Book Review of R. H. Sternberg, The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights (original) (raw)

Where do 'human rights', as a concept and as a legal regime, come from? In the present book S. argues that the Athenians of the classical period 'invented humane values' (p. 2) and that a 'parallel wave' of humane discourse arose in the eighteenth century in Western Europe, in the work of authors directly influenced by Greek texts. Across an introduction, six chapters, three 'explorations' and a conclusion, S. traces the language of compassion and 'humaneness' in classical Athens, comparing those values to similar-looking ideological developments in eighteenth-century Europe. S.'s purpose is couched in interested terms, as an attempt to correct a recent 'phase of polemical disdain for and partial rejection of the Greeks' (p. 7), by showing that, '[f]or all our political correctness or genuine Angst', 'this heritage has borne important fruit' (p. 8). While S. addresses an important subject, the book suffers from numerous errors and insufficient argumentation. The first 'exploration' introduces us to an odd work of the French abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, which was first published in 1788 and featured in the personal library of Thomas Jefferson. The work purports to be the travelogue of a Scythian in Greece in the fourth century BCE, replete with descriptions based on the author's knowledge of the ancient sources. S. suggests that Barthélemy understood ancient Greek slavery to be relatively 'humane' and that this understanding, conveyed through Anacharsis' description, would have informed Jefferson's picture of Greece. (Jefferson is elsewhere said to have 'treated [his slaves] as kindly as possible', p. 18; compare the official Monticello website, which maintains that 'there is no such thing as a "good" slaveholder'.) S. also wishes to read Barthélemy's work in its historical context, as reflecting the concerns of Enlightenment France. Some thoughts are not Barthélemy's editorialising, however. For example, S. sees 'intriguing ambiguity' in his description of the painter Parrhasius' portrait of the Athenian dêmos, which shows it as 'violent, unjust, gentle, compassionate, vain-glorious, crouching, haughty, and timid' (p. 14, emphasis in S.). But any ambiguity here is due not to Barthélemy but to Pliny the Elder, whose description of Parrhasius' painting Barthélemy has copied word for word (iracundum iniustum. .. clementem misericordem; gloriosum. .. humilem, ferocem fugacemque, NH 35.69). Chapter 1 depicts both classical Greece and eighteenth-century Europe as periods of progressive enlightenment, with Protagoras' rationalism, for example, finding its counterpart in the work of Adam Smith. One reads here very traditional accounts of the Greek move from mythos to logos and of the superiority of 'difficult' Thucydides over Herodotus, 'old-fashioned fun reading' (p. 27). The Greeks are credited with 'the beginnings of city planning' (p. 27), but planned urban space goes back thousands of years earlier, as can be seen in sites like Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan (mid-third millennium BCE). Chapter 2 claims to test the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz's theory that notions of rights develop in reaction to wartime atrocities. S. argues that this happened in classical Greece and in eighteenth-century Europe, but she does not examine other time periods or places. Dershowitz's theory would seem to predict that rights talk would emerge anywhere there was terrible violence. The theory is pertinent here only if fifth-century BCE Greece and eighteenth-century Europe were uniquely bloody. Chapter 3 plausibly THE CLASSICAL REVIEW