd. in Pagden 2013, 35).13 Voltaire probably had better information than most people because he was not only royal historiographer but also, like Thucydides, a military historian (Starkey 2012, 27). The actual extent of destruction wreaked by the Thirty Years’ War remains controversial even today, because nineteenth-­century German writers shaped the suffering in Germany into a “Gothic atrocity narrative”: “In addition to the tales of cannibalism associated with the siege of Breisach, the most prominent motifs were rape, mutilation and torture, and images of a beautiful land left desolate and despoiled” (Peter H. Wilson 2009, 780). “Following the rather brutal seventeenth century in Europe,” says Alexander Moseley, “intellectuals were motivated to find rational means to constrain war initially through political means (Hobbes and Locke in England), which then shifted to a legalistic approach which flourished greatly on the Continent in the eighteenth century with writers such as Vattel, Grotius, and Pufendorf.”14 Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, exemplifying the humanist tradition descending from Greco-­Roman antiquity via the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, developed his thesis on the origin of political society (Discourses, The Social Contract) while placing heavy emphasis on compassion (Émile). Rousseau merits far greater attention than will be discovered in these pages. But let us consider briefly the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which was an eighteenth-­century war in the European heartland and “the last major conflict before the French Revolution to involve all the great powers of

Warfare 37

Europe.”15 Armstrong Starkey, taking up the question of how the philosophes responded to the Seven Years’ War, says, “Generally speaking, French intellectuals were largely untouched by the war, and could even consider that the conduct of the war was relatively humane” (Starkey 2012, 37). Some observers had a smug sense that this war was less brutal than preceding conflicts (such as the Thirty Years’ War) in that the officer class adhered to a higher standard in the treatment of prisoners. It’s difficult to measure such changes. The first of the Geneva Conventions would not be signed until 1864, and prior to that year there were in Europe no significant agreed-­upon international standards for the treatment of POWs, let alone civilians. Immanuel Kant and the abbé de Saint-­Pierre, who was elected to the French Academy in 1695, both pursued schemes to create perpetual peace among nations. The Seven Years’ War had nothing like the same status in the Enlightenment that the Peloponnesian War had had in antiquity, but Starkey notes that it “intensified [Voltaire’s] revulsion” against the evils unleashed on humanity by war (Starkey 2012, 24). Although not a pacifist, Voltaire in some cases adopted a stance of antimilitarism. Starkey writes: “Voltaire represents more than anyone else the way in which the Seven Years’ War may have affected [sic] a cultural shift in the Enlightenment landscape” (Starkey 2012, 27). In considering the development of Voltaire’s thought, J. B. Shank (2015) identifies Voltaire’s brief exile in England (1726–1729) as especially formative in that Voltaire met Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope,16 and John Gay, writers who at that time were beginning to experiment with using literary forms such as the novel and drama to create a “new kind of critical public politics.17 Pope’s popular and uplifting Essay on Man (1734) shared Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s philosophical optimism, the view that humans are part of a perfect world created by an all-­good and all-­powerful God, a position that Voltaire mocked in Candide through the figure of Professor Pangloss (Candide, chap. 4). Voltaire, long considered the embodiment of the Enlightenment,18 famously satirized the Seven Years’ War’s rapine and slaughter in Candide. Pangloss serenely reports, for example, what befell the female protagonist Cunégonde: “She was disemboweled by Bulgarian soldiers after having been raped to the limit of possibility.”19 Pangloss’s equanimity takes nothing away from the shock of the horrors he describes, though it later turns out that the character survived. The adventures of Candide include his encounter with a mutilated slave in Suriname who had lost a hand in a sugar-­mill accident and a leg as punishment for trying to run away. “This is the price paid for the sugar you eat

38  The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

in Europe,” the slave explains. “ ‘Oh Pangloss!’ cried Candide. ‘This is an abomination you had not guessed; this is too much, in the end I shall have to renounce Optimism.’ ”20 Of current and immediate relevance in the eighteenth century, for people who chose to think about it, were the overseas depredations and brutal actions perpetrated by European conquerors and purported civilizers. Slavery was a massive aspect of these wrongs (and a subject to be explored in chapter 5). We cannot absolve Enlightenment thinkers from the Eurocentric racism that broadly supported slavery and other cruelties, but Sankar Muthu in Enlightenment against Empire (2003) calls attention to the anti-­imperialist political philosophies of three men: Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder, each of whom I will briefly discuss in turn. Diderot in the 1770s was especially outspoken, contributing radical criticisms to Abbé Guillaume-­Thomas Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of European Settlements and Commerce in the Two Indies.21 Diderot writes: Beyond the Equator a man is neither English, Dutch, French, Spanish, nor Portuguese. He retains only those principles and prejudices of his native country which justify or excuse his conduct. He crawls when he is weak; he is violent when strong; he is in a hurry to enjoy, and capable of every crime which will lead him most quickly to his goals. He is a domestic tiger returning to the forest; the thirst of blood takes hold of him once more. This is how all the Europeans, every one of them, indistinctly, have appeared in the countries of the New World. There they have assumed a common frenzy. (Diderot IX, 1; as quoted in Muthu 2003, 74)

Diderot, keenly aware of the catastrophic effects of European incursions into the non-­European world, further observes: Settlements have been formed and subverted; ruins have been heaped on ruins, countries that were well peopled have become deserted; ports that were full of buildings have been abandoned; vast tracts that had been ill cemented with blood have separated, and have brought to view the bones of murderers and tyrants confounded with one another. It seems as if from one region to another posterity has been pursued by an evil genius that speaks our several [European] languages and which diffuses the same disasters in all parts. (Diderot IV, 33; as quoted in Muthu 2003, 87)

In one of two substantial chapters on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Muthu argues that “Kant’s understanding of human unity and diversity

Warfare 39

forms the basis upon which he condemns imperialism and articulates a cosmopolitan conception of global diversity, which defends . . . non-­European peoples’ freedom to organize their societies and to practice their collective lifestyles in the manner they see fit” (Muthu 2003, 124). Finally, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a key figure in criticizing imperialism in all its violence, picks up on the sixteenth-­century protestations of Bartolomé de Las Casas, author of the explicit eyewitness Short Account of the Destruction of the Indian Nation (1552). De Las Casas, Herder says, has been accused of “exaggeration and a heated imagination; but no one has convicted him of lying” (quoted in Frazer 2010, 161). Herder himself praises this “heated imagination” as “a noble fire of sympathy [edles Feuer des Mitgefühls] with the unfortunate” (G 7:689, F 387; quoted in Frazer 2010, 161).22 Muthu continues: “Herder at times begins to blend his descriptive account of humanity, that is, his philosophical anthropology, with a vision of humanity that embodies a moral ideal.” He adds that the “law of nature” put forward by Herder “calls upon all humans to let each other cultivate themselves in the manner in which they see fit” (Muthu 2003, 247). Herder has “an animus against European imperial projects” (ibid., 249). When most people think of empire in ancient Greece, they probably think of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE. The easternmost conquests of Alexander are comparable to European world conquest and imperialism: in both cases, we have supposed civilizers inflicting bloody domination over outmatched indigenous peoples; the late classicist Brian Bosworth pursued this parallel to good effect.23 But such a comparison cannot serve this book’s argument, because Alexander comes later than my period of interest, and also because he belongs to royal Macedon, not to democratic Athens. A comment from Muthu will bring the topic of warfare full circle: “In Herder’s view, modern empires are repeating tragically the premodern imperial pattern of destruction, imbalance, and, ultimately, implosion. As he notes, ‘Thus Alexander destroyed the equilibrium of the world’ ” (Muthu 2003, 252). C. Summary As warfare commands the distressed attention of certain intellectuals in both eras, we find the exploration of inhumanity and related issues. This is very explicit in Classical Athens and perhaps less so in the eighteenth cen-

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tury, yet some philosophes did notice and respond to reports of violence and unnecessary suffering. Moreover, we shall see presently that they were much more worried about slavery than the Athenians ever were and became very much more worried about torture. Is it mere coincidence that the humane discourse of Athens would emerge a few generations after the brutal exercise of raw power in its fifth-­century empire? And that the humane ideals of the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment began to crystallize during Europe’s bloody campaigns that secured control over the globe’s non-­European lands and peoples? In the following two chapters, I will examine precisely how Dershowitz’s suggestion can be elaborated.

CHAPTER 3

Empathy and Tears

It is . . . beyond controversy that the socially and culturally constructed environment, in which emotions are generated, has a history. The historians, the historians of literature, and the art historians cannot directly study neurobiological processes. . . . But they do have access to the external stimuli that generated emotions. Angelos Chaniotis, Unveiling Emotions, p. 16

The capacity for empathy is inborn among neurotypical human beings.1 But as with other human capacities, such as walking or talking or making music, empathy needs to be developed. Indeed, thanks to brain plasticity, it can be “taught,” in the sense of practiced, repeated, enlarged. In this chapter I suggest that Greek tragedy taught empathy (resulting in and evidenced by an increase in real-­life tearfulness), much as the novel taught empathy and sympathy in eighteenth-­century Europe.2 Enlightenment figures such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume placed great emphasis on sympathy as a fundamental ethical sentiment. The reader will be unsurprised, perhaps, to learn that our word “sympathy” is from Greek sumpatheia, which denoted fellow feeling, literally a “feeling together with,” a word that was used in the Classical period and later (LSJ s.v. sumpatheia). A. Athens Classical Athens was the “city of suppliants.” Truly, compassion was a cornerstone of Athenian identity. The orators Lysias (24.7) and Isocrates (15.20) both refer to the reputation of the Athenians as the “most compassionate” (hoi eleēmonestatoi). While exploring the humane values of the 41

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Athenians—always in tension with actual practice—I’ve noticed that this compassion (oiktos or eleos) seems to grow and change: it becomes more tearful. To define exactly what I mean by “tears of compassion,” let me quote Gorgias describing the impact of a story well told (Encomium of Helen 9):3 “Fearful shuddering and tearful compassion [eleos poludakrus] and sad yearning enter into the hearers; and the soul, affected by the words, experiences as its own the emotion aroused by the good and ill fortunes of other people’s doings and lives.” Aristotle in his turn interpreted those effects with his rather poorly understood concept of katharsis (Arist. Poet. 1449b), an emotional purification of the spectator achieved through his compassion (eleos) and terror ( phobos). This section argues that Plato’s criticism of tragedy reflected a significant change he observed during his lifetime (ca. 429–347 BCE): that men were crying more freely than they had in his childhood, a change he blamed (plausibly) on the emotionally stirring effects of poetry. In Plato’s Ion (535d–­e), the rhapsode Ion admits that he sees the audience weeping at his performances of Homer. Work by the cultural anthropologist William M. Reddy (2001, chaps. 5–7) can help us interpret this possibility via analogy with a shift that occurred in eighteenth-­century France as people learning empathy from the novel began to cry much more than before. Reddy explains the ensuing result: “Because feelings were deemed natural, they united people rather than isolating them; they were shared by all, a public resource. Public expression of intense feeling, rather than causing embarrassment, was a badge of generous sincerity and of social connectedness” (William M. Reddy 2001, 164). A 2009 volume on crying and tears in ancient Greek literature, edited by Thorsten Fögen, deals separately with Homer, tragedy, and Hellenic historiography. In Homer, heroes sometimes cry, and there is no shame in this. Their tears reflect the power of their emotions: the rage of Achilles or Odysseus’s anguish as he recalls the Trojan War. Sabine Föllinger (2009) lists the causes of Homeric tears: rage, despair, grievous loss, fear, sudden joy, yearning, defeat in a sporting event, desire for revenge, and disappointment. So men weep for many reasons, but not (it seems) from compassion. Even in the climactic scene in the Iliad, where Priam confronts the killer of his sons and Achilles cries, Achilles sheds tears of grief for his own aging father, Peleus, endlessly waiting far away in Phthia, and also for slain Patroclus (Iliad 24.511–512). Only when this storm of grief has passed does Achilles yield to the heartbroken Trojan king “in pity for the grey head and the grey beard” (24.516, translated by Richmond Lattimore). The Archaic period ushered in a shift in norms surrounding emotional

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expression, as described by Hans van Wees (1998): men were now expected to control themselves to the extent possible. Emotional outbursts, especially in response to art and poetry, were strongly discouraged: In the 490s, when men cried over the Sack of Miletus, the Athenians angrily fined the poet, Phrynicus (Hdt. 6.21.2). The strict self-­control boasted by Spartans was never the norm in Athens, but demeanor and facial expression in early Classical sculpture were distinctly “severe” in the early fifth century. The poet Simonides was in tune with this severity when he wrote: “If people would listen to me, we should not be so much in love with misery and torment ourselves by dwelling upon what is bad and painful” (Fr 1 West). Yet compassion survived. The art historian John Oakley writes of Classical Athenian vase painting, “[Pity] was one of the emotions first explored in the Early Classical period, a time when Greek art reflects a great interest in emotional content” (Oakley 2005, 218). Then, from the 470s to 406, most of the plays written by the great tragedians described scenes of destruction and loss in which tragic characters often give voice to anguish. If, as Aeschylus supposedly said, his own works were “slices from the great banquets of Homer” (Ath. Deipnosophistae 8.39.17), those slices of irremediable loss were often moist with tears.4 The bellicose heroism of epic is hardly to be seen, while Homer’s poignant undercurrents of humane feeling flow freely. Chorus members shed tears, as do some principals, such as Ajax or Heracles. As the warrior ethos begins to relax, sympathetic crying in the audience becomes more socially permissible. And compassion gradually gains importance: Jenifer Neils has identified the theme in sculpture as early as the Parthenon metopes carved circa 447–442 BCE (Neils, Sternberg, and Reinbold 2015, 22–23). Although it was never one of the traditional forms of moral excellence (like sōphrosunē [moderation] or dikaiosunē [justness]), compassion approaches the status of a virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, as Martha Nussbaum (2008) has argued. By the fourth century, writers began to allude to a widespread acceptance of tears and a recognition of “the soft part of [men’s] souls,” as Lycurgus put it (Lyc. 1.33). Further, that soft part eventually won a positive valuation, so that at length it was judged a good thing to show compassion. A number of scholars have claimed that drama furnished Athenians an education in either compassion (sorrow for another person’s suffering) or empathy (understanding another person’s feelings).5 Let us consider the latter: empathy. Greek tragedies, which feature characters enacting a plot, the praxis or action that Aristotle emphasized (Poet. 1450a20–23),6 would have been meaningless unless audience members were able to comprehend and respond to the leading characters and their fictive self-­consciousness,

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which could be very persuasive when mimēsis (imitation) succeeded. Bruce McConachie, who brings cognitive science to bear on theater studies, explains: “Our ability to empathize with the experiences of others through mirroring is the cognitive hook that impels spectator interest in the activities of the actors/characters and engages us in the unfolding narrative of a play” (2011, 18). Further on, McConachie furnishes more detail: “Visuomotor representations function as a part of a viewer’s ‘mirror neurons’ to stimulate empathy, typically the first step toward our emotional and social engagements in the theatre” (ibid., 63). At the very moment of its invention, as the ancient story of Thespis would have it, Greek tragedy featured just one actor stepping out from the chorus and speaking with a fictive personality, mind, point of view. To judge by the subsequent development and success of the genre, the first actor’s performances must have been riveting. I like to think that Aristotle, who held that “emotions are cognitive and therefore open to moral education” (Fortenbaugh 1975, 45), would have accepted my thesis that Greek tragedy taught empathy. The playwrights endowed their characters with inner lives, if only to ask, for example, in the case of Oedipus, What would a man feel upon discovering the devastating truth of his identity? That he has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother? What would he do? That their parts were not written with the exquisite psychological detail of nineteenth-­century drama does not mean that the characters were stick figures. Ruth Scodel writes: “Whether or not tragedy has subtle psychology, it often makes some motives explicit while leaving others obscure, and so invites the audience to see the characters as having inner selves about which we can only guess— like real people” (Scodel 2010, 25). Modern audiences may wonder how masked actors could deliver emotionally moving performances. It has often been observed that the use of masks would have made it impossible for actors to convey nuanced facial expression of the sort we routinely expect in cinematic close-­ups. This is true. The actors of Greek tragedy must therefore have relied on vocal modulation, body language, and adroit gesture.7 Evidently ancient masked actors did evince emotion and also drew it from the audience. The mask itself, used skillfully, would have been compelling. Peter Meineck, using specialized evidence from the burgeoning field of neuroscience to explain how our brains make us engage with faces, writes: “In many respects, the painted mask is just the suggestion of a face, and only through its expert manipulation by a skilled performer in conjunction with movement, music, and text does it come to vivid emotional life” (Meineck 2011, 133; cf. Meineck 2018). Amy R. Cohen offers additional insight based upon twenty years of ex-

Empathy and Tears 45

perimenting with masked performances of Greek tragedies at Randolph College: For audiences watching Greek drama even now, consciousness of the masks melts away after only a few minutes, and that suggests an unmediated engagement between the audience and the actors in the [performing space] and a kind of imaginative participation by the audience in the creation of characters and emotions. . . . We, the audience, do the work of the play by using our imaginations to see the masks change expression when the characters change moods. (Amy Cohen 2019, 6)

We need not doubt that Athenian thinkers understood the idea of empathy even though they had no single word for it. Just listen to Plato’s Socrates in book 10 of the Republic: The best of us, I imagine, when we hear Homer or one of the tragic poets imitating some hero in a state of grief, as he drags out a long speech of lamentation, or even breaks into song, or starts beating his breast . . . Well, you know how it is. We enjoy it, and surrender ourselves to it. We follow and share the hero’s sufferings, treat them as real, and praise as an excellent poet the person who most affects us in this way. (Republic 605d, translated by T. Griffith)

As empathy and compassion gained greater currency, men began crying more freely than they had in centuries. Pathetic displays in the courtroom became standard (see Plato’s Apology 34c and Aristophanes’ Wasps 976). As for weepiness in the domestic setting, consider the following instance. Lysias 32, “Against Diogeiton,” is a lawsuit against a guardian who allegedly deprived his three wards of their inheritance. A male family member, the speaker, had called a family meeting, at which the widowed mother accused Diogeiton of mistreating her children. They were cast out of their house in worn-­out clothes, she said, without shoes, attendants, bedding, cloaks, or the furniture and money that was their due. The speaker continues: At that point, gentlemen of the jury, after many terrible things had been said by the woman, all of us present were so affected by this man’s conduct and by her statements, seeing the children, the sorts of things they were suffering; remembering the dead man [their father] and how he had left his estate to an unworthy guardian; reflecting how difficult it is to find a person who can be trusted with one’s affairs; so that, gentlemen of the jury, no one of us present

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was able to say a thing, but weeping no less than the sufferers we left to go our way in silence. (Lysias 32.18)

It sounds exaggerated. But the speaker would neither describe nor invent this weepiness if it seemed implausible or ridiculous. After all, he needs to win the favor of the jurors. Plato famously disapproved of such practices (  Ap. 35a–­e, 38d–­e), complaining that poetry weakened men (Resp. 605d–­606b). He argued that the emotional excess of tragedy, which (like Homer) shows heroes wailing and lamenting, corrupts spectators by encouraging them to relax control over their own emotions. Plato rejected tragic mimēsis (Resp. 388–394) and banned poets from his ideal republic (607a). Even in the Laws (800d), Plato rolled his eyes at the sentiment inherent in tragedy: “Whichever [chorus] has instant success in drawing tears from the polis . . . wins the prize,” he wrote (translated by David Wiles [1997, 87]). But when Plato insists on a stiff upper lip, perhaps he is not merely being a curmudgeon. Rather, I think, his criticism of tragedy reflects a real change: men were crying more in the theater (and possibly outside it). We have this not only from Plato but also from Isocrates, who says people cry over the fabrications of poets (Isoc. 4.168). These comments of Plato and Isocrates find a further parallel in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (2.2.13), where a captain of Cyrus says that some authors, inventing pathetic incidents in poems and stories, seek to elicit tears (of compassion, I presume). Then, in the fourth century, compassion became a litmus test of character for literary and public figures, as I will explain in chapter 4. In Xenophon’s mostly fictional Cyropaedia, Panthea, the devoted wife of an Assyrian, has been captured in war and chosen as a prize for Cyrus. Showing respect for her grief, he doesn’t lay a hand on her. Indeed, so kind is Cyrus to Panthea that she praises his compassion (Cyr. 6.1.47).8 In a separate example, Demosthenes (19.309) once denigrated his archrival, Aeschines, by accusing him of lacking compassion for Greek captives from Olynthus, some of whom were freeborn women who had been enslaved and prostituted in Athens. “Yet Aeschines did not pity [the women]; nor did he weep for Greece.” Notice that Demosthenes here equates the feeling of compassion with a tearful response. In many scenes from oratory and historiography, we can infer compassion in passages even where the words oiktos and eleos are lacking but a character is said to witness pathetic things and weep. In this sense, tears are metonymic: they demonstrate only part of the emotional response but stand for the whole.

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In comparison with the early fifth and mid-­fifth century, the late fifth century appears to have ushered in a kinder, gentler discourse, with a novel emphasis on compassion and civility. Philanthrōpia (love of humankind; generosity) will follow in the fourth century as the trend continues. (See chapter 4.) Seen also in art, the softening has sometimes been attributed to the experience of the Peloponnesian War (e.g., Richter 1974, 141), as if their wartime sufferings chastened the Athenians and made them more sensitive. If so, the mechanism is this: Greek tragedy, reflecting on current events and suffused with suffering and sympathy, taught empathy. And if, in the fifth century, an energetic new genre, tragic drama, taught empathy and drew tears, then we may ask how else it changed the emotional regime and culture of Athens. Source material from Athens (which lacks personal letters and the like) is meager, and the indications slighter; but such is the nature of ancient history. So now, we are about to turn from our poorly documented period and consider, in search of analogy, a richly documented more recent period, eighteenth-­century France, where men definitely started crying more (a lot more!) than previously. The historian Lynn Hunt (2007) and other scholars assess abundant evidence from late eighteenth-­century France, showing that along with the rise of the novel, people became more empathetic, sympathetic, and conspicuously tearful. William M. Reddy (2001, 141–172) theorizes that this response to the novel created a new emotional regime that changed the culture: the dramatic shift to sentimentalism. There is no evidence for a shift of that magnitude in Athens; but what about a smaller shift: 2.5 rather than, say, 7.5 on the Richter scale? Sentimentalism in the late eighteenth century was extreme, as the voluminous source material (including personal letters) makes clear. Two influential German authors were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, especially with his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and Heinrich Heine, whose lyric poetry was set to subtle music in Schubert’s Lieder. B. Europe Between 1641 and 1782 in France, the literary genre known as romance, featuring extravagant tales with unlikely or superficial characters and events, evolved into the more realistic novel. Across the Channel, the English novel also evolved during the eighteenth century as literacy spread and specific capitalistic developments generated a new readership consisting of people in the artisan and servant class as well as the educated elite, women as

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well as men. Across the Atlantic, too, American colonists shared in these developments. Readers found the new novels entertaining, naturally, but they were also fascinated by the opportunity to plunge, as it seemed, into the minds of other people. This illusion was particularly strong and convincing in the case of epistolary novels, composed of letters that expressed the perspectives and deepest feelings of the characters. Tom Laqueur explains: “The epistolary novel relies on the intimacy of the letter to make its readers feel that they have instant access, despite print, to the thoughts and feelings of the correspondents in question” (Laqueur 1989, 181). Hunt adds, “The novel made up of letters could produce . . . striking psychological effects because its narrative form facilitated the development of a ‘character,’ that is, a person with an inner self ” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 43). Hunt focuses on three very influential epistolary novels: in England, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–1748), and in France, Rousseau’s Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Readers got so swept up in the story lines and letters that they cried copiously over affecting scenes. This effect resembles, perhaps, the impact of first-­person speech in fifth-­ century Athenian drama, in contrast to typical epic narrative, the earlier form of storytelling. Only more so: “A play,” writes Hunt, “could not linger in this way on the unfolding of an inner self, which on the stage usually has to be inferred from action or speech” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 45). Perhaps this distinction helps account for the sheer volume of eighteenth-­century tears. Although the three novels named above featured female protagonists, men as well as women identified with them. For example, a retired military officer named Louis François wrote to Rousseau about Julie’s famous deathbed scene: “You have driven me crazy about her. Imagine then the tears that her death must have wrung from me. . . . Never have I wept such delicious tears. That reading created such a powerful effect on me that I believe I would have gladly died during that supreme moment” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 48). Another example is to be found in the case of Richardson’s much-­ wronged heroine Clarissa, who dies brokenhearted. Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh in 1749 wrote to Richardson about the death scene: “My Spirits are strangely seized, my Sleep is disturbed, waking in the Night I burst into a Passion of Crying, so I did at Breakfast this Morning, and just now again” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 46). Hunt emphasizes the consequences of the new literary phenomenon: that readers who identified with characters in novels learned to think of

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their fellow human beings as people with inner lives like themselves (Lynn Hunt 2007, 41–43). Thomas Jefferson remarked: “We are therefore wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage.”9 Markman Ellis finds that contemporary critics noticed the potential of sensibility. He quotes a 1778 essay in The Universal Magazine: It must be allowed that Delicacy of Sentiment . . . adds greatly to the happi­ ness of mankind, by diffusing an universal benevolence. It teaches men to feel for others as for themselves; it disposes us to rejoice with the happy, and by partaking to increase their pleasure. . . . It excites a pleasing sensation in our own breast, which if its duration be considered, may be placed among the highest gratifications of sense. (Markman Ellis 1996, 6)

The power of empathy could increase either happiness or misery. Sensibility leads “to the abodes of misery—to scenes of distress,” according to a writer (“Fidelio”) for The Lady’s Magazine in 1775.10 As more and more readers learned empathy and began to approach real-­ life situations with their new empathic skills, there were collective results: society began to shift and change. In France, the first momentous change was the abolition of judicial torture. Voltaire, campaigning for this cause, added the article on torture to his Philosophical Dictionary in 1769. Lynn Hunt comments: Natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, insisted Voltaire [in 1766], though he himself had not said so earlier. In the [1769] article, Votaire uses his habitual alternation of ridicule and fulmination to condemn French practices as uncivilized. . . . A civilized nation, Voltaire concludes, can no longer follow “atrocious old customs.” What had long seemed acceptable to him and many others now came into doubt. (Lynn Hunt 2007, 75)

A helpful concept here is the “community of feeling” described by Angelos Chaniotis and other historians of emotion: a community that shares its mores and emotional reactions, that can grow out of reaction to world or local events, or cultural efflorescence. Although we often presume that emotion lies within the province of individual psychology, Reddy notes that ethnographic research by anthropologists routinely uncovers “traces of collective shaping of emotional effort and collective elaboration of emotional ideals” (William M. Reddy 2001, 56).

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My readers, I hope, are intrigued by the parallel between two energetic new cultural genres that shaped their respective societies: the tragic drama that taught empathy in Athens and the novel that taught empathy in eighteenth-­century Europe. I pursue the twin consequences of that empathy in chapter 4.

CHAPTER 4

Humane Discourse

My task in this chapter is to showcase and compare the emergence of humane discourse (praise of sympathy, compassion, humanity, and the like) in Classical Athens, on the one hand, and in eighteenth-­century Europe on the other. To begin, note that both periods featured a lively exchange of ideas both in person and via written texts. The settings for face-­to-­face discussion in Athens included its democratic law courts and Assembly as well as festivals, the busy agora, and sumposia (elite drinking parties). The eighteenth century, now famous for the “Enlightenment public sphere,” had its coffeehouses, gentlemen’s clubs, learned societies, and Parisian salons. When it came to texts, Athenian booksellers traded in handwritten scrolls (ink on papyrus) that contained courtroom speeches, public display speeches, histories, or occasionally letters,1 while eighteenth-­century thinkers enthusiastically exchanged personal letters and enjoyed the fruits of the printing press: books, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets that catered to eager readers in a rapidly changing world. Athens witnessed the creation of institutionalized higher education: Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and a school for rhetoric founded by Isocrates. The universities of Europe, the first of them created during the medieval period (Bologna in 1088, followed in the twelfth century by the University of Paris, the University of Oxford, etc.), were numerous and flourishing in the eighteenth century; independent societies like the Royal Society in London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris were added besides. And so in each of my two periods, new ideas found many channels available for their dispersal. And those ideas had practical outcomes, including social practices that would change history. The sense of universal humanity cultivated in each was in no small measure a product of the publicness of each. 51

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A. Athens By the fifth century, as I have shown, Athenians had formed a flawed community that already imagined itself to be especially civilized. Angeliki Tzanetou (2012) examines tragic dramas depicting an Athens that opens its gates to suppliants, and she convincingly argues that historical realities shaped those depictions: Athens, having fended off Persia, emerged as the leader of the Delian League, a naval alliance against Persia that soon morphed into a maritime empire under Athenian control. Complaints from subject-­ allies, fanned by resentful Spartans, created a negative image of Athens as a tyrannical master, ruling over subjects against their will. Meanwhile, in the theater, Athenian suppliant plays furnished a flattering image of Athenians’ relations with other Greeks not as they actually were but as the Athenians preferred to think of them. With the establishment of the Second Athenian Naval Confederacy via the Decree of Aristoteles in 377 BCE, Athens showily mended its ways, promising autonomy to allied states. About half of those had earlier belonged to the Delian League, so this revival of Athenian leadership suggests that harsh behavior had not alienated the entire Aegean world: the Athenian record must have been mixed. At the same time, talk of compassion and benevolence quickly gained ground in fourth-­century Athens, as if the self-­serving self-­image of moral superiority was sinking more deeply into the culture. The earliest passage in extant rhetoric that refers to compassion with resonant approbation (Lys. 24.7), calling Athenians the eleēmonestatoi, the “most compassionate,” dates to 403 BCE or shortly thereafter, in the wake of Athens’s abject suffering and final defeat at the hands of Sparta. Fifty years later, Isocrates uses similar language in his Antidosis, where he says that Athenians are “the most compassionate and gentle” (Isoc. 15.20), and by now this has become a common trope: Demosthenes, in a late letter (323 BCE), says that Athenians are always ready to show compassion and humanity (Dem. Ep. 3.22). In light of the crying discussed in chapter 3, I wonder whether “compassionate” actually signified “prone to a display of compassionate tears,” a visible sign of emotion. Alas, there is no way to know. In any case, the conceit of Athenian generosity and compassion deepened and spread into popular culture, largely, I think, as a result of the education in empathy that fifth-­century tragic drama had afforded. Our thirty-­two extant tragedies all date from the fifth century, but tragic plays continued to be composed and performed during the fourth century. In ancient Athens, a polis that lacked state-­sponsored schooling, citizens no doubt derived their concepts of civic virtue from their private upbringing. But also, perhaps

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more important, they derived their concepts from public events, including dramatic spectacles, athletic competitions, political assemblies, funerals for the war dead, and litigation. The importance of the latter is indicated by the sources themselves. Moral rhetoric, replete with terms of approbation and disapproval, shows how individual Athenians were expected to match themselves to the ideals of the city-­state. At least a dozen different passages suggest that the capacity for compassion could be regarded as a litmus test of character in fourth-­century Athens. This was something new. Traditional moral standards had long emphasized the importance of helping friends—and harming enemies. Bloody vengeance had palpable appeal. But Plato himself now rejects the tit-­for-­tat mentality: “If justice and goodness are the same,” Socrates says to Polemarchus in the Republic, “then the just man injures no one” (Plato, Resp. 335d). Meanwhile, in the busy courtrooms of litigious Athens, one way to convince jurors of a man’s moral value was to praise him for his pity; one way to vilify a man was to decry his pitilessness. Dinarchus, for example, criticized Demosthenes for failing to pity destroyed Thebes (Din. 1.24). Sometimes eleos and oiktos seem as much a moral or emotional propensity as an immediate feeling. Demosthenes (24.81) describes eleos as something that you bring from home, along with suggnōmē (forgiveness) and philanthrōpia (humanity, benevolence, kindheartedness). Jacqueline de Romilly, in La Douceur dans la pensée grecque (1979), highlights within this “soft” fourth-­century discourse the Greek words praotēs (gentleness), epieikeia (reasonableness, mildness) and suggnōmē (pardon). Still more work remains to be done with those, but I set them aside for now. And since I have already considered oiktos and eleos, the words for compassion, the remainder of this discussion will focus on the noun philanthrōpia and its cognate adjective, philanthrōpos.2 De Romilly observed that philanthrōpos and praos are adjectives for gentleness that “suddenly invade the world of Greece in the fourth century” (1979, 37). In 1996, using the shiny new tools of computerized word searches to test de Romilly’s erudition, I found that philanthrōpia in fact is found nowhere in texts by the fifth-­century writers Herodotus, Thucydides, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias. By contrast, it proliferates in the fourth-­ century writers Isocrates (4 times), Xenophon (10 times), and Demosthenes (26 times). Plato puts it on the lips of Socrates (Euthphr. 3d). Ted Parker proposed that philanthrōpia becomes a buzzword in fourth-­century Athens as a point of contention between aristocratic and democratic tendencies. The latter, he says, could make the word philanthrōpia represent the tolerance, civility, and sociability that an “open society” like that of Athens

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needs in order to function smoothly. For citizens with aristocratic sympathies, however, philanthrōpia (in the sense of generosity or beneficence) offered the philanthropic elite a way to seize the moral high ground and stake a claim to power. Although the term “buzzword” may suggest fleeting interest, Parker’s interpretation appears to notice that philanthrōpia is a highly valued attribute in this period.3 In my opinion, a sudden burst of public interest in a value does not necessarily mean the value is shallow. The historically rich and long-­lived slogan of “Greek freedom” (see Dmitriev 2011), for example, alluded to a deeply held value. Why not the same for philanthrōpia? Exactly what does the Greek word philanthrōpia denote? It means, literally, “love of humankind,” and it originated as a term that identified the preferable attitude of gods or heroes to human beings. Later, on a strictly human plane it can mean the love of humankind that prompts people to help one another. It inspired the generals at Arginusae to order the rescue of some two thousand shipwrecked warriors (Xen. Hell. 1.7.18), although stormy weather thwarted the attempt. According to Xenophon, defeated populations were permitted to retain some of their possessions owing to the philanthrōpia of Persia’s Cyrus the Great (Xen. Cyr. 7.5.73), a quality that ensured Cyrus’s popularity and success (Cyr. 8.2.1, 8.4.7–8). These remarks are found in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus), a fictionalized biography that idealizes Cyrus as a model prince, conspicuous for his humanity. Xenophon, who admired the Spartans, elsewhere claims that the fourth-­century Spartan king Agesilaus won over entire cities because of his philanthrōpia (Xen. Ages. 1.22). Isocrates became a huge proponent of philanthrōpia. He not only recommended it to the petty rulers Evagoras and Nicocles but also urged Philip II of Macedon and Philip’s son Alexander the Great to show philanthrōpia to the Greeks. Philanthrōpia is not an emotion: unlike compassion, it does not mean sorrow for the sufferings of another. It is not tearful. It is not a feeling that could “enter into” a person as did anger, love, envy, or compassion. It is not mentioned in conjunction with any emotion except compassion; and even that association is limited to two occurrences in the same speech (Dem. 25.76, 81). In oratory and historiography, it is grouped with pardon (suggnōmē) and gentleness ( praotēs). We should view the capacity for compassion (oiktos, eleos) and the love of humankind ( philanthrōpia), taken together or singly, as qualities that were held up for unprecedented public praise in the fourth century. This is not the same as viewing them, unjustifiably, as qualities that were nonexistent in the fifth. The great novelty is to find someone boasting of his good character with the following words (Dem. 21.185): hoion esti metrios kai philanthrōpos

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tis hēmōn kai pollous eleōn (“only one of us is moderate, people-­loving, and compassionate toward many”). Sometimes, to be sure, philanthrōpia seems to mean no more than “friendliness.” Aeschines always uses the word this way, and Demosthenes sometimes does. Very occasionally such friendliness is exposed as a sham. In Against Aristogeiton I (Dem. 25), however, philanthrōpia in its grander sense is held up as the linchpin of Athenian society, quite like sympathy in Hume’s account (see section “B. Europe”). Athenians, we are told (Dem. 25.87), possess a “shared philanthrōpia [tēn koinēn philanthrōpian] that you have by nature toward one another.” A strong sense of justice, dating as far back as Solon or further, prompted Athenians to champion victims of injustice and the oppressed, or so we are told by the ancient sources, and Oliver Goldsmith lauded Solon with these words: “[Solon’s] known humanity procured him the love and veneration of every rank among his fellow-­citizens” (Goldsmith 1774, 1:34; emphasis added). Modern scholars have studied the Greek notion of justice (dikē) and its far-­reaching significance in terms of moral, literary, and political culture. I can add only this point: the Athenian polis, in priding itself on justice and humanity, opened the door to compassion. Compassion, to be sure, was not a traditional virtue comparable to self-­control (sōphrosunē), justness (dikaiosunē), courage (aretē), or wisdom (sophia). Yet it gained ground, and a brief glance at arguments and observations from ancient oratory will reveal the moral conjunction between justice and compassion, a conjunction that will recur in the eighteenth century. In his Panegyricus, Isocrates praises Athens for always defending wronged Greeks (Isoc. 4.52): tois adikoumenois aei tōn Hellēnōn epamunousan. Isocrates says that Athens should be ready to aid the oppressed (8.137). The Athenian sense of justice meant, implicitly, that compassion was something that the victims of injustice both needed and deserved. The Lysianic Funeral Oration praises ancestral Athenians for defying Eurystheus on behalf of the Heracleidae (Lys. 2.14): “They took upon themselves so great a danger, pitying the wronged [tous men adikoumenous eleountes] and hating the oppressors.” Later in the speech, fallen warriors are credited with having pitied the wronged Corinthians (adikoumenous autous eleoun), consequently fighting and dying on their behalf (Lys. 2.67). The theme of Athenian humanity emerges most prominently in the Demosthenic corpus. To begin with, Demosthenes often reminds Athenians of their city’s humane reputation, as in For the Rhodians (Dem. 15.22): “For I wouldn’t want you, who have a reputation for always rescuing the unfortunate [doxan ekhontas tou sōizein tous atukhountas aei] to appear in this affair

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worse men than the Argives.” In another passage, he praises Athens while denigrating the Thebans (Dem. 20.109): “The Thebans, men of Athens, are more disposed to savagery and wickedness than you are to humanity and the wish for justice [epi philanthrōpia kai tōi ta dikaia boulesthai].” Compassion and pardon are embedded in the laws and constitution, according to Demosthenes (Dem. 22.57): “In them [the laws] there is pity, pardon, everything appropriate to free men [eleon, suggnōmē, panth’ ha prosēkei tois eleutherois].” This statement resembles that of Pericles in Thucydides’ earlier funeral oration, where he lays special emphasis on laws written for the protection of the wronged: hosoi te ep’ ōpheleiai tōn adikoumenōn keintai (Thuc. 2.37). Here is how Demosthenes describes the ethos of Athens: “To pity the helpless [tous astheneis eleein], not to allow the strong and powerful to commit outrages; not to treat people savagely or flatter the man who seems to be in a position of power” (Dem. 24.171). The popular moralizers Isocrates, Xenophon, and Demosthenes touted a vision of Athens that was firmly rooted in the capacity for compassion.4 In the same century that witnessed the diminution of Athenian power, the challenge of rival states, and the rise of Macedon, the idea of Athens as a once-­benign power became firmly enshrined. As we saw in the introduction, Isocrates went so far as to claim, in his encomiastic Panegyricus, that the Athenian empire was won through kindness (Isoc. 4.80). Throughout the fourth century, and long after the city-­state’s political prime, Athenians continued to explore compassion in their private lives, with the result that later Greeks, including Plutarch’s contemporaries about 100 CE, believed that their ancestors had erected an altar to Pity in the middle of the city.5 Archaeologists, having found no trace of it, suspect they were mistaken. The humane discourse of Classical Athens was never codified. It did not amount to rights, although aspects of Athenian law (protections for male citizens) did acknowledge the privileged status of the human body, which I explore in the next chapter. Ultimately, Athenian humane discourse yielded practical outcomes. Philanthrōpia survived to become the “great catchword of the [succeeding Hellenistic] age,” stretching from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to Rome’s final conquest of the Greek world in 30 BCE. Talk of philanthrōpia nourished pragmatic philanthropic benefaction on an unprecedented scale. As Peter Green remarks: “[ P]hilanthrōpia was the thing, and . . . all Hellenistic cities, through their wealthier members, practiced it as a matter of course” (Green 1990, 496). Given that fourth-­century Athenians prided themselves greatly on their

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special blend of compassion and philanthrōpia, one may well wonder why. Were they delusional? Consciously hypocritical? Or were they in fact more prone to tears than other Greeks? Perhaps. Were they demonstrably more humane? Legend had it so, but the legends pointed to a remote heroic past. In the fourth century, from 377 to 355 BCE, perhaps the Athenians felt that their reformed leadership increased their moral stature; if so, we have no direct evidence of that. Perhaps, in order to feel good about themselves, they had to paper over their atrocities. It could have been a self-­serving, self-­perpetuating myth. If people are convinced that everything they do is for a good purpose, then they needn’t worry too much about the details of any particular situation. B. Europe Lynn Hunt, in her groundbreaking book Inventing Human Rights (2007), demonstrates that the societal backdrop for the articulation of human-­rights concepts in the eighteenth century was a new emotional regime dominated by “sympathy.” The concept of sympathy was very broad at that time. The Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), for example, considered sympathy a kind of sense, a moral faculty among the “Multitudes of Perceptions which have no relation to any external Sensation” (Hutcheson 1728, x; and see Frazer 2010, 23). Sympathy, or fellow feeling, although less noble than conscience, was what made social life possible. The humane discourse that emerged in the eighteenth century emphasized sympathy, while “humanity” and “benevolence” were closely equivalent to it. Their term “sensibility” referred to what today we may understand as a discerning sensitivity. Several philosophers in the early decades of the eighteenth century developed ideas about so-­called moral sense theory, “the view that humans possess a special sensory ability that can determine, pre-­rationally, what is good or evil.”6 David Hume, in his seminal Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM, 1751), drew from some of these ideas, especially those discussed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713) and Francis Hutcheson.7 Hume writes: “[N]o qualities are more entitled to the general good-­will and approbation of mankind, than beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit, or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others, and a generous concern for our kind and species” (EPM 2.1.5.15–19: Hume 1998, 9).

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Adam Smith, Hume’s close friend and protégé, opens his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS, 1759) with a chapter on sympathy that begins with these words: How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. (TMS 1.1.1: Smith 2002, 1–2)

And a few pages later: Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain or sorrow, that call forth our fellow-­feeling. Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator. Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-­feeling with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness. (TMS 1.1.1: Smith 2002, 4)

These terms and ideas were already in circulation prior to and during the rise of the novel, which often employed and promoted them, as did Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), or Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). The reading public was shaped by such works: people began more and more to value and cultivate sympathy as they empathetically wept their way through tender, heartrending novels. (See chapter 3.) From a legal standpoint, human rights developed from the concept of “natural rights,” which found energy in the late Middle Ages as canon law interacted with Roman law: according to James Griffin, natural rights germinated in the egalitarianism of that period (2008, 30, 40). The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Protestant and the so-­called father of natural law, admitted that the validity of natural rights did not depend upon belief in God. The German jurist Samuel von Pufendorf defended the idea of natural law while also reintroducing a Stoic notion of sociability (Latin socialitas; Pagden 2013, 76). The English philosopher John Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration (1690) argued for the individual’s right to select a religion: in the second of Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government, published in the same year, he explains that “every man has a property in his own per-

Humane Discourse 59

son. This nobody has any right to but himself ” (quoted in Hyland, Gomez, and Greensides 2003, 156). The growing secularization of natural law and natural rights in the context of the rise of sympathy led to the full articulation and acceptance of rights talk, delineated in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Once these rights were declared and indeed acted upon via revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, a slow evolutionary struggle began over their range of application, a struggle that continues today. White men were the initial beneficiaries, but each state eventually had to contend with new claimants: Protestants, Jews, blacks, women. One way for justice and compassion to converge is in the concept of rights. “[O]ur concept of rights,” says Griffin, “emerged at the historic stage when belief in human equality started to supplant belief in a natural social hierarchy” (2008, 44). And then (Lynn Hunt 2007, 214): “The process had and has an undeniable circularity to it: you know the meaning of human rights because you feel distressed when they are violated. The truths of human rights might be paradoxical in this sense, but they are nonetheless still self-­evident.” C. A Pause for Reflection What have I accomplished in chapters 1 through 4 with this extended consideration of the parallels between Classical Athens and Enlightenment France? So far, the analogy with France, a richly documented period, has enabled me to offer a brand new explanation for the birth of humane discourse in Classical Athens, a detailed account encompassing both the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Meanwhile, for European historians I have drawn attention to a Classical precedent that has gone unnoticed. Moving forward, Part II will examine the most important constituent elements of humane values (chapter 5, “Elements of Respect”) and the paths along which they moved to Enlightenment Europe (chapter 6, “Paths through Time”). But first, for readers so inclined, I offer Exploration B, which probes Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, an important locus of Greek humane discourse and one that was familiar to many eighteenth-­century readers.8

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Exploration B: Cyrus the Great

Human rights tend to be analyzed in terms of the evolution of rights talk along with the legal development of rights. Yet this is only part of the story: another part is the history of emotion and the history of the ideas of empathy, compassion, and humanity, without which rights make no sense. Cyrus the Great is sometimes considered the first known ruler to practice tolerance and a mild approach to governance. Our knowledge of Cyrus has historically been filtered through a Greek lens, so the earliest protoconcept of human rights, sometimes disparaged as Western, actually intertwines two distinct strands: Persian governance and Greek discourse. Cyrus the Great was a real historical person who, in the sixth century BCE, conquered a large empire for Persia and founded the Achaemenid dynasty. He is mentioned about two dozen times in the Old Testament, where he is conspicuous for releasing Hebrews from captivity in Babylon. Local evidence for the rule of Cyrus consists mainly of inscriptions (including the famous cuneiform Cyrus Cylinder, which Iran claims as the world’s earliest human-­rights charter). The ancient Persians did not write narrative histories, so most of what we know about Cyrus (or, more precisely, the legend of Cyrus) comes from two Greek sources: the fifth-­century BCE History by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and the fourth-­century Cyropaedia by Xenophon, an Athenian. The title Cyropaedia means The Education of Cyrus, broadly construed, as with The Education of Henry Adams (1908). This curious narrative is a quasi-­fictional comprehensive biography that is sometimes regarded as the very first novel (a historical novel) in all Western literature. It seems unlikely that Xenophon set out to found a genre; rather, his moralizing biography, despite certain romantic elements, conveyed wise advice for rulers. Cyrus lived about two hundred years before Xenophon’s 61

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own day, so long before that Xenophon could easily reinvent Cyrus as the ideal prince. And this is exactly what he did. Furthermore, although the setting is ostensibly Eastern and exotic, the figure of Cyrus is imbued with values and thought processes that are Xenophon’s own. Cyrus is arguably as Greek as his author, although we should keep in mind that the Persian and Greek cultures at this time were mutually influencing each other (Margaret Miller 1997, 3–6 and passim). Xenophon opens his Cyropaedia with the question, “How does a ruler rule?” (1.1.1–3). As W. E. Higgins observes: “Xenophon wished to discuss how government succeeded, in view of the fact that in his own age none seemed to” (1977, 44). Throughout the Cyropaedia, Xenophon explores the qualities of the ideal leader as exemplified by his richly imagined Cyrus the Great. Those qualities include daring and ferocity in battle, self-­restraint, piety, and kindness. All in all, Cyrus comes across as a pretty nice guy, unlike his Early Modern successor, Machiavelli’s ideal ruler. Cyrus often has self-­directed motives for his ostensible good deeds, his “calculated shows of philanthropy,” in Tatum’s words (1989, 71). As prince, Cyrus uses kindness to win friends and earn the love of his subjects. As general, he uses kindness to maintain fighting strength and good morale among the troops. Thus, the portrait of Cyrus recommends ruling by kindness as well as by fear. One must never lose sight of the fact that this approach represented an ideal and was by no means an accurate reflection of contemporary Greek practice. Jacqueline de Romilly regards the various nice-­guy kings in Greek literature as a critique of tyranny: “That is why the gentleness of princes was praised whenever the occasion presented itself,” she says (de Romilly 1979, 127). “In the fourth century, the matter went further, until the image was first sketched, then filled in, of an idealized monarch characterized by gentleness, among other things” (ibid.). The ideal ruler should have the power to harm his enemies and help his friends. He should be capable of compassion. Cyrus hires physicians to attend to the rank and file, orders supplies for the sick, and even establishes a board of health and a dispensary. After the Cadusians in his army are worsted by the Assyrians, he personally cares for the survivors: It was clear, however, that he was strongly distressed, so that, when the rest were eating their main meal at the usual hour, Cyrus with his attendants and physicians would not willingly leave anyone uncared for, but he either looked after them in person, or, if he did not succeed in doing that, was conspicuous in sending others to take care of them. (Cyr. 5.4.18)

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Cyrus is praised and remembered for his benevolence, and on his deathbed characterizes himself as benevolent (the Greek word is philanthrōpos, “people-­loving”). In that respect, he resembles Agesilaus, the Spartan king who, according to Xenophon again, cared for stray children and elderly prisoners of war and won the devotion of conquered cities through his benevolence (  Ages. 1.20–22). Cyrus the Great is also praised for his kindness (euergesia, Cyr. 8.7.13) and for his compassion (katoiktisis, Cyr. 6.1.47). After centuries of neglect during the Middle Ages, the Cyropaedia resurfaced in the Renaissance and quickly gained the attention of tutors in charge of educating young princes. Indeed, one may think of Machiavelli’s Prince (1532) as the early modern answer to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Nevertheless, the Cyropaedia’s popularity remained strong. It peaked in the seventeenth century, and then started gradually to decline until, “by the second half of the eighteenth century,” says James Tatum, “the Cyropaedia ceased to be regarded as literature of any consequence” (Tatum 1989, 4). The English, in particular, had lost interest in a monarchical political order. “More and more readers came to it because they were just looking for a good read” (ibid., 18). The all-­time favorite story from the Cyropaedia that lasted longer than almost anything else was the story about “the most beautiful woman in Asia”: the war captive Panthea.1 As Xenophon would have it, Panthea is the ardent bride of a vanquished Assyrian. Captured in war, she has been selected as a prize for Cyrus. An officer tells Cyrus how he found Panthea inside her tent, seated among her servants, bowed down with sorrow and dread. Xenophon’s chief interest lies in creating a heroine of great nobility, yet she is also a remarkable weeper: But when we ordered her to rise, all her attendants stood up with her, and then she was conspicuous both for her stature and for her nobility and grace, even though she stood there in humble clothing. And her tears were obvious as they fell in drops, some down her dress, some even to her feet. Then the oldest of us said, “Take heart, lady; for though we hear that your husband is a good and noble man, yet we are choosing you out for a man who, be assured, is not his inferior. . . . We think that if any man deserves admiration, that man is Cyrus; and you shall belong to him from now on.” Now when the lady heard that, she tore her outer garment from top to bottom and started wailing; and her servants also cried aloud with her. (Cyr. 5.1.5–6)

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Plainly, Panthea does not wish to become Cyrus’s concubine and wants to remain loyal to her husband. Her tears, which spill more profusely than real tears ever could, fail to secure her release, but they do draw kindly words from one of her Persian captors; as the eldest, he seems to speak for the entire group of men, and so Xenophon paints the improbable picture of a helpless, lovely prisoner surrounded by victorious soldiers who respond to her distress with sympathy and respect. Their behavior is consistent with that of their leader, Cyrus, who is so kind to Panthea (he protects her and never actually claims her for his bed) that she praises his compassion (Cyr. 6.1.47). Later, when Panthea is grieving over the mutilated corpse of her husband, Abradatas, Cyrus pities them both (7.3.14). He offers to help her—in vain, since Panthea soon takes her own life. From her first appearance to her last, Panthea is presented as exquisitely beautiful, chaste, virtuous, full of suffering, and wholly deserving of compassion. This is a tragic love story of devoted newlyweds who never have the opportunity to enjoy their marriage. A tale, too, of heroism, courage, and sacrifice. Xenophon tells the story in fits and starts: it is in effect a novella (Gera 1993) spread out over three consecutive books in the Cyropaedia. Xenophon’s narrative is so very disjointed that it’s amazing to me that readers in the eighteenth century even noticed it. (Panthea is not even named in the early episodes.) Yet Panthea enjoyed considerable repute in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries: she was admired for her beauty. She was the subject of an illustration in Les Femmes illustres; ou, Les Harangues héroïques de Monsieur de Scudéry,2 a French work on famous women by Madeleine de Scudéry (Scudéry 1655). Perhaps this was how her story gained attention. Panthea was memorialized in poems, plays, and paintings like one by the French Baroque painter Laurent de La Hyre. Panthea with her pretty face is depicted in a state of partial undress that is, admittedly, inconsistent with Xenophon’s story. On the other hand, one can admire the heroine’s lovely bosom. The story of Panthea eventually turns up in anthologies such as the Edinburgh Repository (1793) and in collections for the education of children. In the meantime, several Englishmen wrote plays about Cyrus the Great that focused on the Panthea segment. Several scenes in Xenophon lend themselves to dramatization: Panthea in her tent, discussed above (Cyr. 5.1.5–6); Panthea arraying her husband, Abradatas, for battle (Cyr. 6.4.2–7), exhorting him to fight bravely on behalf of Cyrus; Panthea after the battle weeping over the pathetically dismembered and reassembled corpse of Abradatas

Exploration B: Cyrus the Great 65

(Cyr. 7.3.5, 8), and then stabbing herself over it (Cyr. 7.3.14). Interestingly, the eighteenth-­century plays largely ignore the drama of the newlyweds, the story of their passionate love and mutual devotion cut short. Instead, they focus on the moral character of Cyrus the Great. An English writer, Thomas Maurice, wrote a tragedy in five acts about Panthea, published in 1789.3 It was never publicly performed. No great loss there, despite the sheer inventiveness of Maurice, who builds up a number of absurd subplots in a futile attempt to sustain the simple story. It’s pointless to summarize the twists and turns of Maurice’s blank-­verse Panthea, although I can’t resist repeating Lord Byron’s devastating remark about an 1807 poem by Maurice, which Byron called, brutally, “the petrifactions of a plodding brain” (Keast 1970, 66). What I have tried to understand about the play is Cyrus’s role. What kind of man is he? Well, in the words of one character, Gadates, an Assyrian nobleman: Much, much have I heard extoll’d his generous kindness, His boundless clemency and mercy, shewn Tow’rds hapless wretches whom the chance of war Had thrown unto his hands. (Maurice 1789, 4)

What is Cyrus’s attitude toward Panthea, the most beautiful woman of Asia? Does he pity and protect her? Yes, he certainly does. But by far the greatest emphasis falls on Cyrus’s sexual restraint, his exemplary self-­mastery, a theme that is present in Xenophon’s work but developed much further here. This aspect of the story is what gets dramatized: how Cyrus refuses even to look at the captive beauty (Cyr. 5.1.8), because he fears the onset of irresistible erotic desire. John Banks (d. 1706) also wrote a play about Cyrus, Cyrus the Great: or, The Tragedy of Love; this one was performed posthumously at court in 1735. Banks’s plot is less contrived than that of Maurice and is more authentically grounded in Greek historiography, not only Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, but also the splendid tales about Cyrus told by Herodotus. Banks merges both ancient accounts responsibly and to good effect. He develops the love story of Panthea and her husband in a way that Maurice does not. But when it comes to Cyrus’s attitude toward Panthea, the chief emphasis again falls on Cyrus’s self-­restraint. To summarize, it looks as if what mattered to both these eighteenth-­ century English playwrights were the gentlemanly qualities of the conqueror, who should resist the carnal temptation to exploit the lovely, exotic

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women who lie at his mercy, defenseless. He should refrain from any such abuse of power, thereby meriting praise like that of Panthea herself for Cyrus in the play by Maurice: Oh! I have much to tell thee [Abradatas]; much to praise In Cyrus, valiant, bountiful, and wise: To paint the virtues of that best of kings, Each gen’rous action, and each godlike thought, Eternity would fail! (Maurice 1789, 60)

The preoccupation with sexual self-­restraint in an ideal prince or conqueror brings to mind, by way of contrast, a very famous Roman prince and legendary rapist who virtually personified the abuse of power: Sextus Tarquinius. The Roman historian Livy (1.57–60) tells how Sextus Tarquinius’s rape of the beautiful and virtuous Lucretia precipitated the overthrow of his father, King Tarquin the Proud, and the foundation of the Roman Republic. The eighteenth-­century concern with rape as an abuse of power is also evidenced by the popularity of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). In that novel, the virtuous heroine is a serving girl who stoutly resists the increasingly forceful advances of her master. No gentleman, he (in social position, yes; but not in behavior), for he actually has her taken captive and tries to rape her: a shocking abuse of power that is thwarted by Pamela’s stalwart resistance. Thus the British had Pamela at home and Panthea abroad, parallel reflections on the humane conduct befitting an English gentleman as the empire burgeoned. I soon began to wonder whether John Banks or Thomas Maurice had in mind any contemporary exotic women when they developed their Pantheas. That question swiftly led me to India, mainly because Maurice wrote a five-­ volume work on Indian antiquities (published 1793–1794), for which he was best known. And this was the age of the East India Company. In the nineteenth century, sex in the colonies would become a huge issue, especially for bachelor officers of the Crown. The history of sexual politics is an entire subfield with which I am barely acquainted; but scholars including Kenneth Ballhatchet (1980) and Richard Philips (2006) have closely examined the export throughout British domains of Victorian standards, seen in the rising age of consent, attempted control of prostitution, and so on. The Indians were generally considered lascivious. Parenthetically, on the matter of self-­restraint, it would be interesting to know whether ascetic strands from Greek and Indian thought ever met and crossed. In England, could

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the eighteenth-­century interest in Panthea signal early stirrings of the so-­ called purity movement? It should be noted that a preoccupation with self-­restraint, while a feature of Christianity, was also a Greek virtue (sōphrosunē: self-­control, prudence) that, fully developed by the Stoics, was already present in Socratic teachings and prominent in Athenian popular morality. Greek philosophers developed the idea of freedom, holding that one must never be a slave: not to anyone, and certainly not to one’s own thoughtless impulses or carnal appetites. Here is how Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato, who, like Xenophon, knew and admired Socrates, expresses this idea in book 5 of the Cyropaedia. Commenting on Persian table manners, he writes (Cyr. 5.2.17): “For no Persian of the educated class would allow it to appear that he was captivated with any kind of food or drink, either with his eyes gloating over it, or with his hands eager to get it, or with his thoughts so engrossed by it as to fail to observe things that would attract his attention if he were not at meat.” (And then, of course, for Aristotle, moderation was key.) Thomas Maurice and John Banks put Panthea to very different uses than Xenophon had done, highlighting another virtue in the ideal prince: not compassion so much as self-­restraint and moderation. Cyrus the Great provides a model for conduct. The very opulence, the luxuriant beauty of the India that the British took may have supported Panthea’s popularity. It’s not much of a stretch to see how Persia and India might get conflated in the English imagination.4 Even without Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), the connection is everywhere apparent. To push this suggestion a bit further: Panthea may have stood for Indian women, or perhaps for all of India itself, feminized and subjugated. And finally, let us consider Robert, Lord Clive, who in 1773 was impeached on accusations that he looted the Bengal treasury after winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757. In defending himself at the trial, Clive said: “A great prince was dependent on my pleasure, an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”5 In his Ideologies of the Raj (1994), Thomas Metcalf explores the intellectual foundations for British rule in India. He discusses the tendency to view Britain as a new Rome (Metcalf 1994, 3–4, 13, 54, 60–62, 90, 196), but perhaps Britain was ethically more like Athens, with respect both to sea power and to its sense of guilt. Perhaps the humane discourse of the eighteenth century, the finest product of the Enlightenment, emerged in much

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the same way as humane discourse did in Classical Athens: in each case, the beautiful result of ugly events and the badly troubled conscience of Athenians and Europeans, respectively. Certainly, the Europeans were still, as we now put it, “using the Greeks to think with” at this time. Hume (and, in France, Montaigne) admired the Cyropaedia.6 It also appears to me that orientalism, absurd as it may seem to us, perhaps afforded a significant moment, via Cyrus the Great, in the development of human rights.

PART II

ANCIENT GREEK ROOTS

Figure 2. View of Delphi and the Two Rocks of Parnassus, from Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece: Maps, plans, views, and coins, illustrative of the geography and antiquities of ancient Greece (1806). Villanova University Digital Library.

CHAPTER 5

Elements of Respect

To have human rights, people had to be perceived as separate individuals who were capable of exercising independent moral judgment. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, p. 27

Whether the Greeks ever formulated human-­rights concepts remains debatable, but they definitely pioneered the Western version of respect for individual human beings. Greek literary and visual arts abundantly display the inception of the individualistic humanism that would be reborn with the Renaissance and further developed during the Enlightenment. To dig deeper and uncover the Greek roots of respect for individual human beings, I examine four key elements: first, personhood and individuality; second, human dignity; third, freedom; and fourth, compassion for suffering. My choice of these is, admittedly, subjective: they are not exactly like entries in the chemist’s periodic table of elements. In part I, I studied how the conceit of philanthrōpia developed in Athens. In part II, I will first (in chapter 5) highlight the presence in ancient Greek literature of the “elements of respect,” elements that I consider vital to engendering respect for the individual person, a prerequisite for human rights. In chapter 6, I will point out some of the paths along which these same elements were carried into later Europe. A. Personhood and Individuality I begin with anthrōpos, the Greek word for “human being,” familiar from English “anthropology,” the study of human societies and cultures. Anthrōpos could refer to a male or female human being regardless of social 71

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standing, and whether free or enslaved. In Athens, slaves had an ambiguous status: they were both property and persons. Insofar as slaves were property (chattel), their owners could prosecute anyone who struck or damaged or killed them without due cause. Their owners could mistreat their own slaves but were not supposed to kill them without official sanction; they incurred a religious taint (“pollution”) if they did so, because slaves were recognized as human beings. One ancient term, the neuter noun andrapoda (“man-­footed beings,” slaves taken in war), which aligned them with tetrapoda (“four-­footed beings”), such as cattle or goats, another category of war booty, strikes us as thoroughly dehumanizing. But other and more common terms such as doulos (the basic word for slave) or oiketēs (house servant) or pais (child) seem less so. Garlan writes, “It was universally agreed that a slave was a human being (anthropos), not an animal” (1988, 40).1 In effect, slaves were human beings with very limited rights and protections. They participated in religious rituals of the household. If Greek-­born, they could participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries, religious cult activities that apparently offered rewards in the afterlife. Wiedemann finds that slaves possessed “certain moral rights” (2005, 13, with chaps. 9 and 12). I will return to the topic of slavery in a later section but allow it to rest for now. The appropriate attitude of a good man toward a fellow human being of whatever rank emerges in Xenophon’s story about a half-­dead soldier in his fourth-­century Anabasis. The Anabasis highlights the saving leadership of Xenophon himself, who in 401 BCE took command of the Ten Thousand (an army of Greek mercenaries) stranded in Persia and led the difficult retreat to the Black Sea.2 In book 5, once the army reached the coastal city of Cotyora, Xenophon had to clear himself of charges of hubris (violent arrogance) for striking subordinates. There are questions of truth and accuracy in Xenophon’s self-­flattering narrative, but no matter: If the facts have been tailored to please an audience, so much the better, for then we can learn something about the audience. Actually there is more than one audience: not only the soldiers at the trial, but also the soldiers who witnessed the prior episode with the half-­dead soldier. All these men belonged to the same army, one drawn from across the Greek world. G. B. Nussbaum, writing about its political organization, calls the army of the Ten Thousand a “hybrid Panhellenic community” (G. B. Nussbaum 1967, 11) reflective of the “average” Greek. In his (successful) defense, Xenophon responds to one of his accusers who happened to be a muleteer. After a brief exchange, Xenophon recognizes the man and remembers why he hit him.3 It turns out that he had ordered this muleteer to carry on his mule a desperately ill soldier in place of the regular

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baggage. Xenophon bids the court listen to the story (Xen. Anab. 5.8.8–11), which I have reformatted into dialogue form for the sake of clarity. XENOPHON: A man was being left behind because he was no longer able to proceed. I recognized the man only so far as to know that he was one of us; and I forced you to carry him so that he might not perish; for, I believe, the enemy was following after us. MULETEER: Yes, that’s right. XENOPHON: Well, after I had sent you on ahead, I caught up with you again as I came along with the rear guard, and you were digging a hole to bury the man in, and I stopped and praised you. But when, as we were standing there, the man drew up his leg. The bystanders cried, “The man is alive!” and you said, “Let him be alive as much as he likes. I, for my part, will not carry him.” Then I struck you—you speak the truth—for you seemed to me to know he was alive. MULETEER: Well, so what? He nonetheless died, didn’t he, after I showed him to you. XENOPHON: We all of us, too, are going to die; and on account of this, should we be buried alive?

Both speaking characters in this narrative meet Hunt’s requirement that they be “separate individuals . . . capable of exercising independent moral judgment” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 27). The muleteer is brutish, with faulty judgment. Xenophon claims for himself the moral high ground. The blow he struck was justified, he says, because the muleteer was on the verge of consigning a Greek soldier to live burial, a horrendous thing. That soldier deserved a chance to recover his health or, if not, to die a decent death. The appeal is to commonality: “We all of us will die” (hēmeis pantes apothanoumetha). Military rank or social status is irrelevant. Xenophon’s mundane story (no high art here) testifies to the value placed (ideally) on each person’s life as a human being,4 even though the realities of ancient society and warfare routinely trampled upon that value. It is also clear that the lowly muleteer was expected to have done a better job in exercising his individual moral judgment. The point of punishing him was that he had disrespected human dignity. Everyone in this case follows the notion that the responsibility for good judgment is an individual one, and Greek literature for the most part is populated by individual characters who matter, who have carefully crafted inner lives. Prior to the invention of Greek tragedy, the lyric poets of an earlier age (the Archaic period, ca. 700–480 BCE) had already laid the

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groundwork for the focus on mind by establishing a vivid expressive voice for the subjective individual. Vernant explains: “By making their personal emotions, their present state of mind, into the major theme of communication with their public (friends, fellow citizens, and hetairoi), the lyric poets confer a precise verbal form and a firmer consistency on the indecisive, secret, intimate, and personal subjectivity that resides within us” (Vernant 1991, 326–327). One thinks, for example, of these tender lines often attributed to Sappho:5 The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is the middle of the night and the hours go by and I lie here alone. (Sappho 2007, translated by Jim Powell)

The lines evoke an empathy that is based on the unshareable yet common experience of isolated individuality. Respect for other individuals would seem to depend on acknowledging that they too, as well as you and I, have minds. Meanwhile, experimental psychologists in the twenty-­first century have documented what every parent knows: even very young children normally realize that other people have minds (Vasudevi Reddy 2008). We have no sure knowledge of another person’s inner life, but solipsism, the idea that other people don’t have minds, was invented by modern philosophers. Ancient Greek philosophers never seem to have raised the problem of “other minds” but instead took it for granted that other people are not mere robots with no inner life. Some scholars during the last eighty years have, interestingly, challenged the existence of either a fully self-­conscious self in antiquity or the interiority of characters in Greek tragedy, or both. As to the first: In 1938, the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss, nephew and collaborator of the “father of sociology,” Émile Durkheim, seemed to deny that the fully self-­conscious self existed prior to the eighteenth century. (Not that it necessarily exists now: philosophers and neuroscientists alike still grapple with the construct.) To be sure, a precisely Kantian idea of the self did not exist prior to Kant. But are we therefore to infer that no concept of the self existed prior to Descartes and Kant? Where is the evidence to support that claim? How could such a thing be possible? The alleged nonexistence of self around 1600 CE, for example, would make nonsense of Shakespeare: What on earth would Hamlet be going on about? And how does the alleged nonexistence of self in antiquity account for the idea, prominent in Greco-­Roman philosophy as well as in early Christianity, that human

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beings have minds and souls? Mauss, futilely attempting to forestall confusion, delimits his claim: he is talking about the “category of the person” in law and morality, not the psychological person. He writes: “Let me merely say that it is plain, particularly to us, that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical” (Mauss 1985, 3, translated by W. D. Halls). If we grant that human beings generally are aware of their individuality, then what makes the Greeks special is that they created influential literary works that evoked and encouraged such awareness and acknowledged it as significant. This becomes an intricate matter for classical scholars. Christopher Pelling in 1990 published a volume of essays on characterization and individuality in Greek literature (see also Gill 1996), but here I shall simply glance at a few tragic dramas by the three great fifth-­century tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They devised vivid characters whose words and actions strongly suggest interiority,6 and they convince me, at any rate, that the Greeks had a strong concept of self, the mind, or an inner life. First we have, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (458 BCE), the title character’s hesitation to step on the sumptuous red fabrics laid down at the command of Clytemnestra, his treacherous queen (lines 905–957).7 He expresses ambivalence, a complex state of mind, seen here in two excerpts: Clytemnestra: What do you think Priam would have done if he had won? Agamemnon: I think he would have walked on these embroideries. Clytemnestra: Then do not be ashamed of the disapproval of men. Agamemnon: The voice of the people carries enormous power. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Well, if you want this so much. —Here, somebody help me off with my boots. (  A servant removes them.) Trusty slaves, they have served me well. And as I tread on these lavish sea-­red cloths, let no god’s envious glare strike me from afar. I am ashamed to let my feet ruin the wealth of this house and waste these expensive threads. Enough! (He steps onto the tapestries.) It is done. (  Agamemnon, lines 935–938, 944–950, translated by Peter Meineck)

In Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE), the enraged Medea, on the brink of infanticide, delivers a soliloquy (lines 1021–1080) in which she repeatedly changes her mind, most strikingly here:

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Medea: Why do you smile so sweetly that last smile of all? Oh, Oh, what can I do? My spirit has gone from me, Friends, when I saw that bright look in the children’s eyes. I cannot bear to do it [kill them]. I renounce my plans I had before. I’ll take my children away from This land. Why should I hurt their father with the pain They feel, and suffer twice as much of pain myself ? No, no, I will not do it. I renounce my plans. Ah, what is wrong with me? Do I want to let go My enemies unhurt and be laughed at for it? I must face this thing. Oh, but what a weak woman Even to admit to my mind these soft arguments. Children, go into the house. And he whom law forbids To stand in attendance at my sacrifices, Let him see to it. I shall not mar my handiwork. Oh! Oh! Do not, O my heart, you must not do these things! Poor heart, let them go, have pity upon the children. If they live with you in Athens they will cheer you. No! By Hell’s avenging furies it shall not be— This shall never be that I should suffer my children To be the prey of my enemies’ insolence. Every way it is fixed. The bride will not escape. No, the diadem is now upon her head, and she, The royal princess, is dying in the dress, I know it. But—for it is the most dreadful of roads for me To tread, and them I shall send on a more dreadful still— I wish to speak to the children. (Medea, lines 1040–1069, translated by Rex Warner)

David Wiles contends that “[i]n a world where multiple gods regularly operate through humans, it made no sense to think of actions being rooted in an autonomous ego” (Wiles 2000, 154). But how can Medea change her mind four times in as many minutes if she has no mind nor the individual power to change it? (See also Gibert 1995.) Her ambivalence is “self-­divided.” And from Sophocles, there is the Ajax (442 BCE?), in which the entire action of the play turns upon the protagonist’s state of mind, as Ajax moves from anger (at being denied the armor of Achilles), to mania (featuring his deluded slaughter of herd animals in place of human enemies), to chagrin (when he comes to his senses and sees what he has done), to suicide (he falls

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upon his sword). The suffering of Ajax is entirely mental: he has no flesh-­ burning shirt like that of Heracles in Trachiniae or festering wound like that of the protagonist in Philoctetes (two other plays by Sophocles). The extreme torments he suffers are not in his body but wholly in his mind, his inner self. With his self-­discovery, when he realizes what he has done, he incurs his own shame: Ajax: Here I am, the bold, the valiant, Unflinching in the shock of war, A terrible threat to unsuspecting beasts. Oh! what a mockery I have come to! What indignity! (  Ajax, lines 364–367, translated by John Moore)

His consort, Tecmessa, also suffers very poignantly, but Ajax has a degree of interiority unsurpassed in Greek tragedy. Sheila Murnaghan, noticing how tragic characters attribute mind to others, emphasizes the extent to which the chorus and Tecmessa engage in acts of mind reading, picking up cues from the hero’s speech and actions as they try to understand what Ajax is going through alone. These cues they interpret in light of their own hopes and fears. Sheila Murnaghan states: “Sophocles is just as interested as any modern cognitive scientist in mind-­reading as a definitive human activity” (Murnaghan 2016, 10).8 Meanwhile, Suzanne Keen comments: “The human capacity for primitive empathy, or the phenomenon of spontaneously matching feelings, suggests that human beings are basically similar to one another, with a limited range of variations” (Keen 2006, 212). The single most famous Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, richly illustrates specific techniques the playwright employed to endow Oedipus with the appearance of an inner life. First, looking only at the words spoken by Oedipus himself, one finds myriad verbs of intellection and emotion, intertwined with first-­person pronouns. He talks constantly about what he thinks and what he feels. He offers frequent self-­analysis and self-­description, along with musings and deliberations. From Sophocles’ Oedipus the King: Oedipus: Children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus, why do you sit here with your suppliant crowns? The town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense; I did not think it fit that I should hear of this from messengers but came myself—

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I Oedipus whom all men call the Great. (He turns to the Priest.) You’re old and they are young; come, speak for them. What do you fear or want, that you sit here suppliant? Indeed I’m willing to give all that you may need; I would be very hard should I not pity suppliants like these. . . . . . . . . . . . . . I pity you, children. You have come full of longing, but I have known the story before you told it only too well, I know that you are all sick, yet there is not one of you, sick though you are, that is as sick as I myself. Your several sorrows each have single scope and touch but one of you. My spirit groans for city and myself and you at once. You have not roused me like a man from sleep; know that I have given many tears to this, gone many ways wandering in thought, but as I thought I found only one remedy and that I took. I sent Menoeceus’ son Creon, Jocasta’s brother, to Apollo, to his Pythian temple, that he might learn there by what act or word I could save this city. (Oedipus the King, lines 1–13, 58–72, translated by David Grene)

Oedipus addresses plague-­ridden suppliants, formally introducing himself as king of Thebes (line 8), but the Greek text immediately establishes Oedipus as deeper than the mere figure of a king: as having an inner life. In line 6, we have Oedipus expressing his own judgment, thinking it fit. Line 7 has the intensifying pronoun myself by which he asserts his wish to see the situation firsthand, not hear from messengers. Further, lines 11–12, “I’m willing to give all,” and lines 12–13, “I would be very hard / should I not pity suppliants like these.” The speech is all about his thoughts and feelings. Let us skip the priest’s response and resume with Oedipus at line 57. He knows what he ought to know: “I know that you are all sick.” The Greek has an emphatic personal pronoun, “I” (egō), at the end of line 60. Each of you has his own pain, but I bear all of it together. Lines 63–64: “My spirit [psukhē] groans / for city and myself and you at once.” We don’t know

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exactly how to translate the Greek psukhē (a root of English “psychology”), but it’s definitely an interior faculty (spirit? soul? mind?) that belongs to Oedipus and can groan. Line 65: “You have not roused me like a man from sleep.” Lines 66–67: “Know that I have given many tears to this, / gone many ways wandering in thought.” Lines 68–71: “but as I thought I found only one remedy / and that I took. I sent . . . Creon . . . to [Delphi] to find how,” (line 72) “doing what or saying what, I might save the city.” Is this not a self ? Or, turn it around: If no inner life was aimed at, then why does Sophocles consistently and persistently misdirect us? Language like this generates a strong sense of emotional flow. Feelings appear to sweep through the protagonist scene by scene: Prologue: Oedipus professes pity for citizens suffering from the plague (lines 12–13, 58–60): no one else knows his pain (60–64). His anxious thoughts have fixed upon the plan of sending Creon to consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi (lines 68–72). Episode One: Oedipus expresses anger toward the blind prophet, Tiresias (330–403). Episode Two: Now he’s vehemently angry with his brother-­in-­law, Creon (532 ff.). “I want your death [623].” (Creon, early in this episode, suggests that the chorus judge Oedipus’s thoughts by his demeanor (528–529). Episode Three: Oedipus expresses apprehension and terror as he speaks with Jocasta and the Messenger (976, 988–999). Episode Four : Oedipus again expresses fear (1170). Then comes the disclosure of his true identity (1180–1185). Episode Five: A messenger reports Oedipus’s response to Jocasta’s suicide, culminating in his self-­blinding (1268–1279). Finally, Oedipus appears on stage with bleeding eye sockets (1307 ff.) and deepest woes, anxious wishes for his daughters (1462, 1486–1514), topped by his vehement demand for exile (1436, 1451–1454, 1518). From start to finish, our protagonist has evinced powerful emotions that touch us.

Greek tragedy, in sum, offered and continues to offer the world texts that richly depict the human mind.9 These texts antedate the famous Socratic aphorism “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, Ap. 38a), which insists that individuals with innerness have value. Earlier than both is the riddling maxim inscribed at Delphi (Paus. 10.24.1): Gnōthi sauton, “Know thyself.” And then, the idea of the soul is crucial in ancient Greek philoso-

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phy, as seen, for example, in Plato’s Phaedrus (245c–­249d), where Socrates fancifully sketches the nature of the soul, and above all in Plato’s Republic (passim).10 The earliest life story of an individual is another work by Xenophon, the Cyropaedia, a highly imaginative (fictionalized) account of the life and career of Persia’s Cyrus the Great (reigned 550–530 BCE). The Cyropaedia is also important for its humane discourse, its praise of compassion (addressed in Exploration B). But as a biographical gesture, it foreshadows the fact that biography would become a popular genre in the Roman era, an interest reflected also in numerous portrait busts. The most profuse and influential collection of ancient biographies is that by Roman-­era Greek writer Plutarch (d. 120 CE), whose Parallel Lives set forth compare-­and-­contrast moralizing biographies of prominent individuals paired from Greek and Roman history, such as the conquerors Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar (the latter work revisited by Shakespeare in his Julius Caesar of 1599). The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1985) observes that literary biography and autobiography among Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic periods furnished the basis of our modern idea of the individuality and character of a person.11 Building on Hegel, Jonathan Strauss, a philosophically inclined professor of French literature, finds that Greek tragedy sharpened the value of the individual, most decisively in one particular play, Sophocles’ Antigone.12 Strauss argues that Antigone tries to define an individual “through his or her life rather than through death” (Strauss 2013, 2). Strauss emphasizes how the play helps to constitute the concept of individuality, even while accepting the mistaken opinion that this concept was lacking in earlier fifth-­ century Greece (ibid.). I see the play somewhat differently. I agree that the stage character Antigone crystallizes the importance of the individual; I also think that she embodies human dignity. The individual is an important idea, and so is the idea of individuality’s importance. The dignity of the individual somehow not only alights on individual human beings but also arises precisely from their individuality. B. Dignity Sophocles’ Antigone, then, helps me pivot from the topic of individuality to the topic of human dignity, which the philosopher Pablo Gilabert calls “the moral heart of human rights” (2018, 114). The term “dignity,” notoriously difficult to define, has attracted the attention of quite a few distin-

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guished philosophers, including George Kateb, Michael Rosen, and Jeremy Waldron. Rosen’s book is tailored precisely to human-­rights law (2012, ix), so I lean heavily on it. My own view accords with Kant’s core concept of human dignity, described in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GMS: 1785) as a value that is “inner” and “unconditional” (GMS, 4: 435– 436; Rosen 2012, 22), and I offer that Antigone epitomizes human dignity as she courageously violates Creon’s public decree that the corpse of her treasonous brother, Polynices, remain unburied. Antigone is the founding mother of civil disobedience (and see Becker 2000), breaking a ruler’s unjust decree while following her own consciousness of a higher law. She is a figure of moral autonomy whose self-­sacrificing courage throws everyone else in the shade. In the second episode, shown next, she is brave, articulate, independent, and deeply committed to burying Polynices. Although a young woman (and women were supposed not to rock the boat), Antigone stands up to Creon with sublime poise, passion, and self-­possession. While offering David Grene’s translation here, I promise that Antigone is even more splendid in Greek. From Sophocles’ Antigone: Creon: Now, Antigone, tell me shortly and to the point, did you know the proclamation against your action? Antigone: I knew it; of course I did. For it was public. Creon: And did you dare to disobey that law? Antigone: Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; nor did Justice, which lives with those below, enact such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure. They are not of today and yesterday; they live forever; none knows when first they were. These are the laws whose penalties I would not incur from the gods, through fear of any man’s temper. I know that I will die—of course I do— even if you had not doomed me by proclamation. If I shall die before my time, I count that a profit. (  Antigone, lines 446–462, translated by David Grene)

Later in the play, led away to be lethally sealed in an underground cavern, she says:

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Antigone: You see me, you people of my country, as I set out on my last road of all, looking for the last time on this light of this sun— never again. I am alive but Hades who gives sleep to everyone is leading me to the shores of Acheron, though I have known nothing of marriage songs nor the chant that brings the bride to bed. My husband is to be the Lord of Death. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tomb, bridal chamber, prison forever dug in rock, it is to you I am going to join my people, that great number that have died, whom in their death Persephone received. I am the last of them and I go down in the worst death of all—for I have not lived the due term of my life. (  Antigone, lines 806–816, 891–896, translated by David Grene)

Later still, trapped inside the cavern, she defiantly hangs herself, a final expression of her autonomy and courage that is reported by a messenger (1192– 1225, lines 1296–1289 in Grene’s translation). Antigone is unique among the memorable heroines of Greek tragic drama. Medea kills her children, and Clytemnestra her husband, but Antigone, acting from deep religious feeling and devotion to family, buries her slain brother at the cost of her own life. Yes, she has the dignity of high rank (more on rank below); but so, too, does her sister and foil, Ismene, who is often construed as a vacillating coward.13 Antigone’s true dignity lies in the courage of her convictions. The worth and dignity of the individual, the individual’s intrinsic value, underlies the persistent emphasis in Greek literature on vulnerability, on the fragility of human prosperity and personal happiness, a prominent theme in Greek literature from Homer and Herodotus onward. Certain tragic plays fixate on how the magnificent ruling family of Troy was brought low; and Solon supposedly warns Croesus, wealthy king of Lydia, to “call no man happy until he’s dead” (Hdt. 1.32). The theme of happiness will be snapped up by Aristotle (who in the Nicomachean Ethics defines eudaimonia, happiness or human flourishing, as the goal or telos of life: EN 1097a),14 and that theme gets further developed by the Stoics and Epicureans. Meanwhile, in Archaic and Classical Athens, humanity’s need for protection from violence, a precondition for eudaimonia, is flagged by the early feats of Theseus, the legendary king of Athens who cleared the Saronic coast of murder-

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ous villains, including Sinis, Sciron, and Procrustes, each of whom had a gruesome way of killing wayfarers: Sinis used pine trees to tear them apart; Sciron, making them wash his feet, swiftly kicked them off a cliff; Procrustes chopped or stretched them until they fit his bed. Theseus kills each villain in that villain’s own evil manner, combining brawn with brains and divinely inspired moral righteousness. (See Bacchylides, below). Aeschylus at Eumenides 13 describes the civilizing Athenians as “roadmakers” (keleuthopoioi). And even more so than the Athenians generally, Theseus was a civilizer, a benefactor of humanity, as Sophie Mills explains (1997, 19; see also Walker 1995). The slaying of the Minotaur cements Theseus’s reputation as a civilizer: he saves Athens from having to pay annual tribute to King Minos of Crete in the form of seven youths and seven maidens to be fed alive to the monstrous Minotaur (half man, half bull). That these anonymous lives are deemed worth saving reveals the connection between the dignity and worth of the vulnerable individual and the need for protection. Who is the man said to be, and from where? How is he equipped? Is he leading a great army with weapons of war? [35] Or does he come alone with only his attendants, like a traveller wandering among foreign people, this man who is so strong, valiant, and bold, who has overcome the powerful strength [40] of such great men? Indeed a god impels him, so that he can bring justice down on the unjust; for it is not easy to accomplish deed after deed and not meet with evil. (Bacchylides, Dithyramb 18, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien)

These youthful exploits of Theseus, however, become merely the backstory to his mythic career as the compassionate ruler of Athens. In the Athenian suppliant plays examined closely by Angeliki Tzanetou in her City of Suppliants (2012),15 the mature, rational Theseus exhibits compassion, justice, and moderation. Thanks to his good character, Athens offers asylum to those who need it, most strikingly in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. (The chorus at lines 460–461 deems Oedipus worthy of compassion; and see lines 562– 568, where the suffering stranger is promised hospitality.) The vulnerability of human beings, their need for protection from violence, inspires a concept of justice that is defined as the punishment and containment of unjust evildoers who assail people’s safety and dignity. To return to the question of rank raised above, I concur with Waldron’s view that what was originally the dignity of rank gets extended to the lower classes, so that everyone eventually is treated well. Waldron explains: “[T]he modern notion of human dignity involves an upward equalization of rank, so that we now try to accord to every

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human being something of the dignity, rank, and expectation of respect that was formerly accorded to nobility” (Waldron 2012, 33: original emphasis). C. Freedom Freedom, fundamentally, starts with protection from constraint and violence, a relation that emerges clearly in the constitutional development of Athenian democracy. Thus we find that the legendary wise man and lawmaker Solon, when society in the 590s BCE was being torn apart by tension between the haves and the have-­nots, met the crisis in part by abolishing debt slavery: henceforth no Athenian citizen could be taken or sold into slavery in satisfaction of his debts. This protection was now a privilege of citizenship, and others eventually followed: citizens paid for their crimes with fines rather than being whipped as slaves were. Indeed, the corporal punishment of noncitizens crucially helped define the status of the citizen in Athens, a matter explored by Virginia Hunt (1992). Herodotus’s History recounts the confrontation between the vast, despotic Achaemenid empire of Persia and the small, free Greek city-­states in a narrative that focuses on the contrast between tyranny and freedom. The power-­abusing figure of the tyrant is epitomized by Xerxes, who treats everyone in his empire, including noble courtiers, as his slaves. Xerxes commits many acts of unchecked violent arrogance (hubris). He defies nature by converting land into a seaway (by digging his canal across the Athos Peninsula, Hdt. 7.22, 37, 122) and a seaway into land (by bridging the mile-­ wide Hellespont, Hdt. 7.33–36). He is ferociously cruel. When Pythius, a wealthy underwriter (7.27–28), pleads that one of his five sons be left behind in Sardis rather than conscripted, Xerxes has the youth killed and cut in half, his corpse arrayed in such a way that the army, as it departs Sardis, marches out between the two halves (Hdt. 7.38–39). Persian warriors must be slavishly whipped into battle, in stark contrast with free Greek warriors, whose honor, courage, and patriotism carry them forward. Thus, to resist the Persian invasions is to defend Greek freedom, as Athens had already attempted to do by supporting the Ionian Revolt (499– 494 BCE); and the Athenians emerge as shining, victorious champions at the land battle of Marathon (490 BCE) and the sea battle of Salamis (480). Even within the lands of Greece, local tyrants had to be supplanted in order for city-­states, preeminently Athens (which experienced tyranny under the rule of Pisistratus and his sons), to establish a free, democratic system, even though this would evolve into an imperial democracy. Hence,

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despotism, though often associated with the Persians, is by no means foreign to the Greek tradition. It appears both as its past (the Archaic age of tyrants) and as its consequence (the Classical despot-­polis). But the theme of Greek freedom gets carried forward throughout Classical antiquity, especially (and ironically) during the Roman era, when the slogan or promise of offering the Greeks their freedom is usually a mask for Roman conquest, repression, and control (Dmitriev 2011). A noteworthy aspect of freedom is that the concept emerges historically in contradistinction to the experience of slavery, a topic brilliantly treated by Orlando Patterson in his Freedom, vol. 1, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991). The book opens (p. ix): “No one would deny that today freedom stands unchallenged as the supreme value of the Western world” and goes on to problematize this comment. I agree with Patterson that Greek literature draws empathetic and sympathetic attention to the position of the enslaved individual, especially females. This starts with Homer. In book 8 of the Odyssey, the hero, Odysseus, listening to the bard Demodocus sing about the Trojan War, weeps with sorrow, elaborated by the following extended simile: As a woman weeps, lying over the body of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people as he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children; she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her, hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders, force her up and lead her away into slavery, to have hard work and sorrow. (Od. 8.523–530, translated by Richmond Lattimore)

Then, in Greek tragedy, among the most striking war captives are Cassandra and Hector’s widow, Andromache. Both characters are captured and dragged into slavery when Troy falls. Cassandra in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus performs a mad scene (  Ag. 1076–1330): the frenzy she brings to the stage, grim foreboding of the deadly future mingled with gruesome visions of past misdeeds at the palace where the scene unfolds, sets her apart, yet the playwright makes her a poignantly sympathetic figure. The Cassandra of Euripides in his Trojan Women also has a mad scene (Tro. 307–461): wildly brandishing a torch, she feigns ecstatic joy at her incipient “wedding,” although she knows she will be carried away as the humiliated concubine of Agamemnon, soon to be butchered at his side by vengeful Clytemnestra. Yet somehow, despite these repellent extremes, we sympathize with Cassandra.

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The plight of Andromache, also depicted in Euripides’ Trojan Women, as well as in his Andromache, has an even deeper resonance in Greek literature because it starts with Homer’s Iliad. In book 6, Andromache poignantly (and futilely) pleads with Hector not to leave her widowed. Answering her plea, Hector reasserts his need to defend Troy: Even so, it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers in all their numbers, all their gallant courage, may tumble in the dust crushed by enemies— That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears, wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live, laboring at a loom, at another woman’s beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting it all the way— the rough yoke of necessity at your neck. (Il. 6.450–458, translated by Robert Fagles)

Greek dramatists, in their depictions of women, invented and sharpened the concept of personal freedom (as Antigone has shown): Patterson observes: “[W]omen stand powerfully, and exclusively, for personal independence, for the voice of the individual conscience against personal and political tyranny, for universal and natural, as distinct from man-­made, justice, and for the freedom to worship their gods and love whom they choose to love” (Patterson 1991, 109–110). Patterson then explores how the concept of personal freedom expands into the concept of political freedom. In short, the very concept of freedom is our single most conspicuous inheritance from ancient Greece. D. Compassion for Suffering By comparison with Christian compassion, we are told, Greek pity or compassion is but a minor cultural theme.16 Yet despite their polytheism, despite the lack of a merciful deity and his Son, a moral teacher who preaches love,

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Greek compassion has won the notice of quite a few scholars (Stanford 1983; Alford 1993; Konstan 2001, 2006; Martha Nussbaum 2001, 2008; Johnson and Clapp 2005; Sternberg 2005, 2006; Tzanetou 2005, 2012; Munteanu 2012; Visvardi 2015; Johnson 2016; Mirguet 2017). The deep rootedness of compassion in Greek culture is displayed in the meeting of Achilles and Priam at the end of the Iliad, where the fierce young warrior gives way to the elderly king, “filled with pity now for his gray head and gray beard” (Il. 24.516, translated by Robert Fagles), and surrenders Hector’s corpse.17 Deeper information on the nature of Greek pity or compassion is now needed. There were two words for compassion or pity, oiktos and eleos. They are close synonyms: typically, both denote the sorrow or distress that one person feels for another who is in pain or jeopardy. This distress, it was said, “enters into” (eiserkhetai) a person who sees someone suffering, hears a sad tale, or sees a suffering person shedding tears. When Greek writers describe pity as something that “enters into” the pitier,18 this notion follows the larger Greek tendency, starting with Homeric epic, to attribute strong feelings or powerful ideas to an external source. Herodotus says that pity entered into Cambyses (Hdt. 3.14.11), and Plato employs the same expression when he says that pity did not enter into Phaedo (Phd. 58e-­59a). Once it is within a person, pity can displace other emotions, as with Periander (Hdt. 3.52.3), who in pitying his son lets go of his anger. Compassion, however, was not to be trusted, because it could be easily manipulated and, unless brought into line with justice, might produce a harmful outcome. According to Herodotus, for example, compassion restrained ten men from murdering the infant Cypselus, with the result that he grew up into Corinth’s notoriously cruel tyrant. In the courtroom, the manipulation of emotion, including compassion, was termed a skill (tekhnē: Dem. 21.196, Aeschin. 2.156). Perhaps that explains why compassion never joined the traditional Greek virtues such as excellence (aretē), justness (dikaiosunē), and self-­control (sōphrosunē). At the same time, Athenians clearly prided themselves on their championship of the pitiable helpless and the wronged. Thus we discover a profound tension within Athenian culture, in that compassion was both rejected and embraced. The fragmentary evidence suggests change over time. Despite the pity that Achilles showed Priam in Iliad 24 (see p. 42), no overt praise of pity in either historiography or oratory can be dated before the very end of the fifth century. But the tragic poets, and those historians who were on the same page as the tragic poets, implicitly encouraged compassion. Thucydides, despite his modern reputation for ruthless Realpolitik, shared a vision

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of the world with the tragedians: the story arc of the heartbreaking Sicilian Expedition in particular is tragic, as noted by scholars ranging from F. M. Cornford in 1907 to V. D. Hanson in 2005. Tears of compassion are a topos, a literary motif, in Herodotus, who may have been friends with Sophocles, as Plutarch suggests. To offer a lengthy example, compassion is certainly implied in the miraculous birth story of Cyrus the Great as recounted in the History, with all its obvious resemblances to the birth story of Oedipus told in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Herodotus recounts that Astyages, king of the Medes, marries his daughter to a lowly Persian and then orders her newborn baby killed. A herdsman is commanded to expose the infant (i.e., set it outside to die), but his wife, who has coincidentally just given birth to a stillborn child, persuades him to switch the two so that Cyrus may live (Hdt. 1.112). It is an affecting scene: “At the same time he said these things, the herdsman uncovered [the infant Cyrus] and showed it to her. And when the wife saw the child so big and beautiful, she burst into tears, and taking her man by the knees she begged him by no means to expose it.” The woman suggests a plan that will allow their dead son to receive a princely burial and the other child to live. Herodotus focuses strongly on her desire to preserve the baby’s life. This scene also builds upon pathos established a bit earlier in the story. When the newborn Cyrus was first handed over, all decked out for death, to Harpagus, a kinsman of Astyages, Harpagus cried (Hdt. 1.109), and so did other members of his household. The richly dressed but seemingly doomed baby is a pitiful sight. Neither Harpagus nor the herdsman wants to kill him. Compassion for the child is implied at every turn. Returning to tragic drama: after the tragedians educated their public, moralizing rhetoric shifted toward a limited praise of compassion in the fourth century, as I discussed in chapter 4. Aristotle in the Poetics (1449b) famously names pity and fear as the two emotions elicited by tragic poetry, very much in keeping with Plato’s earlier objections (Resp. 606b), although Aristotle’s own view is more favorable than Plato’s. That compassion is very nearly a virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes has been noticed by Martha Nussbaum,19 and most readers observe that a concern for suffering permeates many Greek tragic plays, such as Euripides’ Trojan Women, discussed above. Greek writers are often riveted by irremediable loss, especially the plight of the person of high status and sumptuous wealth who loses it all at a single blow, like King Croesus of Lydia in book 1 of Herodotus. And thus, in both Euripidean plays about Hecuba, whose sons and husband are slain, we have the former queen of splendid Troy sunk to utter degradation, to the prospect of slavery in Greek lands, to total loss of

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personal freedom along with the “social death” described by Orlando Patterson (1982). During this ghastly transition, moreover, she is confronted with yet more loss: the murder of her young grandson Astyanax, whom the conquering Greeks fling from the smoldering ramparts; the treacherous murder of Polydorus, the son she had sent to “safety”; the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena over the grave mound of the slain Greek hero Achilles; and the madness of another daughter, the virgin priestess Cassandra, who will be the war prize and concubine of victorious Agamemnon. Conclusion In this chapter, I have elaborated on the presence in ancient Greek literary culture of four elements that, contributing to respect for persons, form the very roots of human rights: first, personhood and individuality; second, human dignity; third, freedom; and fourth, compassion for suffering. In the following chapter, I will gently explore what became of these foundational elements as time went on. My goal, in line with the reflections of Charles R. Beitz, is to approach an understanding of ill-­defined elements like dignity through the history of ideas rather than legal precedent. “The broader history of thought,” Beitz writes, “must have influenced the . . . beliefs [of the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights] and predisposed their aspirations for international human rights and their more detailed reasoning about the contents of human rights doctrine” (Beitz 2013, 269).

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CHAPTER 6

Paths through Time

Just as the Silk Road that connected ancient China with Central Asia and the Mediterranean for millennia was not a single well-­worn route or road but rather a network of many intertwining paths, so too the elements of respect and the humane impulses of Europe, of which human-­rights law may be considered the crowning achievement, did not traverse history over a single well-­worn route but rather traveled along many intertwining paths. In this chapter I point out some of these paths, without attempting a comprehensive map of them, a vast undertaking impossible here. Fundamentally, any discussion of the connections between Classical Athens and later Europe must depend upon an old, familiar story that amounts to the history of humanism, although I will add a few new twists that highlight the previously neglected golden thread of humanism that I call “humane discourse.” In the following paragraphs, I sketch that history in a nutshell. First, the Greeks made human beings the central focus of their visual arts, imaginative literature, and philosophy. They celebrated the beauty of human beings and the marvelous capacity of their intellects. (See Sophocles’ “Ode to Man,” excerpted on pp. 24–25.) Those ideas and values expanded geographically during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE) in the wake of Alexander the Great’s extensive conquests. Hellenistic visual arts and literature displayed a pervasive and deepening interest in the role of emotion in human life. Now there was a new verb for pity, splagkhnizomai, “I feel another person’s suffering in my guts,” based on the noun splagkhna (“innards”). Second, the bellicose Romans conquered the Greeks and were culturally taken captive by them (“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit 91

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agresti Latio,” Horace, Epist. 2.1.156–157). But the Romans, when not busy with military conquest, did cultivate humanism and make it grow. Greek literary culture became so fashionable that elite Romans had specialized slaves memorize Greek texts and use them to educate their masters’ sons. Christianity emerged from Judaism within a Greco-­Roman matrix that featured the scholarly work of Hellenized Jews (on which more below). The Roman empire became Christianized by the fourth century CE.1 Latin was the language of the Roman Catholic Church, so when the western half of the Roman empire disintegrated in the fifth century and “barbarians” overran Italy, the Latin language was perpetuated by the Church. (Traditional ecclesiastical vestments, incidentally, resemble the dignified robes of elite Romans.) Latin books got copied and recopied by Roman Catholic monks. Scholasticism, a medieval school of philosophy, thrived on Latin translations of Aristotle, whose idea of natural sociability, for example, inspired Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE). Scholastics made “their version of the natural law the basis for a universal moral and political code,” including a wide range of natural rights, “which are the direct antecedents of what later came to be described as ‘human rights’ ” (Pagden 2013, 65–66). Meanwhile, other Greek books got copied and recopied by Greek Orthodox monks in the eastern half (the Greek half ) of the Roman world, where the empire carried on for another thousand years in a line of shifting dynasties now known as the Byzantine empire, which fell in 1493 to the Ottoman Turks. As the end drew near, some Greek scholars fled westward to Italy and helped spark the Renaissance (see Herrin 2007, 332–333). Now the humanistic legacy of Greek and Roman culture got rediscovered, starting with the stellar Latinist and “father of humanism,” Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374 CE), and was “reborn” with the Renaissance. The Dutch Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) epitomized the spread of Renaissance activity into Northern Europe. Meanwhile, another connection with Greek learning occurred through the Europeans’ prolonged interaction with the Islamic world, whose scholars had long prized, preserved, and translated the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical texts that the Arabs encountered after gaining control of the Byzantine East around 635 CE (Gregory 2010, 180). It was Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198), a Spanish Arab, who popularized Aristotle. Upon that general historical landscape, in this chapter I will point out (A) specific paths from Athens to Rome via (A1) philosophy and rhetoric, (A2) comic drama, and (A3) the writings of Hellenized Jews. I will then point out (B) paths from Rome onward into Europe via (B1) Christianity, (B2) Roman law and jurisprudence, and (B3) opera. Last (C1 and C2), I

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will suggest that the classical education of eighteenth-­century intellectuals contained a wealth of cultural materials that surely nourished and potentially helped inspire the eighteenth-­century formulation of human-­rights concepts. A. From Athens to Rome 1. Philosophy and Rhetoric

The pursuits of philosophy (thinking) and rhetoric (speaking) were closely related in antiquity, as the rivalry between the philosopher Plato and the rhetorician Isocrates suggests. Long after the political power of Athens ended and much of its glory faded, the city remained an important locus of philosophical and rhetorical schools. Young men from elite Roman families aspired to finish their education in Athens, and in so doing they met with the humane discourse of Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Xenophon, by then several hundred years old. Although the humane discourse of Athens has often been overlooked and left out of the history of humanism, no less a personage than Cicero found it important at the very moment of its transmission from Greece to Rome. During the late Roman Republic, the erudite statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), in a letter to his brother, Quintus, then propraetor of Asia, a Greek-­speaking Roman province in Anatolia, wrote: Only a really great man, gentle by nature and cultivated by instruction and devotion to the highest pursuits, can so behave himself in a position of such power that those under his rule desire no other power than his. Such a one was Cyrus as described by Xenophon. . . . I conceive that those who rule over others are bound to take the happiness of their subjects as the universal standard. (Cicero, Q. fr. 1.1.22–23, emphasis added)

Cicero refers to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the fictionalized biography of Cyrus the Great that conveys Athenian humane discourse by highlighting the purported compassion and philanthrōpia of Cyrus. (See pp. 54 and 105 and Exploration B.) Cicero praises his brother for his entire conduct as governor (Q. fr. 1.1.25): Quintus, he says, is “free of all trace of harshness and cruelty, entirely pervaded by mercy, gentleness, and humanity [humanitas].” Here, the Latin word humanitas, aligned as it is with mercy and gentleness, in effect translates the Greek word philanthrōpia while denoting “humane or gentle conduct.”

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Cicero then underscores the irony of Romans governing a Greek province: But we are governing a civilized race, in fact the race from which civilization [humanitas] is believed to have passed to others, and assuredly we ought to give its benefits above all to those from whom we have received it. [28] . . . [E]verything I have attained I owe to those pursuits and disciplines which have been handed down to us in the literature and teachings of Greece. Therefore, we may well be thought to owe a special duty to these people, over and above our common obligation to mankind; schooled by their precepts, we must wish to exhibit what we have learned before the eyes of our instructors. (Cicero, Q. fr. 1.1.27–28)

In this passage, the word humanitas (pursuits and disciplines handed down in the literature and teachings of Greece) has the other definition found in Charlton Lewis and Charles Short’s Latin Dictionary: “Mental cultivation befitting a man, liberal education, good breeding.” So Cicero’s passage, with its double use of humanitas, praises the famous Greek paideia (education) while also offering philanthrōpia (love of humankind) as a principle of governance that can and should be exhibited. (This is not to say, by the way, that the Greeks lacked fierce battlefield prowess. To the contrary, Greek soldiers served as mercenaries throughout the region.) 2. Comic Drama

A second way the humane attitudes of Athens reached Rome was through the genre of dramatic poetry called New Comedy. In contradistinction to the vulgar, fantastical, and politically topical genre of Old Comedy represented by the plays of Aristophanes, fourth-­century BCE New Comedy typically offered domestic plots of family mishaps and misunderstandings overcome through new humane values: reconciliation and sometimes an understanding (suggnomē) that verges on forgiveness (Gutzwiller 2012), although David Konstan (2010) persuasively argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, featuring confession, sincere repentance, and a bilateral change of heart, is not found in Classical Antiquity. New Comedy also featured stock characters whose wit and humanity transcended class status or social rank. A favorite type was the “clever slave,” who was always ten steps ahead of his master and often successfully negotiated the problems he created for him and for himself. The Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence and others (now lost) directly imitated the Greek comic poets Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon.2

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Conflicts and misunderstandings arise among closely related people and, after near brushes with disaster, find resolution and a happy ending, exemplified by the most complete play of Menander, titled Dyskolos, “The Grouch.” First produced early in 316 BCE, it tells the story of a respectable young man’s love for a lower-­class girl with a misanthropic father, ending with a raucous double wedding that rises above class difference. Menander was celebrated for his philanthrōpia, epitomized by this famous fragment (707K.-­A.): “How humane is a human being when he acts humanely.” More concretely, how did the transmission of New Comedy from Greece to Rome take place? Greek cities had for many centuries dotted the coastlines of Sicily and southern Italy. These cities welcomed itinerant theatrical companies staging Greek plays. Menander was a great favorite, and New Comedy eventually Hellenized the theatrical traditions developing at Rome itself: Roman authors staged Latin translations or adaptations of Greek plays or else wrote plays of their own on the same pattern. In New Comedy, the humane theme of reconciliation is often embedded in the overarching humane theme of universal humanity, famously articulated in this line from Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-­Tormenter, adapted from Menander’s play with the same title), line 25: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” In English: “I am a human being, and I consider nothing human alien to me.” 3. Writings of Hellenized Jews

Third and last, the Hellenistic period also brought a Greek education, paideia, to members of the Jewish elite living in Alexandria, the leading city of Egypt, as well as other Hellenized cities around the Mediterranean, and in this way, the Hebrew tradition met and mingled with the humane discourse of Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Xenophon, along with other writers in the Greek canon. In this connection, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, also called Philo Judaeus, will be mentioned below, while the Romano-­Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus, like other Hellenistic historians, injects a lot of emotion into his narrative, especially oiktos and eleos: In his Antiquities 1–11, according to Françoise Mirguet, pity “becomes a hallmark of moral character and a defining component of an ideal Jewish identity” (Mirguet 2017, 45). At this time, the words for pity begin to take on the sense of “mercy” (Latin clementia is a favorite word with Julius Caesar) and a new vocabulary of compassion is created: Latin compassio appears for the first time in Tertullian (Konstan 2001, 58). Proposing that “the emotionalization of responses

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to others’ pain is, at its origins, a translational process” (Mirguet 2017, 79), Mirguet uncovers the hybridization of emotional language by demonstrating meticulously that translators working on the Greek scriptures borrowed from the Classical Greek conception of compassion to fill out Hebrew narratives of loss and shared sorrow (Mirguet 2017, chaps. 1–2, pp. 21–108). Comparing Hebrew texts with their translations into Greek, she shows how Hebrew texts that describe bodily responses were translated with a shift of emphasis, identifying the emotion that prompted the bodily responses. For example, the Hebrew original at Exodus 15:​14 means: The peoples heard, they trembled; Writhing seized the inhabitants of Philistia. (Mirguet 2017, 85)

Greek codices, however, interpret the writhing and trembling: they say either that the peoples “became enraged” (ōrgisthēsan) or that “they were terrified” (ephobēthēsan). The perspective has shifted: the Hebrew text focuses on external behavior as observed by onlookers, while the Greek version represents the internal experience of the sufferer. Similarly, at the end of Job’s pleading to his family and friends ( Job 19:​ 21), the Hebrew text has Job asking them to “favor” his cause, but the Greek has, “Pity me, pity me, O friends” (Mirguet 2017, 91). All this shows that (and how) Greek compassion entered the Judeo-­ Christian scriptural tradition during the translation of Hebrew scriptures into Greek as the Septuagint. According to Jan Joosten (see Mirguet 2017, 90; but cf. Joosten 2012, 98–99), the Greek term eleos has the same meaning in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as it does in Greek literature. Here, truly, Christianity looks very much like “Hellenized Judaism” (Pagden 2013, 29–30, 406). Moreover, Philo of Alexandria (born ca. 20 BCE), who synthesized Jewish religion with Greek philosophy, had a significant impact on early Christian thinkers. The great New Testament novelty, of course, lies in ascribing compassion to divinity, but the “Kyrie eleison” embedded in the Latin Mass is in fact Greek for “Lord, take pity.” B. From Rome to Europe Two important paths from Rome to Europe run alongside Christianity and Roman law. Actually, these paths are so broad as to resemble highways. I consider each briefly in turn.

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1. Christianity

Christianity in the Roman era drew not only from the Hebraic tradition but also from Greco-­Roman philosophy of both the “natural” (protoscientific) and ethical stripes. According to Anthony Pagden (2013, 30), theology began as an attempt to understand the nature of the Christian God through the scattered writings His followers had left behind. Since these writings offered little beyond basic moral rules, Christian theologians had to look elsewhere to answer their big questions about the nature of the universe. Inevitably, they turned to Greek sources, where they also found analytic discussions of personal virtue, as in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics. As a result, Christianity absorbed much of Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, and also Stoicism, which was both Greek and Roman. Tertullian, for example, was one of the Church Fathers influenced by Stoic thought. (See Pap 2014.) This means that as Christianity developed and spread, whether through military conquest or missionary activity, core aspects of Greco-­Roman philosophy got carried forward. And this dynamic process of absorption, reinterpretation, and dissemination would continue century after century. Saint Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, for example, brought in Plato; similarly, Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century brought in Aristotle. For the deep origins of human-­rights concepts, however, Stoic philosophy is especially important, owing to its theme of universal humanity and, arguably, its idea of natural rights.3 The former was an aspect of Stoicism from the start, beginning with the founder, Zeno of Citium (335–263 BCE), who taught at the Stoa Poikile in Athens. One of his earliest works, titled Politeia, expressed the belief (inherited from Cynic philosophy, which Zeno had studied) “that all human beings are equal, all brothers with souls made of the same fire that infuses the universe.” The unified cosmopolis of the Stoics was often restricted to sages, but it was nevertheless a seminal idea. For “pagans” in the early centuries of the Common Era, Stoicism was rather like a personal religion, embraced by many people, including Seneca the Younger, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the ex-­slave Epictetus. In the words of Peter Brown, Stoicism entailed “the examination of one’s motives, the need for consideration of one’s response to every situation, the perpetual awareness of the inner self laid out before the quiet eyes of God” (Brown 2013, 205). Divested of rank and social status, all people are the same, and Zeno argued that there should be “one world-­state for all humanity in which all people would be equal citizens” (Arieti 2005, 263; cf. Pagden 2013, 326).

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Dan Edelstein (2019, chap. 4) describes the receptions of Stoicism from the mid-­sixteenth century as “an intellectual ebb and flow” (Edelstein 2019, 107) that briefly settled down in the late seventeenth century “as a Christianized form of neo-­Stoicism took root. It was from this source that the philosophes drew many of their own notions about the natural and divine order of society” (ibid., 107–108). Writing of the eighteenth century, Pagden finds that Montesquieu, Diderot, David Hume, and Adam Smith, cosmopolitans all (Pagden 2013, 322), were voicing “the Stoic sense of what the Greeks had called oikeiosis, or the natural attachment to what is . . . akin to oneself. . . . Each, too, recognized that these ‘benevolent sentiments,’ as Hume calls them, depended upon communication, and each knew that communication, like charity, begins at home” (Pagden 2013, 294–295). 2. Roman Law and Jurisprudence

Meanwhile, Stoic philosophy also seeped into the law and jurisprudence of Rome, another major inheritance for Western Europe (see Edelstein 2019, chap. 5). The work of Roman jurists was comprehensively codified at the behest of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE, and the resulting Digest of Justinian got dispersed through many lands, surviving in France, for example, clear up to 1804, when the Napoleonic Code finally supplanted it. (In Holland, it survived even longer.) Justinian’s Digest exerted enormous influence on the Continental legal tradition. The most relevant aspect of this inheritance is the Roman precept of universal benevolence developed by Ulpian, whom Tony Honoré dubs a “human rights pioneer” (Honoré 2002, title and passim). Ulpian was an unusual and (one may say) enlightened third-­century lawyer in Roman Syria whose writings eventually made up some two-­fifths of Justinian’s Digest. Honoré writes: “[Ulpian] expounds Roman law as a law based on the view that all people are born free and equal and that all possess dignity. These three values, freedom, equality, and dignity, are the essential elements of what we now term human rights” (Honoré 2002, 76; emphasis added). 3. Opera

The humanistic legacy of the Greco-­Roman world in architecture and the visual arts is far too vast to survey here, but in finishing this section, I would like to draw attention to the musical art that is opera, because for me the

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expressive emotional power of an accomplished operatic singer reflects the very essence of individual dignity and human value. This art form has indeed at times been put to work critiquing political oppression. Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio (first version in 1805, last version in 1814), concerns the rescue of Florestan, a political prisoner, by his wife, Leonore, disguised as a prison guard named Fidelio.4 The solemn “Prisoners’ Chorus” is unmistakable: “Oh what joy, in the open air / Freely to breathe again! / Up here alone is life! / The dungeon is a grave.” Two other examples from opera: In 1900, Puccini’s Tosca, set in troubled 1800 Rome, depicts the title-­role heroine and Mario, her republican lover, resisting threats and torture at the hands of Scarpia, the wicked chief of police. Menotti’s 1950 Cold War opera The Consul depicts a rights-­deprived family trapped and crushed behind the Iron Curtain. What has opera to do with ancient Greece? A great deal, in fact. Musicians and connoisseurs known as the Camerata, meeting around 1600 CE in Florence, Italy, invented opera in a conscious attempt to reconstitute Greek tragedy in its combination of drama and music.5 It is thus no coincidence that the first operas had plots drawn from Greek myth, such as Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1597 and Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607. The flavor of this moment of invention is captured in the preface of Peri’s Euridice in 1600, addressed to Maria de’ Medici, queen of France and Navarre: It has been the opinion of many, most Christian Queen, that the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their entire tragedies on the stage. But until now this noble art of recitation has neither been revived nor, as far as I know, attempted by anyone; and it seemed to me that this was due to the defect of the modern music, which is far inferior to the ancient. (Peri, Euridice, preface, as translated in Weisstein 1964, 18)

A wistful, worshipful reference to the ancients is typical. The Greco-­ Roman literary legacy was so honored in Europe that the late seventeenth century, amid the demanding whirl of early modernity, witnessed a spirited debate on the value of ancient literature versus contemporary learning. This was the so-­called Battle of the Books, or in France, the “Querelle des anciens et des modernes,” which began within the Académie Française. (See Patey 1993.) And although the moderns eventually won the quarrel, a classical education long remained virtually the only kind of academic education considered respectable, along with biblical studies. I turn next to the nature, extent, and content of this classical education.

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C. Eighteenth-­Century Classical Education 1. Language and Literature

It’s worth explaining how the study of ancient languages differs from the study of modern languages. For modern languages, the goal is often proficiency in speaking. For Latin, this is rarely the case; for Ancient Greek, virtually never. Study of both ancient languages starts with massive rote memorization of vocabulary and of charts summarizing the conjugation of verbs and the declension of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and so on. Greek and Latin are highly inflected languages, which means that almost every word has a particular ending tacked onto its stem, an ending that changes according to the word’s grammatical function in a given sentence. It’s a subtle and complex system. After the initial feat of memorization (which used to be helped along by beatings), each language is learned by reading ancient texts that are part of an established canon, a collection of writings long deemed superior. The work can be tediously slow because each author, whether of poetry or prose, differs from the rest in vocabulary and style. The student encounters first those authors who write most clearly and offer the most interest. Xenophon, as it happens, uses an accessible style and brings his topics vividly to life; many students of Greek therefore cut their teeth on his writings, whether the Anabasis, the Hellenica, or the Cyropaedia (on which more below; and see Exploration B). Of the many works of Plato, the Apology is so short, elegant, and poignant as to be offered early. It portrays the courage of Socrates, the irritating philosophical sage of Athens who was executed in 399 BCE. His most famous and deeply humanistic maxim, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” is found in the Apology (38a). A closer translation reveals the maxim’s universalizing aspect: “The unexamined life is not livable for a human being [anthrōpos].” On the Latin side, Cicero is a standard author whose conception of dignity fed into the French Revolution (Rosen 2012, 40–41), and in this context I will quote Cicero’s long-­winded statement on universalism from a widely known treatise: [50] But it seems we must trace back to their ultimate sources the principles of fellowship and society that Nature has established among men. The first principle is that which is found in the connection subsisting between all the members of the human race; and that bond of connection is reason and speech, which by the processes of teaching and learning, of communicating, discussing, and reasoning associate men together and unite them in a sort of natural fraternity. . . . [51] This, then, is the most comprehensive bond that

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unites together men as men and all to all; and under it the common right to all things that Nature has produced for the common use of man is to be maintained, with the understanding that, while everything assigned as private property by the statutes and by civil law shall be so held as prescribed by those same laws, everything else shall be regarded in the light indicated by the Greek proverb: “Amongst friends all things in common.” (Cicero, De officiis 1.50–52, translated by Walter Miller)

The curriculum I’ve described above may sound stultifying, but it largely constituted the education of elites throughout Europe for more than fifteen hundred years, until the Industrial Revolution awoke the world to the possible advantages of a practical education in new subjects, such as contemporary engineering. Because a classical education was essentially the same from one nation to the next, educated people throughout Europe shared a familiarity with specific Greek and Latin texts and with the overall Greco-­ Roman heritage that facilitated intellectual communication across borders (since language barriers could be avoided by using Latin) and helped shape a common worldview. Thanks to the celebrated translations by the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), lots of English speakers knew Homer: the wrath of Achilles and the wily endurance of Odysseus polutropos, the man “of many turns.” For example, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), written for a general audience, includes quite a few classical references. From Tom Jones, then, I offer a passage that irreverently alludes to the lowest version of a classical education: As soon as dinner was ended, Jones informed the company of the merriment which had passed among the soldiers upon their march; “and yet,” says he, “notwithstanding all their vociferation, I dare swear they will behave more like Grecians than Trojans when they come to the enemy.”—“Grecians and Trojans!” says one of the ensigns, “who the devil are they? I have heard of all the troops in Europe, but never of any such as these.” “Don’t pretend to more ignorance than you have, Mr. Northerton,” said the worthy lieutenant. “I suppose you have heard of the Greeks and Trojans, though perhaps you never read Pope’s Homer; who, I remember, now the gentleman mentions it, compares the march of the Trojans to the cackling of geese, and greatly commends the silence of the Grecians [at Iliad 3.1–9]. And upon my honour, there is great justice in the cadet’s observation.” . . . “D—n Homo with all my heart,” says Northerton; “I have the marks of him on my a— yet. There’s Thomas of our regiment, always carries a Homo in his pocket; d—n me, if ever I come at it, if I don’t burn it. . . .”

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“Then you have been at school, Mr. Northerton?” said the lieutenant. “Ay, d—n me, have I,” answered he; “the devil take my father for sending me thither!” (Fielding 1992 [1749], 281)

Earlier, in Fielding’s chapter 3, Mrs. Western scolds her niece Sophia: “The ancient philosophers, such as Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, did not use to argue with their scholars [students]. You are to consider me, child, as Socrates, not asking your opinion, but only informing you of mine” (Fielding 1992 [1749], 246). Mrs. Western’s instruction, of course, could hardly be more muddled. Alcibiades was never a philosopher, while Socrates always solicited the views of his interlocutors, the exact opposite of Mrs. Western’s procedure. But author Fielding immediately remarks: “From which last words the reader may possibly imagine, that this lady had read no more of the philosophy of Socrates, than she had of Alcibiades” (ibid., 247). The amusement afforded by this passage turns upon the inside joke of Mrs. Western’s pompous ignorance, at which Fielding sniggers alongside the educated reader. At the higher end of the educational spectrum lay Voltaire, champion in the dreadful Calas affair and foe of judicial torture. (See p. 17.) The first play by Voltaire was his Oedipe, in which he sought to rise above the plot flaws of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Voltaire, writing to the Reverend Father Porée in 1731, recalled that he was as immersed in Ancient Greek literature during the composition of Oedipe “as if [he were] at Athens” (quoted in Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet 1988, 373). Classical learning served to demarcate the privileged few, but it also trickled down to the many. At least one newspaper article in early America, for example, alluded to Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave concubine, as a “black Aspasia” in sly reference to a foreign courtesan who won fame as the mistress of Pericles after the death of his wife. (Pericles was the fifth-­century BCE statesman who led Athens at the height of its power.) Very little is known about Aspasia: the best source is the Life of Pericles by Plutarch (ca. 50–­ca. 120 CE), one of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which were widely read and admired across the centuries. Aspasia, born in the Greek city Miletus, was a highly educated woman who interacted with the finest philosophers, including Anaxagoras and even Socrates himself.6 The comparison of Sally Hemings to Aspasia is titillating but wrong: the latter was a courtesan, not a slave. Regardless, the author of this article evidently expected his readers to have heard of Aspasia.

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2. Exploring Italy and Greece

Educated people in the eighteenth century understood the classical heritage as twofold, both Roman and Greek, but they saw most things Greek through a Roman veil.7 The haunting Roman ruins of Italy and southern France provoked curiosity about the past, and gradually the new discipline of archaeology was developed to uncover it. Italy was a major destination in the eighteenth century for young Northern Europeans and Americans who could afford to finish their education with the Grand Tour. In southern Italy, the Bay of Naples sported the lovely site of Paestum, where several Greek-­ built temples dominate the skyline: with those on their itinerary, the young milords on the Grand Tour could encounter Greek architecture directly. Greece itself, on the other hand, was nearly inaccessible at that time, partly because it lay under the control of the Ottoman empire and partly because travelers were at risk from picturesque but potentially murderous brigands. A passion for Greco-­Roman art was awakened with the discovery of ancient art treasures at the nearby sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where thriving cities and outlying rich villas had been buried in 79 CE with the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The first treasures unearthed were whisked into the private collections of local princes, but within several decades the new methods or protomethods of archaeology, an emerging discipline, were brought to bear. Meanwhile, Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Germany was creating his history of Greek art, which regarded the Classical age as one of perfection: on a spiritual level, as it were, as well as an artistic and technical one. “[Winckelmann] made of Greece a coherent, steady and luminous image,” writes David Constantine (2011, 104). Rosen (2012, 31–32) emphasizes that the conception of human dignity in Schiller’s On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmut und Wurde, 1793) was derived from Winckelmann. During the years 1748–1751, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett were traveling to Athens to re­cord in measured detail the monuments standing either in isolated neglect or else amid medieval clutter that nonchalantly incorporated ancient walls into the fabric of later buildings. Their book, Antiquities of Athens, was published in 1762. A Frenchman, Julien-­David Le Roy, completed a similar project, sans measurements; his was titled Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece. These were decades in which the erudite Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy was toiling over his eight-­volume Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, during the Middle of the Fourth Century before the Christian Era, which purports to be a first-­person travelogue kept by an imaginary Scythian traveling through Greece. (See Exploration A.)

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Amid this craze, the theme of Greek freedom was brought to public attention when the Greek resistance against Ottoman control began to coalesce. In 1770 came a Russian-­instigated insurrection that won the sympathy of Europeans and inspired a growing movement of Philhellenes (“fans of Greeks”), although there was a certain disdain for contemporary Greeks, who were considered to have declined from the nobility of their ancient ancestors. Philhellenes furnished money and sometimes also manpower to support the cause of Greek liberation, which in the 1820s would evolve into a full-­fledged (and successful) war of independence. The most famous of the eighteenth-­century Philhellenes was the Romantic poet Lord Byron, who wrote verses popularizing the cause of Greek freedom; he later, even more romantically, perished in Greece. The Europeans, long since sensitized by their dealings with the Ottoman Turks (the “Infidel”) and also with Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, were prone to sympathize with the Greeks, the more so in light of their ancient contribution to the historic cause of Freedom writ large, which rang loud and clear through the pages of Herodotus, whose History many educated people had read. 3. The Golden Thread of Greek Humane Discourse

Thanks to classical education, respect for the classical tradition ensured the survival and transmission of crucial Greek texts, including Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, both of them directly relevant to my examination of humane values. Eighteenth-­century intellectuals were exposed to the Philoctetes, the very tragedy that elevated compassion to the status of a virtue. Adam Smith read and commented on it. Moreover, there were at least two fresh adaptations of the play, one by Jean-­Baptiste Vivien de Chateaubrun in 1755 (commented on by Lessing and noticed by Goethe also), and the other by Jean-­François de la Harpe in 1783. Xenophon’s entertaining and edifying Cyropaedia, a key source for humane discourse, was surprisingly popular, as the reception of its subnarrative about Panthea reveals. (See p. 46 and Exploration B.) After centuries of neglect during the Middle Ages, the Cyropaedia resurfaced in the Renaissance and quickly gained the attention of tutors in charge of educating young princes. After peaking in the seventeenth century, the Cyropaedia’s popularity started gradually to decline. James Tatum says that by the second half of the eighteenth century, “the Cyropaedia ceased to be regarded as literature of any consequence” (Tatum 1989, 4). But its story about “the most beautiful woman in all of Asia” (Tatum 1989, 178), the war captive

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Panthea, stayed very much alive. This lovely young woman, singled out as a prize for Cyrus, does not want to become his concubine: she must remain true to her husband. Cyrus is so kind to Panthea, protecting her and never claiming her for his bed, that she praises his compassion (Cyr. 6.1.47). Xenophon tells the story in fits and starts: it is in effect a novella spread across three consecutive books in the Cyropaedia. The narrative is very disjointed; indeed, Panthea goes unnamed in the early episodes. Yet she achieved considerable repute in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: as mentioned in Exploration B, she was included in Madeleine de Scudéry’s book on famous women in 1655. She was also celebrated in poems, plays, and paintings, and eventually turned up in anthologies and collections for the education of children. In the meantime, some people wrote plays about Cyrus the Great that focused on the Panthea segment. (See Exploration B.) John Banks (d. 1706) wrote a play about Cyrus that was posthumously performed at court; in it Panthea profusely admires Cyrus the Great: Oh! I have much to tell thee; much to praise In Cyrus, valiant, bountiful, and wise: To paint the virtues of that best of kings, Each gen’rous action, and each godlike thought, Eternity would fail! (Banks 1735, 60)

An English writer named Thomas Maurice wrote a blank-­verse tragedy in five acts about Panthea that was never publicly performed. And what kind of man is Cyrus in this play? In the words of one character, an Assyrian nobleman named Gadates: Much, much have I heard extoll’d his generous kindness, His boundless clemency and mercy, shewn Tow’rds hapless wretches whom the chance of war Had thrown unto his hands. (Maurice 1789, 4)

In conclusion, key Greek texts formulating the values of human dignity and compassion somehow survived the passage of time, were noticed in eighteenth-­century Europe, and could have contributed to the development of humane discourse among Enlightenment thinkers. This book’s conclusions are right around the corner, but before we go there, I invite the reader to take one last detour, Exploration C, where I explore a feature that ancient Athens and the eighteenth-­century Enlighten-

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ment share: a striking tension between emerging humane ideals and actual social practice, a problem that has commanded my attention from the very beginning, when I published Pity and Power in Ancient Athens (2005), whose express aim was “to explore the moral discomfort of Athenians” (p. 1). This detour is optional, of course, but I invite you to come along.

Exploration C: Tensions

A. Genteel Pleasures Virtually all educated Westerners are familiar with the manifold ways in which classically educated intellectuals in eighteenth-­century Europe and America looked back to Greece and Rome not only for political ideas but also for architectural models and standards of civilized behavior and taste. Gentlemen of the Enlightenment consciously consulted ancient history on the grounds that the glorious cause of liberty, the timeless struggle against tyranny and oppression, remained substantially the same. Meanwhile on an unconscious level the aristocrats of both eras, whether republicans or kings, dealt with similar problems, one of which was how to enjoy their pleasures and privileges to the utmost. The epicurean Thomas Jefferson, in planning Monticello, hit upon a solution resembling that devised for Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, about twenty miles east of Rome. The architects of both estates sought to enhance their slave-­supported luxuries by minimizing the personal presence of slaves. Lovely little Monticello, Palladian in style and situated upon a summit,1 was laid out with symmetrical L-­shaped terraces attached to the main house, from which one could gaze out upon the verdant landscape of the Virginia Piedmont. Hadrian’s Villa was not set on a summit, true, but it stood high enough to command a view, and it boasted a broad east-­west terrace traditionally named the Poikilē. Now it is a curious coincidence, perhaps, that beneath the terraces at both Monticello and Hadrian’s Villa lay concealed dependencies. Those at Monticello accommodated living and working spaces for slaves, including a kitchen as well as carriage bays, while those at Hadrian’s Villa held cramped quarters for up to seven hundred slaves. At either estate, the lord and master, while enjoying his view, would literally 107

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be walking on top of his slaves. And then, for the sake of convenience and discretion, slaves carrying on their daily tasks at either estate would go back and forth through all-­weather passageways, or cryptoportici (Ricotti 1973), resembling those that Pliny the Younger describes2 and about which Jefferson could have read in his copy of Castell’s 1728 Villas of the Ancients (Beiswanger 1998, 74). The network of cryptoportici at Hadrian’s Villa was quite extensive, while Jefferson further reduced the presence of slaves at Monticello by having his wine brought up from wine cellar to dining room via a dumbwaiter tucked beside the fireplace: dishes of food would swing in silently on the shelves of a swiveling door. We can only imagine the net effect of such arrangements at Hadrian’s Villa, but for Monticello, a watercolor painting from 1825 depicts young ladies in white dresses enjoying the lawn.3 Looking at them and imagining their vantage point, it is easy to forget that just out of sight, in the concealed dependencies and cryptoportici, as well as on Mulberry Row below and in the vegetable gardens and the fields beyond, the work of the plantation was being carried on by slaves. In sum, then, both builders, the Roman and the American, found an architectural solution to a problem that, for Jefferson at least, was a moral problem: the problem of slavery. B. Slavery in Classical Athens It is usual to compare American slavery with Roman slavery because of the direct historical and legal links between the two: the Justinian Code purveyed slave laws from late antiquity into the Middle Ages and straight through to Spanish and Portuguese sugar plantations worked by African slaves in the New World (Phillips 1985). And it is Roman slaves rather than Greek slaves of whom Jefferson speaks in his Notes on the State of Virginia (Waldstreicher 2002, 178–179). Hadrian’s Villa captures an essential aspect of the moral problem that interests me, but in the rest of this exploration, I will deal with Athens rather than Rome. I believe that it is worth comparing Athenian attitudes toward slavery with those of Jefferson for several reasons. First, the intellectual ferment of Classical Athens may be compared to, and contrasted with, the intellectual ferment of the American Enlightenment. Second, in both cases the politically important concept of freedom rested upon the practice of chattel slavery, as Moses Finley (1960) and Edmund Morgan (1975) long since observed. Third and most important, the Athenians boasted of humane ideals, and Jefferson must have been aware of this.

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After all, he owned, read, and recommended Oliver Goldsmith’s The Grecian History, an eighteenth-­century work in which the Athenians are praised as “the instructors of all mankind” (Goldsmith 1774, 3) and are furthermore credited with being kind to their slaves (ibid., 54). So my goal here is to compare and contrast the discourse in these two periods and places, Classical Greece and early America (of which Jefferson is emblematic), times when burgeoning humane ideals coexisted with the practice of slavery. The first half of what follows will be devoted exclusively to the Athenian material. Then, since the Jeffersonian material is vast and my space here short, I will set forth just a few texts for comparison. With Athens, as I previously explained, we face a glaring contradiction. Athenians in the Classical period thought of themselves as humane and civilized. They prided themselves on their capacity for compassion; they cared deeply about justice. Yet slavery was an indispensable feature of Athenian society, and worse still, slave torture was intrinsic to the Athenian legal system. The practice of slave torture furnishes an effective way to test the vaunted humanity, or philanthrōpia, of the Athenians and to explore how slaveowners within the system may have thought about physical cruelty toward slaves. Interrogation under torture was supposed to reveal the truth, just as a touchstone revealed the purity of gold. In fact, the Greek word for torture— basanos—meant “touchstone.” Slaves could be tortured in all kinds of private disputes, such as inheritance cases, not for any suspected wrongdoing on their part but simply to generate courtroom evidence. Household slaves were intimately acquainted with the doings of their masters, so a typical question might be: Was so-­and-­so living in the house at that time? And the slave’s answer, or testimony, was valid only if it had been obtained under torture. In theory, it seems, free men had honor and could be counted upon to tell the truth; slaves had to be tortured in order to be believed. So how did slave torture fit into the moral universe of the Athenians? Were Athenian citizens ever troubled by it? How did they reconcile the cruelty and injustice of this practice with their civic ideology of kindness and fairness? I will try to answer these questions in two steps: first, by examining the rhetoric that surrounded judicial slave torture, and second, by analyzing a remarkable story from a courtroom speech dating to the fourth century BCE in which the banker Pasion offers his slave for torture and then, at the last minute, changes his mind. Rhetoric surrounding basanos is found in many courtroom speeches by Demosthenes, Isocrates, and others in which litigants offer or demand that

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slaves be put to the torture. What do the speakers say about the practice? What attitudes do they express? On the one hand, we find, basanos was supposed to yield truth (Lys. 7.37; Dem. 47.35, 49.56, 59.120; Lyc. 1.29) and unmask the lies of others (Isaeus 8.11; Dem. 52.22, 59.125). It offered accuracy (Isaeus 10.11; Dem. 29.5, 30.37, 59.122; Lyc. 1.34), clarity (Dem. 29.14, 30.36), and the beauty of simplicity and truth (Dem. 29.11–12). If you trusted yourself, you would agree to let your slave be tortured (Dem. 45.62). Basanos was a way to confirm belief or inspire trust (Isaeus 8.10, 28, 29). Indeed, it was the strongest kind of evidence—impartial, and even democratic (Lyc. 1.29). Slaves, it was said, tell the truth when tortured (Lyc. 1.32), in contrast to free men, who do so in accordance with their oaths and pledges (Ant. 6.25) and out of their respect for justice, to dikaion (Ant. 6.23). On the other hand, some litigants clearly worried about what their slaves would say: the damning truth (Dem. 47.10, 17) or an equally damning untruth, for basanos was a double-­edged weapon. True testimony could be incomplete or irrelevant (Dem. 29.40). The speaker in Antiphon 5, from a case in which two individuals actually were tortured, one fatally, complains that a witness under torture will say whatever is likely to please his torturers and induce them to stop hurting him (Ant. 5.31–32). Slaves had another incentive to lie, because the city-­state would set them free if they gave evidence against their masters that led to a conviction. In other words, basanos was an unreliable procedure, and it turns out that some Athenians did question the rationale for it (Ant. 5.31); some did perceive that torture did not necessarily lead to the truth, as the law supposed. Yet all the language referring to basanos is consistently cold and detached. Aeschines says, for example, “I will even halt my speech . . . for the public torturer is present and will conduct the interrogation in front of you, if you so command” (Aeschin. 2.126). Since basanos required the consent of both legal parties, there was a preliminary procedure, the proklēsis eis basanon, or “challenge to torture,” which generally worked as follows: One party to the lawsuit would challenge his opponent to hand over a slave for torture. Whoever refused such a challenge would appear to be covering up facts deleterious to himself. Whoever accepted a challenge or voluntarily offered a slave would appear confident in the strength of his own case. So how seriously should we take all this talk about torture? When it comes to challenges and counterchallenges, of which we have forty-­two examples, there was a lot of posturing and grandstanding, and the extant speeches contain no slave testimony obtained through a challenge. Why not? Some scholars have argued that the practice was virtu-

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ally obsolete, and all the talk was just that: talk. The Athenians, they urge, were too civilized for basanos. Other and more cynical scholars have argued that a challenge, if accepted, would settle the case out of court and so the testimony resulting from basanos would not appear in any courtroom speech. The intricate procedural questions surrounding the challenge to torture are not easily resolved, but I am convinced that basanos was not a legal fiction. The rhetorical ploys involving basanos would have been pointless unless actual torture sometimes occurred. And it is important to keep in mind that torture was part of the culture: it was a familiar practice for which Athenians were emotionally prepared, and we have plenty of evidence that slave testimony was certainly used in Athenian courts for a broad range of cases. Meanwhile, the infrastructure for judicial torture was securely in place. Basanos could be conducted in private, or one could use a public venue, including the Temple of Hephaestus, the Council Chamber, and the courtroom, wherever that happened to be. Standard methods of torture entailed binding the victim to a ladder, wheel, or rack, where he or she could then be stretched, twisted, whipped, or burned. There were public torturers, though sometimes the litigants themselves undertook the task. This last fact is highly significant: it suggests a certain comfort level with the infliction of pain. The statesman and orator Demosthenes could be accused (plausibly, it would seem) of twice racking a certain Anaxinus of Oreus with his own hand (Aeschin. 3.224–225). Basanos, then, was double edged but not morally offensive. The courtroom rhetoric suggests that most Athenians were not overly worried about the cruelty or injustice of the practice. When the speaker of Antiphon 5 objects that his opponents tortured a slave witness and then illegally put him to death, his point is not that this treatment was cruel but that he, the defendant, has been wrongly deprived of the opportunity to interrogate the slave in the same manner himself. Demosthenes, eager to keep a certain Milyas from being tortured, insists that the man is free but blithely offers for basanos another servant who was indisputably a slave. Whenever a speaker alludes to justice, his concern is always justice for himself as he sees it: in other words, a favorable outcome to the lawsuit. Basanos either is the most just way to resolve disputes, as Lycurgus says (diakiotaton, Lyc. 1.29; cf. Ant. 6.24), or should not be used to condemn a man, as Antiphon asserts ( pōs dikaion? Ant. 2.2.7). For the slaves subjected to torture, there is no such thing as justice or injustice. Slaveowners should simply use their property to greatest advantage: so that the speaker in On a Wound by Premeditation finds it more just (dikaioteron) to have a slave woman tortured than to sell her to raise money

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(Lysias 4.13). Physical cruelty passed without comment. And the language of compassion, highly visible elsewhere in oratory, is altogether absent from passages dealing with basanos. So far, I have argued that despite rhetorical grandstanding, the threat of torture was palpable and real, and the discourse surrounding basanos must be taken seriously. This discourse assumed a sharp line between free men and slaves, as suggested at Demosthenes 22: “In [the laws] is pity, pardon, everything appropriate for free men.” As many scholars have noted, the bodies of slaves in ancient Athens were subject to forms of violence from which the bodies of citizens were exempt. Violence toward them was commonplace. The existence of slave refuges suggests that the general condition of enslavement was regarded as pitiable, but there was no guarantee of compassion for specific human beings who were already marked off, sometimes literally (by branding), as slaves. And it appears that any expression of compassion for slaves subjected to judicial torture would have been inappropriate. Still, this answer is too simple, given that the sharp ideological line between free men and slaves was in reality often blurred: through manumission, for example, or the khoris oikountes, slaves who lived and worked quite independently. What did people on or near that blurred line think about slave torture? Could they regard it with detachment? C. Up Close and Personal I will now move closer to an actual scene of torture (so far as we can trust our sources) involving a freedman who owned a slave. Among the forty-­ two challenges to torture, only two were accepted. In both those cases, the opposing litigants met at the place where the interrogation was supposed to occur, but the procedure broke down. One of those cases involved the banker Pasion, and Pasion is a fascinating figure because, starting from the position of slavery, he gained his freedom, earned the trust of the bankers for whom he worked, eventually took over their bank, and became very rich.4 Subsequently the Athenians voted him the rights of citizenship. He represents the single most celebrated example of upward mobility in ancient Athens. Isocrates 17, a speech called the Trapezeticus, was written around 393 BCE for a wealthy foreigner who brought suit against Pasion over a missing deposit and demanded for basanos one of Pasion’s slaves, a man named Cittus who knew about the transaction. Pasion allegedly hid Cittus; and when Cittus was found, Pasion said he was a freedman, not a slave, and therefore

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could not be subjected to basanos. Eventually, however, he admitted that Cittus was a slave, accepted the challenge, and arranged for the interrogation. The litigants met in the Temple of Hephaestus (most unfortunately, given that the temple also served sometimes as a slave refuge: Christensen 1984). The public torturers were there, and so was Cittus. But soon the procedure reached a curious impasse: Pasion abruptly withdrew permission to torture Cittus (Isoc. 17.15): “But this fellow Pasion claimed that they had not been chosen as torturers, but he told them to question the boy orally if there were something they wanted.” What is going on here? Pasion has suddenly changed his mind. Why? The standard interpretation is the one promoted by the speaker: Pasion vehemently wishes to escape the basanos procedure because he has something to hide. His sudden refusal, we are assured, reflects his guilt. Note that the motive of guilty concealment can certainly explain why Pasion, in a typical ploy, earlier denied that Cittus was a slave. But the same motive cannot adequately account for the remarkable scene at the temple. Let us suppose that Pasion is innocent. In that case, he should be willing to put Cittus to the test. Why back out now? Or . . . let us suppose that Pasion is guilty. If Cittus, under torture, reveals the whole truth as the speaker hopes, Pasion will be incriminated. But Pasion’s repeated refusal of basanos also incriminates him, as he obviously realizes. Pasion is in a muddle and at this point has nothing to gain by ducking basanos a third time. Indeed, his sudden and very public refusal (there are witnesses) becomes the single most crucial piece of evidence in the case against him: it is the “greatest proof ” against him (Isoc. 17.53). It proves that he is lying about the deposit. It makes him look desperate. Pasion loses face completely, and his legal opponent will exploit this episode as often as he can. So either way, whether he is innocent or guilty, it would behoove Pasion to let the basanos take place. A sudden change of heart is not in his own best interests. An alternative interpretation would attribute to Pasion a protective motive. Michael Gagarin (1996, 15) has suggested that Pasion wished to shield Cittus, his valued property, from damage. This is possible, but there is no discussion of compensation, as there is in Demosthenes 37, the other scene where basanos very nearly occurs. Therefore we should consider another possibility: that Pasion wanted to protect Cittus from pain and suffering. It is important to consider how closely Pasion has worked with Cittus, and for how long: years, perhaps, since Cittus handles very important tasks. The designation “boy,” or pais, is misleading: male slaves, young or old, could be called “boy,” and Cittus was clearly a mature male, Greek-­speaking, and probably literate. He was deeply involved in the day-­to-­day workings of

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the bank. Whatever his dress and bearing may have been, he could pass for a free Greek. Indeed, Cittus and the speaker had shared an audience with Satyrus, the king of Pontus. So Pasion must regard him highly. Moreover, Pasion has much in common with Cittus, for he himself was once a slave, working for this very bank, having risen above the other slaves to perform skilled labor as chief cashier and manager. It would be astonishing if Pasion did not empathize with Cittus. They were probably friends. When trouble started, Pasion first hid him, then denied his servile status, but then gave in to the pressure for basanos. Perhaps, at the last moment, confronted with the torturers and their implements, Pasion simply could not stand to let Cittus suffer. A protective motive furnishes the most convincing explanation for his sudden change of mind. Let me now return to the contradiction with which I started. Athenians often thought of their city as kindly and humane. But such attitudes did not apply to slaves under torture. Citizens jealously defended the line between free men and slaves, often through violence. With the exception of Isocrates 17, references to basanos are all remorseless. Insofar as slave torture tests the humanity of Ancient Athenians, they fail that test. The contradiction that troubles us appears not to have troubled them. My best explanation for the cold tone of basanos passages is that many people felt no compassion for slaves subjected to torture, while those who did could not admit it. Is there any chance that some Athenians shrank from basanos because it was cruel and inhumane, or because it was unfair to the slave? Yes, for the line between slave and free, so sharp in Athenian ideology, was in reality blurred, and that fact probably created problems for some individuals. The tale of Cittus in Isocrates 17, where Pasion attempts to shield his slave, illustrates the problem. D. Jefferson’s Hypocrisy I now move forward in time to the late eighteenth century and the refined world of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, the home his slaves started building six years before he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are entitled to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” A good bit has been said, by Paul Finkelman (1993), John Chester Miller (1991), and scores of others, about Jefferson’s hypocrisy: his chronic failure to match deed with word. He and other Virginian leaders resembled Athenians in that they prided themselves on their capacity for humane feeling; they cared deeply about justice. But they, too, lived with

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the glaring contradiction between humane ideals and the practice of chattel slavery. Jefferson, more so than George Washington and Robert “Councillor” Carter, who eventually freed their slaves, always remained wedded to sectional interests; personally, he depended on slaves to work his ten thousand acres. He articulated high ideals as a young man, but “to judge from his lifelong behavior,” writes Finkelman, “his grand style was far more important than [their] natural rights” (Finkelman 1993, 183)5 Jefferson and some of the other American revolutionaries set great store by property rights, and slaves were property. In the Athenian material, I pointed to the restricted application of the word “justice.” In the American material, one finds a restricted application of the word “liberty,” as noted at the time by a Quaker from Philadelphia, one Anthony Benezet, who said, “When men talk of liberty, they mean their own liberty, and seldom suffer their thoughts on that part to stray to their neighbor” ( John Chester Miller 1991, 13–14). I used the physical cruelty of basanos as a test for Athens. There was no judicial torture in the British colonies, though Virginia law dealt harshly with slaves and free blacks. But what of physical cruelty at Monticello? In his private capacity as slavemaster, Jefferson was considered kind (Stanton 1993, 158–162). Discipline was left to his overseers, though one of them (Gabriel Lilly, overseer 1801–1805) was notoriously cruel.6 And Jefferson was certainly paternalistic: he claimed an obligation to care for his slaves as if they were children. Like other Virginians, he shunned the word “slave” (McLaughlin 1990, 98); and he used the word “family” in the fashion of the Greek word oikos (household): in 1801 he had dozens of “my own family,” as he said, inoculated against smallpox (Stanton 1993, 148). The prevailing mood of the age made it acceptable to express pity and sympathy for slaves, and Jefferson sometimes does this, as when he speaks of their “numberless afflictions” ( Jefferson 1787, 231).7 But it seems to me that Jefferson reserves the greatest empathy for those caught in the process of enslavement—and this, I think, is strikingly consistent with the Greek material. The theme of the fall from fortune in Greek literature received sustained expression in Euripides’ Trojan Women. A historical example of briefer compass occurs in Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy, where the orator assumes that most of his audience pitied the Olynthian war captives who were brought to Athens for prostitution: “When I mention that Philokrates brought the women, all of you, even the bystanders, know what happened next, and I know well that you pity these unlucky and miserable beings” (Dem. 19.309). Jefferson nowhere evinces more antislavery vehemence than when he rails against the transatlantic trade. Among the 27 crimes and misdemeanors of King George listed in the Declaration of Inde-

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pendence, though this item was subsequently cut, Jefferson wrote: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” Compassion was less likely once enslavement was an accomplished fact. Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia, acknowledges “the injuries they have sustained” and that “among the blacks is misery enough” (Waldstreicher 2002, 178), but at Monticello he brought back runaways, ordered floggings, and sold unruly slaves to make examples of them. The race angle, of course, sets the American material apart from the Athenian material. Jefferson’s low opinion of black Africans, together with the fact that as a white aristocrat his own status was secure, kept him from identifying with his slaves. Although he feared the vengeful anger of a rebellious black mob (in his view, emancipated blacks should be sent far away), there was no chance that he himself would ever be enslaved. It is striking that one so-­called antislavery case that Jefferson took on as a young attorney in 1770 mostly likely involved a very light-­skinned man of mixed race, one Samuel Howell (“a mulatto of the third generation,” as Jefferson wrote in Howell v. Netherland ), who could perhaps be construed as one of “us” rather than one of “them.”8 The very first racist criticism in Notes on the State of Virginia concerns what Jefferson supposed to be the lesser beauty and expressiveness of a dark complexion: “Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” (Waldstreicher 2002, 176). This passage suggests the limits of his empathy. The most notorious way in which Jefferson confronted and exploited the difference between black and white, between slavery and freedom, was through his dealings with the one-­quarter-­black slave Sally Hemings, dubbed his dark “Aspasia” in the sensationalistic press of the day. The entire Hemings family was related by blood to Jefferson’s late wife Martha Wayles Skelton, and they largely constituted the domestic staff at Monticello. Jefferson opposed miscegenation. His hypocrisy, however, is no less glaring than his probable confusion. Sally was light-­skinned enough to be listed as white in the census of 1830. Since she was Martha’s half-­sister, she may have physically resembled her ( John Chester Miller 1991, 49, 191). Jefferson never admitted to the liaison, although historical evidence and DNA test results alike convict him;9 but he quietly let Sally’s one-­eighth-­black

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children, who appear to have been his, go free after they turned twenty-­one (Stanton 1993, 152–153). Three of those children eventually married whites and “passed” into the white world. At first glance, Jefferson the aristocratic planter may seem quite unlike Pasion the wealthy freedman and parvenu. Yet just as Pasion seems to have empathized with and protected his slave Cittus, so did Jefferson develop affective ties to a slave, ties that jeopardized his career and undermined his own class interests. It is worth remembering that all over the South, slaveowners were exploiting female slaves and, over time, blurring the line between black and white: hence the need for a theory of racial contamination that made “one drop” of black blood a barrier to whiteness and its attendant privileges. At the same time, few slaveowners were as highly educated as Thomas Jefferson, so his intellectual conflicts and tensions are especially striking. E. Aristotle In the fourth century, Aristotle, who produced our sole surviving formal analysis of slavery from Classical Greece, found the institution “good and just” (Pol. 1254a18). He posited a theory of natural slavery that presupposed the slave’s inherent inferiority and explicitly denied that natural slaves possessed logos or reason (Pol. 1254b). Yet this was, as Finley observed, an “extreme position” (1973, 81–82), framed in response to critics who had asserted that slavery was grounded in convention and force rather than nature. Garnsey calls Aristotle’s “natural slavery” a “battered shipwreck of a theory” (1996, 107). And even Aristotle had to acknowledge that certain individuals (and here he may have been thinking of fellow Greeks enslaved in his own day) did not fit the negative caricature. The masses of peasants from Egypt or the Near East, brought under the yoke in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, were easily denigrated (Vidal-­Naquet 1986, 166), but onlookers found it obvious that some people were not born to be slaves. They were simply unlucky. Jefferson resembles Pasion in some ways, but he has much more in common with Aristotle. Both were aristocrats and leading intellectuals, and both depended upon slave labor for their lifestyle and their leisure. Aristotle, it is true, openly defended the institution as just, while Jefferson openly attacked it as evil. But both posited a natural inferiority among the enslaved, whether barbarians or blacks.10 This conviction of inferiority, this prejudice, is surely based upon observation: many enslaved persons are demonstrably degraded by their enslavement. What happens when Aristotle and Jeffer-

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son are presented with exceptions to their theories of natural inferiority? Both attempt to explain them away. Jefferson in his private correspondence doubted the accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker, the free black mathematician author of an almanac, and dismissed those of Phyllis Wheatley, a black woman poet (William Cohen 1969, 513). Jefferson drew upon and contributed to the emerging concept of race, a sinister legacy of the Enlightenment. At the same time, however, he promoted the more positive Enlightenment concept of natural rights possessed by all human beings, a concept Aristotle did not have. This was a powerful idea that in the long run helped to bring about the abolition of slavery. Moreover, Jefferson believed in moral progress and felt that slavery would have to end; Aristotle would never have dreamed of such a thing. Where the two thinkers most conspicuously resemble each other is in their tortured argumentation. We may compare Aristotle’s uneasy arguments in the Politics with those of Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. Both suspect that something is wrong with their theories. Aristotle was not overly conflicted about slavery, and ultimately Jefferson couldn’t have been either; or else how do we explain the six hundred–­odd slaves he owned over the course of his lifetime? Yet complete complacency eludes them both. The sentimental language of the eighteenth century throws into sharp relief the coldness and detachment of Athenian discourse surrounding basanos. Oliver Goldsmith, when he called the Athenians “remarkable for their lenity” toward slaves (1774, 54), was imputing to them the humane aspirations of his own age, the Enlightenment. Yet those values, especially in America, were in constant tension with economic and political realities, and with the requirements of an aristocratic lifestyle: the elegance of Monticello that rivaled, in miniature, the elegance of Hadrian’s Villa. F. Overview To summarize: Our intellectual heritage links Monticello with Athens in concrete ways. The framers of the Constitution, most of them classically educated, put the Greeks on a pedestal. Jefferson and his peers emulated ancient democratic and republican traditions. They also read Aristotle, who promoted the theory of “natural slavery,” and some, like Charles Pinkney, excused slavery partly on the grounds that it had been a feature of ancient society. So while the founders inherited from Classical Antiquity certain concepts of freedom and humanity, they also inherited a conundrum. The emotional or moral tenor of the two eras turns out to be quite dif-

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ferent. Notwithstanding the nascent “scientific” theory of race, themes of kindness and humanity, the moral sentiments, are far more prominent in the discourse of eighteenth-­century America than they are in the discourse of Athens. Aristotle says not a single word about cruelty or the abuse of power. Nor does he express concern about the moral effects that slavery has upon masters, unlike Jefferson, who frets because slavery encourages in white owners the “most boisterous passions.”11 Aristotle seems mostly untroubled by slavery, virtually guilt-­free. The same cannot be said of Jefferson. I was looking, among other things, for psychological or intellectual conflict within individuals. One finds tantalizing hints of this in Pasion and Aristotle; our evidence is very thin. But in the case of Jefferson, the richly detailed historical record leaves no doubt that, as John Chester Miller puts it, the tension between the Virginian aristocrat and the man of the Enlightenment “created in [his] mind an ambiguity and a dissonance which he never succeeded in resolving to his own satisfaction” ( John Chester Miller 1991, 2). Jefferson is, in effect, an Aristotle with Angst.

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Conclusions

Athenians of the Classical period invented humane values even though they conspicuously failed to live up to them—much like Thomas Jefferson, who owned more than six hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime. Ancient Athens was never an ideal society, but it’s time for classicists to stop apologizing for exaggerated Romantic-­era claims of ancient perfection. Never in the history of the world has an ideal society existed. So if we are morally obliged to reject concepts and ideals arising from imperfect human societies, then we must reject all our concepts and ideals and become nihilists. Instead, I prefer to ask: How did these beautiful ideals emerge from so much imperfection? Can we trace the process? That is what I have tried to do, because ongoing critiques of ancient and Enlightenment structures of power cannot nullify the positive significance of humane values. Simon Hornblower, discussing Athenian myths of identity (2011, 132– 135), highlights Athens as a place of refuge for the oppressed, a theme explored by Angeliki Tzanetou in her City of Suppliants (2012). The poets of fifth-­century Athens raised questions about the use of force, and on the whole the answer was: “We are the city of Theseus, a kind and generous legendary king. This is our true identity: Athenians are compassionate.” In the first four chapters of this book, an extended comparison of Classical Athens and the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment, I have revealed similarities between them that place the present moment, the early twenty-­first century, in fresh perspective.1 Kiyoteru Tsutsui, speaking at a 2012 human-­rights conference at the University of Michigan, sought a sociological explanation for the recent rapid rise in the number of human-­rights legal instruments worldwide. I suggest that the answer may be less sociological and more cultural: that we are in a third “cultural wave,” with the loose sequence (theorized in part I) 121

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proceeding from reason to warfare to a new cultural genre that teaches empathy, encourages humane discourse, and finally, leads to progress toward the practice of human rights. To elaborate: Early in the twentieth century, the discoveries of Albert Einstein and other scientists ushered in a mind-­ bending new Age of Reason. Horrendous wars then ripped apart the world. World War II and the Holocaust, in particular, awakened a deep horror mixed with bewilderment that large-­scale diabolical slaughter could take place in “civilized” Europe. The next step in the sequence is the flowering of a new cultural genre that teaches empathy. In the twentieth century, that cultural genre was film. Filmmaking can be put to many different uses, to be sure, from vapid or violent entertainment to satire to pornography; at its best, however, the film medium not only disseminates knowledge but also invites empathy. Documentary film footage taken during the liberation of Europe’s concentration camps, vividly revealing their brutality, made an indelible impression on this author at age seventeen. It has been controversially suggested that the footage helped spur the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Narrative film offers limitless opportunity to teach empathy in a deliberate way. Gregory Nava, cowriter and director of El Norte (1983), for example, states that he aimed to bring humanity to the plight of peasants fleeing Central America, “to have people able to see these immigrants as human beings.”2 One of Nava’s characters says: “For the rich, the peasant is just a pair of arms. We are just arms to do their work. . . . But the poor have hearts and souls. We are people—are all equal.” And, finally, as this book goes to press in June 2020, cell-­phone videos of police brutality, most notably the police murder of George Floyd, have stirred a vast movement to recognize and protect the value of Black lives in the United States and elsewhere. Empathy has birthed a new wave of humane discourse. The struggle never ends, it seems, nor can it be abandoned. Because compassion is a Christian virtue, the human-­rights laws of Europe and America may appear to rest on a strictly Christian foundation. Not so. Our Greco-­Roman legacy also supports this legal edifice. Romans were arguably the first to frame human-­rights concepts, but they couldn’t have done it without the Greeks. In the fourth century BCE, Athenians praised compassion (oiktos or eleos) and the love of humankind (philanthrōpia), and nurtured sympathy (sumpatheia), values they then bequeathed to educated Romans and, through them, to all posterity in the West. In other words, humane discourse can be traced back to Ancient Greece and has an intricate legacy thereafter, distinct from Christianity as well as inter-

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woven with it.3 Greek philanthrōpia leads to Latin humanitas, which eventually leads to the eighteenth-­century virtue of “humanity,” a word derived from the Latin. Subsequently, the history of human rights, despite various setbacks, witnessed two expansive trends: (1) the range of people held to enjoy rights broadened, so that propertied white males are no longer the sole rights holders, and (2) the rights themselves broadened. In retrospect, scholars define several generations of human rights: the so-­called “negative rights” like the right not to be tortured, together with the classic liberty rights including free speech and the like; “positive rights” to aid, sometimes dismissed as “welfare rights” or, worse yet, “entitlements”; and today’s “solidarity” rights for groups. These include new rights and protections regarding sexual preference and gender identification. Ideas are powerful, and the history of ideas matters. Exploring culture and concepts, one may find that the values of humanity, kindness, dignity, compassion, and respect constitute the soil in which human rights grow. This “human-­rights culture” reflects the accumulation of attitudes, ideas, and emotions that support fairness and decency, that make us sensitive to outrages and abuses. In the words of Lynn Hunt: “The history of human rights shows that rights are best defended in the end by the feelings, convictions, and actions of multitudes of individuals, who demand responses that accord with their inner sense of outrage” (Lynn Hunt 2007, 213). These attitudes also give us a generous and ever-­expanding view of human liberty, human value, and human possibility. No one has formulated this expansive view better than the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, whose work on potentialities (2011) gives us a new and distant star to reach for. With one turn of the historian’s kaleidoscope, rotating from legal history or philosophy to literary culture and affect, we see clearly the vital links in the history of human rights that connect back to the invention of humane discourse in Classical Athens twenty-­five hundred years ago. Part I of this book explored that invention via analogy with the well-­documented invention of human-­rights concepts in eighteenth-­century America and France (Lynn Hunt 2007). Part II all too briefly described key elements of respect for human dignity in Ancient Greece that were the wellspring for Athenian humane discourse. Part II also pointed out the winding passage of those same elements through European history into eighteenth-­century Europe. With regard to the Greco-­Roman legacy, which is for the ages, each generation goes looking for what it needs. Amid the turmoil of the eighteenth century, some intellectuals sought a way to articulate humane ideals from a secular standpoint, and Ancient Athens became a mirror in which they sought to see themselves. (See Exploration A.) According to Paul Hazard,

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humanity was a new virtue “peculiarly adapted to the eighteenth-­century moralists,” he says, “because it stressed that human condition from which they thought they always had to start, to which they must always return, and which, in consequence, was for them, the all in all” (Hazard 1954, 171). Future Research and Reflections I used to worry that taking human rights back to Athens would fix them as narrowly, incorrigibly Western in the worst sense. But no, the Greeks belong to everyone: the great tragic plays are nowadays performed in Japan and Africa,4 as well as in Europe and America. They speak to all who care to listen. If the roots of human-­rights law lie in the soil of Ancient Athens, then those precedents (something lawyers need and love) reach far deeper than the standard genealogy of human-­rights law, starting in the eighteenth century. It is obvious that the intellectuals who framed human-­rights concepts were drawing, inevitably, upon their classical education, their acquaintance with the literary legacy of Greece and Rome and the inspiration they drew from it. Did the eighteenth-­century thinkers who celebrated Hellas consciously notice the compassionate facet of Classical Athens and derive inspiration from it? Were they aware, as Cicero was in the first century BCE, that the Greeks had contributed the theme of humanity, placing a positive value on kindness and compassion? Philanthrōpia was never the most conspicuous word in Greek literature, nor was it a highlighted feature of paideia, the famous Hellenic education, although Euripides in his Electra has Orestes say, “Pity [oiktos] is not at all present in ignorance, / but in educated men” (lines 294–295).5 Further research beckons:6 we should like to know exactly which eighteenth-­century thinkers (e.g., Voltaire; Hume; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Shaftesbury) drew direct inspiration from Classical Greek texts that elevated compassion and humane discourse: which thinkers absorbed exactly which ancient works, where such evidence is available. My own preliminary explorations suggest very strong links of that nature within the Scottish Enlightenment, whose participants proudly dubbed Edinburgh the “Athens of the North.”7 The present analysis, then, opens up new areas of inquiry. That at least some eighteenth-­century thinkers believed that Athenians were more humane than citizens of other Greek city-­states is evident in the writings of

Conclusions 125

Oliver Goldsmith and in Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy’s Anacharsis (Exploration A). If one accepts the point argued by Lynn Hunt (2007), that empathy and humane discourse create a cultural and social environment hospitable to human-­rights concepts, then we see that the roots of human-­rights law are fixed fast in the bedrock of Ancient Athens. Moreover, the same literary texts that helped to generate the humane discourse of Ancient Athens were still available to elite thinkers of the eighteenth century. I do not claim that those thinkers often gazed directly at the Greeks. Rather, the Greeks were somewhere on the horizon, no matter which direction they turned (chapter 6). Thanks to their acquaintance with the literary legacy of Greece and Rome, the thinkers who framed human-­rights concepts in the Enlightenment were affectively as well as intellectually drawing upon, via their classical education, Greek cultural elements (chapter 5) and Greek humane discourse (chapter 4), a golden thread in the broad tapestry of humanism. We have long known that the emotional and moral discourse of the American Enlightenment, articulated so splendidly by Jefferson, paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation. Intellectual concepts and ideals, despite any hypocrisy of their crafters, have an impact over time, and Ancient Greek humane discourse still matters.

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Notes

Preface 1. See Chaniotis 2012, esp. 11–19. Introduction 1. See Fred D. Miller Jr., 1995. Meanwhile, Mitsis 1999 finds the origin of the idea of natural rights in ancient Stoic philosophy as early as Chrysippus (d. 206 BCE), writing: “The Stoics are the first thinkers in antiquity to develop a view of rights that is natural in the stronger sense of being naturally attached to individuals by the mere fact that they are human beings and, as such, members of a natural human community” (Mitsis 1999, 162). Nelson (2004) richly explores theories of justice in political and moral philosophy across many centuries. 2. This paragraph is drawn from my Tragedy Offstage (Sternberg 2006, 174) and used here by kind permission of the University of Texas Press. 3. Aside from Peter Gay’s analysis of the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment as a sort of “modern paganism,” the other major exploration of the Enlightenment’s debt to Greek antiquity is found in the “Cambridge School” history of political thought, with its emphasis on “classical republicanism” in the eighteenth century and Age of Revolutions (Edelstein 2019, 10; James 2019). See also Stuart-­Buttle 2019; Loughlin and Johnston 2020. 4. See Lauren 2011; Morsink 2019; and, for a bracingly critical view, Mutua 2002. 5. See Johnson and Clapp 2005. 6. This example borrows the wording of Lehigh University’s Roslyn Weiss, personal communication, Feb. 14, 2008. 7. Finley 1959, 151–152. Wiedemann, on the other hand, doubts that the slave societies of antiquity and the New World are strictly comparable: “Much of the scholarship concerning Greek and Roman slavery has assumed that the primary function of the institution was economic, as a means of providing cheap labour as in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States” (Wiedemann 1987, 30). 127

128  Notes to Pages 8 – 9

8. In 1778 Virginia, Jefferson introduced legislation against white women having mixed-­race children; see William D. Cohen 1969, 509. Exploration A: Enlightened Athens in the Age of Jefferson 1. https://www.monticello.org /thomas-­jefferson/jefferson-­slavery/. 2. Joseph J. Ellis notes “Jefferson’s extraordinary capacity for denial” (2000, 131). See also Stanton 1993 and John Chester Miller 1991. 3. See Richard 1994, but Wiltshire (1992) contends that a belief in self-­governance was the crucial contribution of Athens. 4. See Sternberg 1998, 103–106; and Konstan 2005. 5. See Exploration C or Sternberg 2006, chap. 5. 6. The ability to read Greek takes many years of unremitting toil, and I used to wonder how Jefferson did it. Finally, at the Library of Congress, I handled one of his own books that had been specially made by tearing apart both a Greek book and its Latin translation, interleafing them and then rebinding the whole into a bilingual edition. Jefferson thereafter read his Greek “the way every other educated man of the period did, save the professional scholars . . . with the Greek on one page and a Latin crib on the other” (Rosslyn 1990, 62). For more on Jefferson’s books, see Douglas Wilson 1996. 7. Jefferson, who reportedly met the author at a Carthusian monastery outside Paris (Lehmann 1947, 56) recommended Barthélemy’s work in three of his letters, as noted in Sowerby 1952–1959, 1:20, no. 41, search term “Anacharsis.” Or consult the website LibraryThing.com. Accessed April 9, 2020. 8. That Thomas Jefferson followed the Greeks’ liberation efforts with interest is shown by his correspondence (Bergh 1907, 39, 89, and more). In a letter to Dr. Styles dated July 17, 1785, for example, he writes (unrealistically, to be sure): “We might then expect, once more, to see the language of Homer and Demosthenes a living language.” 9. For information on Fréret, see Simon 1961. 10. Waldstreicher 2002, 31–32, 176–177. 11. Actually the Temple of Hephaestus, but also known as the Temple of Theseus owing to the theme of its sculptural decoration. 12. See Exploration C, pp. 112–114. 13. Goldsmith 1774, 54. According to Lehmann (1947, 126, 134), Jefferson described Greece and Rome as “civilized and learned” and “the enlightened nations of antiquity.” Chapter 1: The Turn toward Reason 1. Vico and Voltaire proposed the progression from muthos to logos (Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014, 15). Nowadays, perhaps, few would acknowledge a sharp opposition between myth and reason. Moreover, I cannot launch this chapter without admitting that I necessarily resort to mythmaking of my own in the very act of constructing a historical narrative. Readers steeped in literary theory are begged to suspend their postmodern disbelief for the next five chapters. 2. Personal communication, Apr. 17, 2019.

Notes to Pages 10–29 129

3. Edith Hall (2014, 101–102) suggests that silting of the harbor of Miletus, at the mouth of the Maeander River, inspired the thinkers of that city to ponder change and explore natural causes. 4. This despite the fact that the new scientists sought to validate the excellence of God’s creation. Susan Neiman explains: “Science was viewed not as rival but as servant of faith, since every new discovery was a discovery of law. Any advance of science was proof of more order in the universe” (Neiman 2002, 29). 5. Vividly described by Heilbroner (1967, 16–40); on government use of Enlightenment ideas, see Outram 1995, 28–46. 6. Ethnocentrism was a keynote of both my eras. As merchants, emigrants, and adventurers traveled, their encounters with the Other sharpened every dimension of Us. Encounters with the wider world also brought new and challenging knowledge to the forefront, grist for thought mills. 7. Israel 2011, 7, quoted in Wright 2014, 2. 8. The Periclean funeral oration (Thuc. 2.34–46) contrasts Athens of the day, vibrant and luxurious, with retrograde, unimaginative Sparta. 9. Pl. Tht. 152a, generally considered to be a genuine quotation from Protagoras. See Fine 2003, 132. 10. Personal communication, Apr. 17, 2019. 11. Herder writes admiringly and without irony that Herodotus “collected with commendable infantile curiosity whatever he saw and heard” (Herder 1968, 166). 12. Rawlings 2012, 1. 13. Sophie Mills notes the characteristic Athenian conviction “that human reason is an important agent in human progress” (Mills 1997, 75). 14. For a more nuanced account, see Kidson 1984, 392–393. For an amusing portrait of Hippodamus, see Arist. Pol. 2.8, 1267b24. 15. This and subsequent Frogs quotes come from the translation by Matthew Dillon, published online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Accessed Jan. 28, 2019. 16. Lavishly portrayed by Robin Reilly (1992). See also Brooks 2004, 134–156. 17. Nevertheless, some nineteenth-­century British classicists were tempted to identify Britain with Athens: both of them “civilized,” both of them maritime empires controlled by an island nation. (Athens with its Long Walls to the Piraeus resembled an island.) At times, they slipped into an overly close identification with the Athenians that led to various genteel absurdities, as when the German-­British philologist Eduard Fraenkel (1888–1970) called the Greek warlord Agamemnon a “great gentleman.” (See Raeburn and Thomas 2011, 168.) Always, we must keep reminding ourselves that while the Greeks can seem a lot like us, they are at the same time deeply foreign. 18. The Greek word tekhnē is the root of our English word “technology.” 19. To be sure, the hoplite phalanx of Sparta produced a very different type of equality amongst the Homoioi, the Similars. 20. Displays of wealth could be controlled with sumptuary legislation, but rich families were also prone to squander inherited fortunes within a generation or two (Davies 1971). 21. Demosthenes denies that rich men of earlier generations possessed grand homes, but Graham (1974, 53) notes that archaeological evidence suggests some exaggeration on his part. See Dem. 3.25–26, 13.29, 23.207 for fifth-­century simplicity; Dem. 3.29, 23.208 for fourth-­century opulence.

130  Notes to Pages 29– 35

22. Ober 1989 is vital. See also Ober 2008. 23. Personal communication, Feb. 5, 2019. 24. The same could be true in the eighteenth century, thanks to the Barbary Pirates. See Weiss 2011. 25. Conflicting traditions on Plato’s misadventure (Plut. Dion 5; Diog. Laert. Life of Plato 3, [Life of Plato] 18; Diod. Sic. 15.6; and Nep. Dion. 2) are analyzed in Porter 1943 and in Figueira 1993, 347–349. 26. Just such a tale is recounted in Dem. 53, analyzed in Sternberg 2006, 42–75. Chapter 2: Warfare 1. Explained in detail by Lauren (2011, chaps. 5–7). Buergenthal et al. write: “Modern international human rights law is largely a post–­World War II phenomenon. Its development can be attributed to the monstrous human rights committed during the Nazi era and to the belief that these violations and possibly the war itself might have been prevented had an effective international system for the protection of human rights existed in the days of the League of Nations” (Buergenthal et al. 2017, 31). See also Duranti 2012. Samuel Moyn (2010) sees the matter very differently. 2. Hanson 2005, 6. We hear nothing from the Spartans: they did not produce great literature after the lyric poetry of Alcman and Tyrtaeus in the seventh century BCE. 3. See Sternberg 2005: 4–5, reprinted here with kind permission of Cambridge University Press. In 2005, I translated oiktos and its cognate verb as “pity” to avoid anachronistically aligning the Greek concept with Christian “compassion.” But Françoise Mirguet (2017) has since then demonstrated that the development of the Judeo-­Christian concept of compassion drew upon the elaboration of oiktos and eleos in Greek texts, so I now find the translation “compassion” appropriate. 4. Mittelstadt remarks: “The Melian Dialogue . . . was clearly intended to emphasize the culmination of a fully developed Athenian policy of reckless expansion by conquest, while at the same time pointing to future events ending with the fall of Athens in 404 B.C.” (Mittelstadt 1985, 68–69). 5. Clifford Orwin (1994) furnishes a book-­length explication of this point. 6. David Konstan, personal communication, Apr. 15, 2019. 7. Translated by Robert Browning; published online at Perseus.tufts.edu (accessed Jan. 29, 2019). See also Alan H. Sommerstein, who writes (Hornblower and Spawforth 1996, s.v. “Aeschylus”): “Aeschylus, like all truly tragic writers, is well aware of, and vividly pre­sents, the terrible suffering, often hard to justify in human terms, of which life is full; nevertheless he also believes strongly in the ultimate justice of the gods.” 8. This and other passages from The Trojan Women translated by Richmond Lattimore (1958). 9. Edith Hall notes the stirring effects of this play in antiquity: “Plutarch re­cords that even Alexander, vicious, power-­crazed tyrant of Pherae, burst into tears at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache as enacted in this tragedy (Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas 39.4–6)” (Hall 2018, 130). 10. This amnesty (see Dorjahn 1946) is controversially alleged to have been circumvented by the prosecution and execution of Socrates in 399, but that is another story.

Notes to Pages 35– 43 131

See Edwin Carawan 2013, chap. 9. Carawan quarrels with claims accessibly presented by I. F. Stone in The Trial of Socrates (1988). Carawan instead emphasizes the religious aspect of the asebeia (“impiety”) with which Socrates was charged (Carawan 2013, chap. 9). 11. Xen. Hell. 2.4.43, translated by Rex Warner. The date of composition is unknown; V. J. Gray (1991, 211, 228) assigns the entire work to the 350s. 12. It’s worth noting that religion was neither a motive nor a pretext for warfare in Ancient Greece. 13. The Case Western Reserve University librarian Bill Claspy found the ultimate source of the passage in “Des conspirations contre les peuples” (1766), vol. 26 of Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1877–1885). Available at https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/toutvoltaire/navigate/751/1/?byte=288 48&byte=28850&byte=28859&byte=28863. Accessed June 10, 2019. 14. Personal communication, Feb. 12, 2019. 15. Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Seven-­Years-­War. Accessed Feb. 10, 2019. 16. Alexander Pope was England’s leading poet and a major moralist as well as seminal translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Swift and Gay were part of his intellectual circle (Hyland, Gomez, and Greensides 2003, 11). 17. Shank continues: “Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which appeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism” (Shank 2015, §1.2). 18. On his campaigns for justice 1761–1765, see Davidson 2010, 315–333. 19. Candide, chap. 4, p. 237 in the edition of Redman (1949). 20. Candide, chap. 19, p. 282 in the edition of Redman (1949). 21. The French title is Histoire philosophique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. 22. Frank E. Manuel remarks that Herder’s capacity for Einfühlung, “empathy,” makes him at his worst sound dilettantish and “at his best a great interpreter of states of feeling in other historical epochs” (Herder 1968, xi). 23. See Bosworth 1996, 31–65. Chapter 3: Empathy and Tears 1. For eight definitions of “empathy,” see Batson 2009, and for empathy vis-­à-­vis human nature, see Braten 2013. 2. Dan Edelstein (2019, 128–130) disputes this claim. 3. Edited by D. M. MacDowell (1993). On this passage, see also Cairns 2017, 62. 4. Marianne McDonald notices that Euripides, in particular, returns to Homer in allowing heroes to weep, and this makes the men more sympathetic. The playwright, she says, also “shows us that both sexes can learn from each other” (McDonald 2002, 192). 5. Martha Nussbaum (2001) advanced a similar claim without the benefit of the neuroscientific findings (see Klimecki and Singer 2013; also Kidd and Castano 2013) and other research that has been conducted since then. Nussbaum wrote (2001, 351):

132  Notes to Pages 43 – 59

“We can easily see that [tragic dramas] promote compassion in their audience by inviting both empathy and the judgment of similar possibilities.” (See also Falkner 2005; Johnson and Clapp 2005.) 6. Or perhaps, as Richard Martin suggests (2007), praxis included self-­ characterization through the performance of stylized routines and rituals: “Staged drama partakes of . . . self-­dramatization at the level of the individual” (Martin 2007, 47). 7. The singing and dancing chorus also had an emotional impact. Peter Meineck writes: “[E]motional engagement with a performance is dramatically enhanced if the movements performed are part of a known and felt style. In this sense the chorus in the orchestra communicated directly and viscerally with the audience on a deep, cognitive, non-­verbal level” (Meineck 2012, 37). 8. For a full account of Panthea, see Exploration B. 9. “From Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, with a List of Books for a Private Library, 3 August 1771,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives .gov/documents/  Jefferson/01–01–­02–0056. (Accessed Aug. 29, 2020.) Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1950), pp. 76–81. Quoted in Wills 2000, 18. 10. Vol. 6 ( Jan. 1, 1775), p. 712. Chapter 4: Humane Discourse 1. For a specialized discussion of bookselling in Athens, see Dover 1968. For a succinct treatment, see Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 1–5. 2. See also a dusty 1914 dissertation by Siegfried Lorenz, the Latin title of which means “On the Progress of the Conception of Philanthrōpia.” 3. Parker, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, generously shared with me an unpaginated précis of his 2019 conference paper “Philanthrōpia, Democracy, and the Proof of Power” presented at the Society of Classical Scholars, from which these quotations come. 4. This paragraph is drawn from the introduction to my edited volume Pity and Power in Ancient Athens (2005, 12–13) and is used here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press. 5. See Thompson 1952; Züntz 1953; Vanderpool 1974. 6. Sheridan 2019. 7. The writings of Francis Hutcheson and Shaftesbury “were much discussed in their own lifetimes,” Pagden notes (2013, 85), “and had a considerable influence on a number of philosophical concerns in both France and Germany that lasted well into the nineteenth century.” See Pagden 2013, chap. 2: “Bringing Pity Back In.” 8. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in a letter of October 6, 1820, to Francis Eppes, advises: “your Latin & Greek should be kept up assiduously by reading at spare hours: . . . in Greek, go first thro’ the Cyropaedia, and then read Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon’s Hellenics & Anabasis, Arrian’s Alexander, & Plutarch’s lives, for prose reading” (emphasis added; International Center for Jefferson Studies, http://tjrs.monticello.org / letter/1566). Accessed June 10, 2020.

Notes to Pages 63 – 80 133

Exploration B: Cyrus the Great 1. Dick Davis (2002) examines Hellenistic and Medieval Persian narratives inspired by Xenophon’s story of Panthea. 2. https:// books.google.com/ books?id=1HI_AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA159#v=onepage &q&f=false. Accessed Oct. 1, 2020. 3. This work may be compared with Samuel Johnson’s least successful project, the neoclassical tragedy Irene (also set in antiquity), written between 1726 and 1749. 4. This conflation is epitomized in the life and work of the Anglo-­Welsh philologist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), aka “Persian” Jones. 5. Mark Knights comments: “It is worth noting that this quotation is often cited but I have been unable to locate the original source.” Clive did, however, certainly make a similar statement: “First Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State and Condition of the East India Company” (1772), 148 (Knights 2018, 111). 6. For the eighteenth-­century reception of the Cyropaedia, see Tatum 1989, chap. 1, “The Classic as Footnote,” especially p. 4, on Hume. Chapter 5: Elements of Respect 1. Pagden notes: “Like all human groups, the Greeks had been fiercely ethnocentric. But they were unusual, if not unique, in having a single word—anthropos—with which to describe not merely Greeks but all human beings. . . . The Romans . . . inherited the same universal idea and created another word, or rather two—homo, ‘man,’ and humanitas, ‘humanity,’ to describe the entire species” (Pagden 2013, 161). 2. Their arrival at a summit from which they glimpse the sea is the single most famous passage in the Anabasis. See Rood 2004. 3. The following discussion is based upon my treatment of this story in my Tragedy Offstage (Sternberg 2006, 130–135) and used here by kind permission of the University of Texas Press. 4. A philosophical analog is found in Plato’s Euthyphro (4c-­d), where Euthyphro prosecutes his father for the murder of a homicidal laborer whom he bound hand and foot and threw into a ditch. In Euthyphro’s view, even a homicidal laborer deserves better (a view that is beside the point within the dialog). 5. See Campbell 1967, 285, following Gomme 1957. 6. See Sullivan 1997, 2000, as well as Gibert 1995. 7. Martin says of Agamemnon in this scene: “His willingness to [tread the carpet] is a symptom, not a cause, of his downfall, a sign of his malleability” (Martin 2007, 40). 8. And a defining literary activity as well, as argued convincingly by Vermeule (2010). 9. Find countless specific instances in Edith Hall’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk. Accessed Aug. 29, 2020. 10. For a helpful survey of theories about the soul in Greek philosophy, consult Hendrik Lorenz 2009.

134  Notes to Pages 80–103

11. Finley 1984 assesses biography (along with history) as a significant legacy of Greek culture. 12. See also Dan Edelstein’s balanced evaluation of Antigone’s importance from a standpoint of justice: “To acknowledge a . . . tangible historical connection between classical and Enlightenment ideals of universal justice is simply to recognize that the history of human rights may be more archaeological than seismic, with successive generations adding new layers of interpretation to older theses” (Edelstein 2019, 8). 13. Honig (2013, 151–170) offers a much more favorable view of Ismene: that she is a quiet heroine with a sense of moderation. 14. See Nelson’s discussion of eudaimonia (2004, 12–13) in the context of political theory. 15. In that work, Tzanetou closely analyzes Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Euripides’ Children of Heracles, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the last of the Athenian suppliant plays. 16. Dover, in his groundbreaking Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (1974), for example, devotes only six pages to compassion. 17. Explored especially by Kim (2000). 18. This material is drawn from my Pity and Power in Ancient Athens (Sternberg 2005, 37) and used here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press. 19. “The play suggests that there is something about the sheer vividness of seeing another person’s plight that powerfully contributes to forming emotions that motivate appropriate action” (Martha Nussbaum 2008, 162). Chapter 6: Paths through Time 1. The full story is told in Brown 2013. 2. For recent work on Athenian comedy in the Roman empire, see Marshall and Hawkins 2016. 3. Mitsis (1999, 153 and passim) argues that the Stoics came up with the idea of natural rights. 4. Tangentially, the opening knocks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony seem to quote French revolutionary anthems with lyrics espousing the rights of man (Guerrieri 2012, 36–43; shared on National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Nov. 19, 2012). Transcript available at NPR.org. Accessed Aug. 31, 2020. 5. With some success. Adrian Poole compares opera with tragedy: “opera or song, through which the affective power of music binds listener and performer more closely together than the spoken word or the visual image” (Poole 2005, 98). 6. Aspasia apparently comes up in this period because if the French salon were equated with the Athenian sumposion, its hostess might be viewed as a newfangled Greek courtesan (hetaira: Sonenscher 2008, p. 10 and chap. 2). The only hetaira of consequence was Aspasia. 7. Stobart (1911, 2) says the veil fell away only within the last generation before him: “It is only in the last generation that scholars have been able to distinguish between the true Greek and the false mist of classicism which surrounds it. Till then everybody had to look at the Greeks through Roman and Renaissance spectacles.”

Notes to Pages 107–116 135

Exploration C: Tensions 1. Lehmann (1947, 182) says that the placement of Monticello on a summit “was an innovation in the Virginia of his time.” 2. Noted also by Lehmann (1947, 179–184). Cf. Ricks 2020, 185. 3. View of the West Front of Monticello and Garden, depicting Thomas Jefferson’s grandchildren at Monticello. Watercolor on paper by Jane Braddick Peticolas, 1825; at Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. (Monticello/Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc.) This painting can be viewed at the Monticello.org website. Accessed Oct. 22, 2020. 4. The following discussion revisits my treatment of this story in my monograph Tragedy Offstage (Sternberg 2006, 166–171) and is used here by kind permission of the University of Texas Press. 5. Edmund Morgan makes a similar observation: “If [ Jefferson’s] actions are any evidence, he placed a higher value on collecting books and drinking good wine than he did on freeing his slaves” (Morgan 1976, 60). 6. Jack Robertson, Fiske and Marie Kimball Librarian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, elaborates (personal communication, May 28, 2020): “There are a lot of descriptions of Gabriel Lilly’s brutality . . .[evinced] either by carrying guns, which allegedly made it difficult for Jefferson to hire slaves from other plantations, or by physically punishing enslaved people. James Hemings, son of Critta Hemings Bowles, ran away after being beaten by Lilly.” 7. The American founders, writes Gordon Wood, “struggled to internalize the new liberal man-­made standards that had come to define what it meant to be truly civilized—politeness, taste, sociability, learning, compassion, and benevolence—and what it meant to be good political leaders” (Wood 2006, 23). 8. The case, which Jefferson lost, was Howell v. Netherland: https://www.encyclo pediavirginia.org /thomas_ jefferson_s_argument_in_howell_v_netherland_1770. Accessed Sept. 1, 2020. 9. The 2012 revision of an authoritative report from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Research Committee (2000) states: “It is now the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s view that the issue is a settled historical matter.” In more detail: A considerable body of evidence stretching from 1802 to 1873 (and beyond) describes Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. It was corroborated by the findings of the Y-­chromosome haplotype DNA study conducted by Dr. Eugene Foster and published in the scientific journal Nature in November 1998. The DNA study did prove paternity of a Jefferson family member and corroborated the ample documentary and oral history evidence. Other evidence supports Thomas Jefferson’s paternity as well, including his presence at Monticello during Sally Hemings’s likely windows of conception, the names of Hemings’s surviving children, and the fact that all of her children were granted freedom—they were either allowed to leave the plantation, or legally emancipated in Jefferson’s will, a unique occurrence among Monticello’s enslaved families. (Thomas Jefferson Foundation Research Committee, 2000; available at the Monticello.org web site, under “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account.” Accessed Aug. 21, 2020.)

136  Notes to Pages 117–124

10. For discussions of Jefferson’s racism, see William Cohen 1969, 512–514; and John Chester Miller 1991, 46–59. Miller opines: “Manifestly, Jefferson was under powerful psychological compulsion to believe that the blacks were innately inferior. Had he thought that he and his fellow Virginians were keeping in subjugation and debasement thousands of potential poets, philosophers, scientists, and men of letters . . . he could not have endured even temporarily the continued existence of slavery” ( John Chester Miller 1991, 52). 11. Waldstreicher 2002, 195. Discussed by John Chester Miller (1991, 41; and footnote ibid.). Conclusions 1. To my knowledge, a somewhat similar attempt at comparison was made by Hilary Putnam in his essay “The Three Enlightenments.” His third enlightenment is a potential “pragmatist enlightenment” (2001, 18), led by John Dewey, who calls for a transformation of sympathy through education. 2. From an interview included on the “Supplements” disc of the 2009 DVD “In the Service of the Shadows: The Making of El Norte” (Criterion collection [DVD videodiscs]: 458). Cowriter Anna Thomas also explains their goal: “To have people able to see these immigrants as human beings.” 3. See Armstrong 1984. 4. Van Weyenberg 2013 ( Japan); Wetmore 2016 (Africa). 5. Enesti d’oiktos amathiai men oudamou, sophoisi d’andrōn. Sophos commonly means “clever” or “wise” but is used here in contradistinction to amathia, “want of knowledge, ignorance.” 6. And has already been broached by the political scientist Tim Stuart-­Buttle (2019). 7. The city even boasts an “Acropolis” (Calton Hill), which features the National Monument (built 1822–1829). Its twelve columns were modeled closely on those of the Parthenon in Athens. The Scottish Enlightenment produced tutors who deeply influenced America’s founders, as Thomas E. Ricks explains (2020, xxi, 75–77, 94–96). He writes: “Young university graduates in Scotland looking for work . . . found inexpensive passage to America aboard the tobacco ships in a kind of reverse intellectual Gulf Stream. . . . All in all, it has been calculated that some 211 men who had college or university degrees from Scotland emigrated to America between 1680 and 1780 (Ricks 2020, 75). Boxloads of books came, too” (Ricks 2020, 76).

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Subject Index

Academy (of Plato). See under Plato Achilles, 42, 76, 87, 89, 101 Acropolis, 12, 13, 29, 34, 136n7 advice for rulers, 61 Aeschines, 43, 46, 48, 55, 110 Aeschylus, 6, 30, 75, 83, 85, 130n7, 134n15 affect, 42, 45, 57, 88, 117, 123, 125, 134n5 affective turn, xv Africa, 124, 136n4 Africans, 16, 108, 116 Agamemnon, 13, 75 Agesilaus, xii, 54, 63 Ajax, 43, 76–77 Alexander the Great, ix, 39, 54, 76, 80, 111, 117, 132n8 American South, antebellum, 7 Amnesty of 403, 35, 130n10 Anacharsis (Barthélemy), ii (frontispiece), 9–18, 19, 69, 103, 125, 128n7 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 22, 102 ancient languages, 100–101 ancient perfection, 11, 103, 121 Andromache, 35, 85–86, 130n8 Angst, 8, 119 anthropology, 2, 22, 31, 39, 42, 49, 71, 74 Antigone, 6, 80–82, 86, 134n12 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 92, 97 Archaic Greece, ix, 29, 42–43, 73, 82, 85 archaeology, 56, 103, 129n21, 134n12

aristocrats, 9, 29, 107, 117 Aristophanes, 28, 29, 34, 45, 94 Aristotle, xi, 6, 25, 42–44, 67, 82, 88, 92, 97, 117–119; Lyceum of, 51 Arnold, Matthew, 7 asceticism, 66 Aspasia, 14, 102, 116, 134n6 Astyanax, 35, 89 Athens: achievements of, 1–3, 110; humane discourse of, 1, 121; idealized, 2, 7, 55–56, 121; moral discomfort in, 106; self-­image, 1, 41, 52–53, 55–57, 121 Augustine, Saint, 97 Averroës, 92 Bacchylides, 83 Banks, John, 65–67, 105 Banneker, Benjamin, 118 Barthélemy, Jean-­Jacques: Anacharsis, 9–18, 19, 69, 103, 125, 128n7; Carité and Polydorus, 13; illustrations from Anacharsis, ii (frontispiece), 19, 69 basanos, 109–112 Battle of Plassey, 67 Battle of the Books, 99 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 99, 134n4 Benezet, Anthony, 115 biography, 54, 61, 80, 93, 134n11 Black Sea, 72 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon 151

152  Subject Index

brain, the, xv, 41, 44, 65, 83 Britain, 67, 129n17 Byron. See Gordon, George, Lord Byron Byzantine Empire, 92 Byzantine scholars, 12 Calas Affair, 102 camerata, 99 Candide (Voltaire), 5, 37–38 canon law, 58 Carter, Robert, 115 Cassandra, 35, 85, 89 cell-­phone videos, 122 Choiseul-­Gouffier, 11–12 Christians, 3, 7, 22, 30, 67, 74, 86, 92, 96–98, 99, 122, 130n3 Cicero, xi, 7, 93, 100–101, 124 City Dionysia, 34–35 city planning, 27 classical education, 93, 99, 100–102, 104, 124, 125 Cleisthenes, 28 Cleon, 32–33 Clive, Robert, Lord, 67, 133n5 colonialism, 3, 16, 17, 48, 66, 115 comic drama, 28, 30, 34, 45, 94–95 community of feeling, 49 compassion, 32–33, 36, 41–47, 49, 51– 59, 61–64, 67, 71, 80, 83, 86–89, 93, 95–96, 104–105, 109, 112, 114, 116, 121–124, 130n3, 132n5, 134n16, 135n7 compassion, Greek, xv, 1–2, 6–7, 10, 14, 32–33, 41–47, 53–57, 61–64, 83, 86– 89, 93, 96, 104–105, 112–116, 121– 124, 130n3 Comte, Auguste, 23 conundrums, 30, 118 Corcyra, 33 Croesus, 29, 82, 88 crying and weeping, 42–52. See also tears; weeping cryptoportici, 108 cultural genre, 4, 50, 122 cultural history, 1, 4 cultural themes, 2, 86 cultural waves, 3, 4, 121

culture, 1–6, 16, 31–33, 47, 52, 55, 62, 71, 87, 89, 92, 111, 123, 134n11 Cyropaedia, xii, 6, 46, 54, 59, 61–68, 80, 88, 93, 100, 104–105, 132n8, 133n6 Cyrus Cylinder, 61 Cyrus the Great, 61–68, 88, 93 Declaration of Independence, 2, 6, 8, 9, 26, 59, 114 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 6, 59 de Las Casas, Bartolomé, 39 Delian League, ix, 52 Delphi, 11, 69, 79 democracy, 1, 2, 7, 10, 28–29, 35, 84, 104 Demosthenes, xi, 46, 52–53, 55–56, 93, 95, 109, 111–113, 115, 129n21 de Romilly, Jacqueline, 5, 53, 62 Dewey, John, 136n1 Diderot, Denis, 38, 98 dignity, 71, 73, 80–84, 89, 98–99, 100, 103, 105, 123 dikaiosunē, 43, 55, 87 Diodotus, 33 douceur, 5, 53 Early Modern era, 62, 63, 99 East India Company, 66, 133n5 Edinburgh, 64, 124 education, classical. See classical education Einstein, Albert, 122 eleos, 42, 46, 53, 54, 87, 95, 96, 122, 130n3 Eleusinian Mysteries, 72 El Norte (film), 122, 136n2 emotion: history of, xv, 4, 17, 61; personal, 74 emotional expression, 2, 42–45, 112, 116 emotional regime, 47, 57 empathy, 1, 2, 4, 5, 30, 41–50, 52, 61, 74, 77, 115, 116, 122, 125, 131n1, 131n22 (chap. 2), 131–132n5 Empedocles of Acragas, 21–22, 25 English gentlemen, 66 Enlightenment, 1–8; eighteenth-­

Subject Index 153

century, 1–3, 22–23, 26, 30, 37–38, 40, 41, 51, 59, 67, 71, 91, 105, 107– 108, 118–119, 121, 124–125, 127n3, 134n12; Greek, 1–3, 22, 26, 30, 59, 121, 127n3, 134n12 Ephialtes, 28 Epictetus, 97 Epicureans, 82, 107 epistolary novels, 47, 48 Erasmus, Desiderius, 36, 92 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 22 ethics, xi, 23, 34, 41, 67, 82, 97 ethos, 43, 56 eudaimonia, 82, 134n14 Euripides, xi, 6, 28, 29, 34–35, 75–76, 85–86, 88, 115, 124, 131n4, 134n15 evil, 1, 18, 25, 30, 34, 37, 38, 57, 83, 117 evolutionary development, 59 “fall from fortune” scenarios, 29, 115 Fielding, Henry, 101–102 filmmaking, 122 Floyd, George, 122 forgiveness, 53, 94 founders, American, 9, 18, 118, 135n7 Franks, the, 12 freedom, 2, 6, 29, 31, 39, 54, 67, 71, 84– 86, 89, 98, 104, 108, 112, 116, 118, 135n9 French Academy, 37 French Revolution, 11, 13, 100 Fréret, Nicolas, 12, 128n9 Gay, John, 37 Geneva Conventions, 37 George III, King, 115–116 global, 3, 39 God, 22, 30, 31, 86, 129n4 gods, 54, 76, 81, 86, 130n7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 47, 104 golden thread of humane discourse, 91, 104–105, 125 Goldsmith, Oliver, 18, 55, 109, 118, 125 Gordon, George, Lord Byron, 12, 65, 104 Grand Tour, 103 Great King of Persia, 26

“great men,” 10, 83, 93 Greece, rediscovery of, 11, 103–104 Greek freedom, slogan of, 54, 85 Greek Orthodox monks and religion, 22, 92 Grotius, Hugo, 36, 58 Hadrian’s villa, 107–108, 118 Haiti, 16 half-­dead soldier, 72–73 happiness, 49, 58, 59, 82, 93, 114 harming enemies, 53, 62 health measures, 27–28, 62 Hecuba, 6, 34–35, 86, 88, 130n9 Hegel, G. W. F., 80 Heine, Heinrich, 47 Hellenism, 11 Hellenistic period, ix, 22, 56, 80, 91, 95– 96 Hellenized Jews, 92, 95–96 helping friends, 53, 54, 62 helplessness, 30, 56, 64, 87 Hemings, Sally, 102, 116, 135n9 Henry Home, Lord Kames, 124 Heracles, 43, 77 Herculaneum, 103 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 38–39 Herodotus, 6, 13, 26–27, 29, 61, 65, 73, 82, 84, 87, 88, 104 Hippocrates of Cos, 22 Hippodamus of Miletus, 27, 129n14 Hobbes, Thomas, 36 Holocaust, the, 23, 31, 122 Homer, 10, 12, 21, 42–43, 45–46, 82, 85–86, 87, 101–102, 131n16 Horace, 92 hubris, 26, 72, 84 humane discourse, 1–4, 6, 23, 30, 40, 51–59, 61, 93 humane ideals, 9, 17, 39, 40, 62, 73, 106, 108–109, 115, 121–125 humane impulses, 29, 91–92 humanism, 36, 71, 91–93, 125 humanity (virtue) 7, 23, 33, 39, 51–57, 81, 93, 94, 109, 114, 118–119, 122–123 human-­rights culture, 123 human-­rights law, 1, 81, 91, 124–125,

154  Subject Index

130n1; Greco-­Roman roots of, 2, 91–106, 119, 121–125 Hume, David, 41, 55, 57, 58, 68, 98, 124 Hunt, Lynn, 2, 4–5, 47–49, 57, 59, 71, 73, 123, 125 Hutcheson, Francis, 41, 57, 132n7 hypocrisy, 3, 8, 9, 114–117, 123, 125 idealization, 2, 7, 54, 55, 62 ideal ruler, 54, 62, 66–67 ideals, 6, 9, 17, 39, 40, 46, 49, 53, 62, 66, 93, 95, 106, 121, 123, 125, 134n12; history of, 4, 89, 123 Iliad (Homer), 42, 86–87, 101, 131n16 imperialism, 3, 7, 31–32, 38–40, 52, 56, 59, 66 independence, Greek war of, 104 individuality, 71–80, 89 Industrial Revolution, 25, 28, 101 inhumanity, 27, 39 injustice, 31, 55, 109, 111 interiority of literary characters, 74–79 Ionian Revolt, 84 Iran, 61 Isaeus, 110 Isocrates, xii, 1, 6, 17, 41, 46, 51–56, 93, 95, 109, 112, 114 isonomia, 26 Japan, 124 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 49, 102, 107–119, 121, 125 Josephus, 95 Judaism, 92, 96 justice, 10, 55, 86, 109–111, 114–115, 130n7, 134n12 Justinian, Digest of, 98 Kant, Immanuel, 37, 38–39, 74 katharsis, 42 kindness, 1, 2, 7, 56, 62–63, 65, 105, 109, 119, 123–124 Kyrie eleison, 96 law, 1–4, 6, 8, 15, 27, 29, 31, 39, 56, 58– 59, 75, 81, 84, 91–92, 98, 101, 108, 110–112, 115, 124–125

Laws (Plato), 46 lawsuit, 45, 110–111 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 37 Le Roy, Julien-­David, 12, 103 liberty, 9, 16, 107, 114–116, 123 Library of Alexandria, 22 Library of Congress, 128n6 library of Jefferson, 10–11, 128n6, 132n9 Lilly, Gabriel, 115, 135n6 Locke, John, 9, 36, 58 logic, xv, 21–27, 31 Lucretia, 66 Lyceum (of Aristotle), 51 lyric poetry, Greek, 6, 73–74, 130n2 Lysias, xii, 41, 45–46, 53, 112 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 62–63 Madison, James, 11 manners, 7, 67 Marathon, 13, 27, 34, 84 Marcus Aurelius, 97 masked drama, xvii, 44–45 Maurice, Thomas, 65–67, 105 Mauss, Marcel, 74–75 Medea, 75–76, 82 medical treatises, 27–28 Melos, 33, 35 Menander, 94–95 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 99 Middle Ages, 42, 58, 63, 104, 108 Miletus, 27, 43, 102, 129n3 mimesis, 44, 46 miscegenation, 8, 116 moderation, 43, 67, 83, 134n13 Montesquieu (Charles-­Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu), 9, 98 Monteverdi, Claudio, 99 Monticello, 10, 11, 107–108, 114–116, 118, 135n9 moral rhetoric, 53 mythopoetic, 5, 21, 22 Mycalessus, 33 Mytilene, 32–33 Napoleon, 16, 26, 98 natural philosophy, 22

Subject Index 155

natural rights, 2, 58, 59, 92, 97, 115, 118, 127n1, 134n3 Nature, 31, 100–101, 117 Nava, Gregory, 122 Nemesis (goddess), 27 neoclassicism, 11 neuroscience, 44, 94, 131n5 New World, 11, 38, 108, 127n7 novels, 4–5, 13, 30, 37, 41–42, 47–50 Nussbaum, Martha, xv, 43, 87, 88, 123, 131n5, 134n19 “Ode to Man” (Sophocles), 24, 91 Odysseus, 35, 42, 85, 101 Oedipus, 13, 44, 77–79, 83, 88, 102 oikeiosis, 98 oikos, 115 oiktos, 7, 42, 46, 53–54, 87, 95, 122, 124, 130n3, 136n5 Old Oligarch, xii, 15 Olynthus, 46, 115 opera, 92, 98–99, 134n5 oppression, 2, 99, 107 Orientalism, 67–68 Ottoman Turks, 11, 92, 103–104 paideia, 7, 94–95, 124 Pamela (Richardson), 5, 48, 66 Pandora, 25 panhellenic, 72 Panthea, 46, 63–65, 104–105 papyrus, 51 Parrhasius, 14 Parthenon, 2, 7, 43, 136n7 Pasion, 109, 112–114, 117, 119 Patterson, Orlando, 26, 85–87, 89 Peloponnesian War, ix, xii, 5, 27, 32–37, 47 Peri, Jacopo, 99 Periander, 87 Pericles, 14, 28, 29, 56, 102 Persia, ix, xii, 26, 32, 52, 54, 61–62, 64, 67, 72, 80, 84–85, 88 personhood, 71–73, 89, 91 Petrarch, 92 philanthrōpia, 6, 47, 53–57, 71, 93–95, 109, 122–124

philhellenism, 11, 104 Philoctetes, 6, 77, 88, 104 Philo of Alexandria, 95–96 philosophes, 3, 5, 22–23, 36–40, 98 philosophy, xi–xii, xv, 1, 2, 4–7, 10, 12, 21–23, 25, 34, 37–40, 49, 57, 58, 67, 74, 80, 91–98, 100, 102, 123, 127n1 (introduction), 132n7, 133n4 Phrynicus, 43 Pinkney, Charles, 118 Piraeus, 27, 129n17 pity, Greek. See compassion, Greek Plato, 5–6, 7, 11–13, 25, 26, 29, 34, 42, 45–46, 51, 53, 67, 79–80, 87, 88, 93, 97, 100, 129, 130n25, 133n4; Academy of, 13, 51 Plautus, 94 Plutarch, 80, 102 polytheism, 86 Pompeii, 11, 103 Pope, Alexander, 37, 101 Portuguese sugar plantations, 108 positivism, 23 Presocratics, 5, 21–22 Priam, 34, 42, 75, 86–87 printing press, 51 progress, idea of, 8, 18, 23–25, 118, 128n1, 129n13 Protagoras, 25, 29, 129n9 psychology, 23, 32, 35, 44, 48–49, 74–75, 79, 119, 136n10 public sphere, 51 Puccini, Giacomo, 99 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 36, 58 purity movement, 67 Querelle des anciens et des modernes, 99 race, concept of, 116, 118–119 racism, 3 rank, 83–84 Realpolitik, 87 reason, 4 Reddy, William M., 5, 31, 42 religion, 5, 9, 13, 21–22, 26, 36, 72, 82 Renaissance, ix, 22, 63, 71, 92, 104

156  Subject Index

republicanism, 9–10, 99, 107, 118, 127n3 respect, 46, 64, 71–84, 89, 91, 123 Revolution/revolution: American, 18, 26, 59, 115; French, 11, 13, 16, 26, 36, 59, 100, 134n4; Haitian, 16; Industrial, 25, 28, 101; intellectual, 21, 26; scientific, 5, 22 revolutionary transformation, 23 rhetoric, xi, 12, 51–53, 88, 92–94, 109, 111, 112 Richardson, Samuel, 5, 48, 66 rights talk, 1, 59, 61 Roman Catholic Church, 3, 17, 92, 97 romance, 18, 47, 58 Roman law, 58, 92, 96, 98 Rome, 10, 56, 91–92, 93–96, 96–98, 107–108, 122, 124 Rorty, Richard, 4, 17 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 5, 9, 36, 48 ruins, classical, 9, 11, 103 Sainte-­Beuve, Charles Augustin, 14 Saint-­Pierre, abbé de, 23, 37 Salamis, 27, 34, 84 Sappho, 74 savagery, 56 savages, 10, 24, 33, 34 Scholastics, 92 scientific revolution, 5, 22 Scots, 25, 41, 57, 124 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 64, 105 sea change, emotional, in eighteenth-­ century France, 2, 4, 5 self-­restraint, 62, 65–67 Seneca the Younger, 97 sentimentalism, 47 Seven Years’ War, 5, 36–37 sexual politics, history of, 66 Shaftesbury, third earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 57, 124, 132n7 Shakespeare, William, 74–75, 80 Sicilian Expedition, 88 Silk Road, 91 slavery: in Athens, 9, 108–114, 117–119; France and, 16; in the New World, 40, 108, 114–119, 127n7 slaves in Athens, 2, 7, 14, 15, 30, 72, 117;

in agriculture, 16; in construction, 7; judicial torture of, 14, 109–114; khoris oikountes, 112; in mining, 2, 16; moral rights of, 72; refuges for, 15, 17; supposed kindness toward, 18, 109, 118; upward mobility of, 15, 114; whipping of, 84 slaves in Rome, 92, 107–108 slaves of Thomas Jefferson, 2, 9, 18, 114– 119, 121, 135nn5–6 Smith, Adam, 25, 26, 41, 58, 98, 104 “social death,” 89 sociology, 23, 74, 121 Socrates, 3, 6, 21, 45, 53, 79–80, 100, 102, 130n10 solipsism, 74 Solon, 6, 29, 55, 82, 84 Sophocles, 6, 24, 43, 75, 76–79, 80–82, 83, 88, 102, 104, 134n15 sōphrosunē, 43, 55, 67, 87 soul, 6, 42, 43, 75, 79–80, 97, 122, 133n10 Spanish sugar plantations, 108 Sparta, 7, 10, 14, 15, 25, 27, 32, 43, 52, 54, 63, 129n8, 130n2 splagkhnizomai, 91 Stoics, 58, 67, 82, 97–98, 127n1, 134n3 Stuart, James, and Nicholas Revett, 12, 103 suffering, 6, 13, 16, 23, 30, 34, 36, 40, 43, 45, 47, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 64, 71, 77, 79, 83, 86–89, 91, 113, 130n7, 130n9 sumpatheia, 41, 122 sumposion, 51, 134n6 Sunium, ii (frontispiece), 12 superstition, 3, 5, 22 suppliants, 41, 52, 77–78, 83, 121 sympathy, 23, 39, 41, 47, 51, 55, 57, 104, 115, 122, 136n1 Swift, Jonathan, 37, 131nn16–17 tears, 5–6, 13, 41–50, 52, 57, 63–64, 79, 86–88, 130. See also crying and weeping; weeping tekhnē, 29, 87, 129n18 Temple of Hephaestus, 111, 113, 128n11. See also Temple of Theseus

Subject Index 157

Temple of Theseus, 14, 15, 17, 20, 128n11. See also Temple of Hephaestus tension, 9, 30, 42, 84, 87, 106, 107–119 Ten Thousand, the, 72 Terence, 94, 95 Theater of Dionysus, 6 theodicy, 30 Theseus, 6, 82–83, 121, 128n11 Thirty Tyrants, 35 Thirty Years’ War, 36–37 Thucydides, 5, 26, 27, 28, 32–34, 36, 53, 87, 132n8 Tiresias, 79 Tom Jones (Fielding), 101–102 torture: in Athens, 17, 109–112; in France, 17, 40 tragedy, 58, 65, 73, 74, 75–79, 80, 85, 99, 104, 105, 130n9, 133n3, 134n5. See also tragic drama tragic drama, 5, 12, 41, 42, 43–47, 85–86 Trojans, 12, 86, 101 Trojan War, 13, 34, 42, 85, 88 twenty-­first century, 3, 13, 74, 121 tyranny, 2, 62, 84–87

universal humanity, 51, 95, 97 universalism, 51, 100–101 universities of Europe, 9, 51

United Nations, 3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 3, 31, 89, 122

Zeno of Citium, 97 Zeus, 30, 81

Vattel, Emer de, 36 Versailles, 13 Voltaire, 5, 36–37, 49, 102, 124, 128n1, 131n13 vulnerability, 82–83 warfare, 4, 5, 9, 29–30, 31–39, 73, 122, 131n12 Washington, George, 115 weeping, 6, 42, 46, 64, See also crying and weeping; tears Wheatley, Phyllis, 118 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 11, 103 World Wars I and II, 23, 31, 36, 122, 130n1 Xenophon, xii, 6, 15, 46, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61–68, 72–73, 80, 93, 95, 100, 104– 105, 132n8 Xerxes, 26–27, 84

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Index of Ancient Passages

Aeschines 2.156: 87 Aeschylus Agamemnon 176–178: 30 429–436: 34 905–957:75 935–938: 75 944–950: 75 1076–1330: 85 Eumenides 13: 83 Antiphon 2.2.7: 111 Aristophanes Frogs 686–687: 28 948–954: 28 1054–1055: 28 Wasps 976: 45 Aristotle Nicomachaean Ethics 1097a: 82 Poetics 6.1449b: 6, 42, 88 1450a20–23: 43 Politics 1254a18:117 1254b: 117 Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 8.39.17: 43

Bacchylides Dithyrambs 18: 83 Demosthenes 1.109: 88 1.112: 88 3.25–26: 129 3.29: 129 13.29: 129 15.22: 55 19.309: 46, 115 20.109: 56 21.185: 54 21.196: 87 22.57:56 23.207: 129 23.208: 129 24.81: 53 24.171: 56 25.76, 81: 54 25.87: 55 53: 130 Epistle 3.22: 52 Dinarchus 1.24: 53 Diodorus Siculus 15.6: 130 Diogenes Laërtius Life of Plato 3.18: 130

159

160  Index of Ancient Passages

Euripides Electra 294–295: 7, 124, 136n5 Medea 1021–1080: 75–78 1040–1069: 76 Trojan Women 307–461: 85 481–484: 34–35 719–722: 35 Exodus15.14: 96 Gorgias Encomium of Helen 9: 42 Herodotus 3.14.11: 87 6.21.2: 43 7.22–24: 26, 84 7.25: 26 7.27–28: 26, 84 7.33–36: 84 7.34–36: 26 7.37: 26, 84 7.38–39: 84 7.122: 84 Hesiod Theogony 570–616: 25 Works and Days 47–105: 25 106–201: 25 Homer Iliad 6.450–458: 86 24.511–512: 42 24.516: 42, 87 Odyssey 8.523–530: 85 Horace Epistle 2.1.156–157: 17, 92 Isaeus 8:10, 11, 28, 29: 110 10:11: 110

Isocrates 4.52: 55 4.80: 56 4.168: 46 8.137: 55 15.20: 6, 41, 52 17.15: 113 17.53: 113 Josephus Antiquities 1–11: 95 Lycurgus 1.29: 111 Lysias 2.14: 55 2.67: 55 4.13: 112 24.7: 41, 52 32.18: 45 Menander Fragment 707K.-A.: 95 Nepos Dion 2: 130 Pausanias 10.24.1: 79 Plato Apology 34c: 45 35a–e: 46 38a: 6, 79 38d–e: 46 Euthyphro 3d: 53 Ion 535d–e: 42 Laws 800d: 46 Phaedo 58e–59a: 87 Phaedrus 245c–249d: 80

Index of Ancient Passages 161

Protagoras 320c–321d: 29 388–394: 46 Republic 335d: 53 434d–441c: 6 605b–606b: 6, 45, 46, 88 607a: 46 Theaetetus 152a: 129n9 Plutarch Dion 5:130 Sophocles Ajax 364–367: 77 Antigone 332–383: 24–25 446–462: 81 806–816: 82 891–896: 82 1192–1225: 82 Oedipus at Colonus 460–461: 83 562–568: 83 Oedipus the King 1–13: 78 58–72: 78 Terence Heauton Timorumenos 25: 95 Thucydides 2.37: 56

2.51: 28 3.37.2: 32 3.40.2–3: 32 3.48.1: 33 3.52.3: 87 3.69–244: 33 3.98: 33 5:84–116: 33 7.29: 34 7.71, 75, 84–85, 87: 33 Xenophon Agesilaus 1.22: 54 Anabasis 5.8.8–11: 73 [Constitution of the Athenians] 1.10–12: 15 Cyropaedia 2.2.13: 46 5.1.5–6: 63, 64 5.1.18 5.1.18: 65 5.2.17: 67 5.4.18: 62 6.1.47: 46, 63, 64 6.4.2–7: 64 7.3.5, 8: 65 7.3.14: 64 8.2.1: 54 8.4.7–8: 54 Hellenica 1.7.18: 54 Oeconomicus (passim): 15