The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights

Ideals matter.  Ours is an imperfect world—there has never been a perfect one—but we would be much the worse if we had no sense of human worth, of the value of empathy, and of the importance of humane and rational discourse.  These ideals were articulated with particular clarity by writers in classical Greece and again in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights, Rachel Hall Sternberg illustrates, crisply and elegantly, the similarities between these two civilizing visions and why they remain crucial in our time.

— David Konstan, author of In the Orbit of Love: Affection in Ancient Greece and Rome

The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights is a great pleasure to read, offering, as it does, a novel approach to a much-understudied problem in the history of modern ideas: the relation of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the legacy of classical antiquity. There is a refreshing boldness to the way in which Sternberg presents her provocative argument, which is sure to attract the attention of anyone interested in the history of 'human rights.'

— Johnson Kent Wright, author of A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably

[The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights] adduces striking parallels between ancient and modern thought and suggests promising future avenues of research.

— The Classical Review