While Greek and Roman thinkers were influential in developing ideas such as citizenship, justice and equality, the notion of universal ‘human rights’ (1948), especially those involving one’s ‘identity’, would have struck them as absurd.
‘Identity’ derives from the Latin idem, ‘the same, unchanged’, via the French identité (14th century). The term has been colonised by many different groups who feel that their specific identity – e.g. colour, sexual preferences, personal beliefs – bestows ‘rights’ upon them to behave or be treated in specific ways, whatever anyone else thinks about it, let alone the law of the land. But as the great Greek historian Herodotus pointed out after spending a lifetime travelling round the ancient world, every culture had its own way of doing things, which it regarded as definitive. Try imposing universal ‘human rights’ on that lot!
Not that the notion of a ‘right’ did not exist, e.g. ownership of slaves. As we saw last week, Athenians entitled males aged 18 or over, of Athenian parents on both sides, to determine Athens’s fortunes in the Assembly. But that was conditional on birth, not a ‘human right’ in the modern sense. And Athenians took that ‘right’, or privilege, extremely seriously. It entailed a duty to act in Athens’s interests, and the punishments for those who attempted to use the assembly in their own interests or even persuade it to make a decision which turned out, in the event, to be disastrous, were severe.
Greeks, in other words, thought primarily in terms of the community’s, not the individual’s, good. So Greek arguments about any ‘right’ would have centred on public, not personal, interest: did any specific sort of behaviour weaken military capacity, offend the gods, corrupt the young, and so on? A concept such as ‘conscientious objection’ would have been laughed out of court. The Romans largely followed suit. They did invent the idea of a ‘law of nations’, but only with reference to trade and foreign relations. But Cicero (d. 42 bc) idealised a social, legal and educational humanitas, involving all ‘identities’ embracing reason and (free) speech in a fellowship of teaching, learning and debating. Little chance of that catching on.
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