Greece, Rome, and the Bill of Rights (37 page)

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Authors: Susan Ford Wiltshire

Tags: #Political Science, #General, #History, #Law, #Reference, #Civil Rights, #test

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Page 186
ance. When Americans engage in making a religion out of nationalism, or nationalism out of religion, we are behaving more like Romans than the secular citizens that the Constitution establishes. In a liberal democracy, where freedom of thought is valued, attitudes toward any issue may vary widely with impunity. The Bill of Rights preserves the possibility that we do not all have to be the same to get along.
Knowing the longer story of which our own story is an episode engages us more actively as caretakers of its claims. An awareness of the long heritage behind the Bill of Rights enlivens us to the values it represents. These are important ideas with a long history, not lightly to be discarded even in times of great pressures, when the temptation to do so may be strong.
Understanding the political origins of civic identity in the ancient world may also lead to another kind of awareness. From a contemporary perspective, Athens and Rome placed too heavy an emphasis on the state as the definer of civic identity. Now, however, we may be in danger of the opposite emphasis, on the individual at the expense of the common good.

2
If excessive individualism has replaced the excessive corporatism of ancient societies, then an appreciation for the history of rights may be a salutary reminder that we are formed by our communities as well as by our natures. In that way the story of the Bill of Rights places us in the rich sphere of interplay between the private and the public good.

The framers brought to the new American nation all the traditions of governance to which they were heir. Combining the Athenian fearlessness of innovation with the political pragmatism of the Romans, they wrote into the Constitution their belief that the civic rights of human beings are so basic that they cannot be restricted by government. The Bill of Rights makes explicit the constitutional guarantees of liberal democracy. In part because of its long parentage, it has been both enduring and adaptable as a safeguard of free society.

 

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NOTES
Introduction
1.
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, As Recorded by Lucien Price
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), pp. 203, 161.
2. Plato,
Laws
923a (tr. Taylor).
3. Aristotle,
Politics
1337a2829 (8.1.4) (tr. Barker).
4. A. P. d'Entrèves,
Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy
, 2d ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1970), p. 18, proposes that there would have been no American or French Revolution, and no ideas of freedom or equality under the law, without the influence of natural law.
Chapter 1
1. William V. Harris,
Ancient Literacy
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 46.
2. Harris,
Ancient Literacy
, p. 328, estimates on the basis of the rules of ostracism that from the 480s on, probably only about 15 percent of male citizens or 5 percent of the total adult population, including women and slaves, were literate. Alfred Burns, "Athenian Literacy in the Fifth Century
B.C.
,"
Journal of the History of Ideas
42 (1981), p. 371, concludes that from the end of the sixth century
B.C.
, the "vast majority" of Athenian citizens were literate.
3. Harris,
Ancient Literacy
, p. 47. The complete text of the inscription, with translation and an extended discussion, is given by Michael Gagarin,
Early Greek Law
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 8186.
4. Harris,
Ancient Literacy
, p. 51.
5. Gagarin,
Early Greek Law
, pp. 13233.

 

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Page 188
6. Gagarin,
Early Greek Law
, p. 141. R. K. Sinclair, in
Democracy and Participation in Athens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), acknowledges the importance of legislative sovereignty as the underlying assumption of Athenian democracy (pp. 1, 6768), but locates the compelling cause of democratic government in the victories of the Athenians, virtually unaided, against the Persians at Marathon in 490
B.C.
and Salamis in 479: "These remarkable military successes engendered in the Athenians in general a high confidence in their polis and in themselves, and also a recognition of the contribution of all Athenians to the security and safety of their polis" (p. 5).
7. Robert J. Bonner,
Lawyers and Litigants in Ancient Athens
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), pp. v, 1, 135.
8. Roscoe Pound,
The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times
(St. Paul: West Publishing, 1953), pp. 2834.
9. Bonner,
Lawyers and Litigants
, p. 110.
10. Lionel Casson, "Imagine, if you will, ..."
Smithsonian
18 (October 1987), p. 122: "Imagine, if you will, a time without any lawyers at all; civilization flourished in Egypt and ancient Greece with little help from lawyering, but then came Rome and our troubles began."
11. Edward E. Cohen,
Ancient Athenian Maritime Courts
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 3.
12. Eric A. Havelock,
The Greek Concept of Justice
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 1314.
13. Heraclitus, fragment 220 in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven,
The Presocratic Philosophers
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 199.
14. Kirk and Raven,
Presocratic Philosophers
, pp. 21415.
15. See Martin Ostwald,
From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 260273.
16. Aristotle,
Politics
1294a79 (4.8.6).
17. Aristotle,
Nicomachaean Ethics
1098a78, b24 (1.7.14).

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