10 CONCLUSION

What have we said about human rights in Ancient Rome, and have we said it effectively? How far does our evidence support the belief that the principles were clearly perceived and vigorously applied?

The picture is something of a patchwork.

Punishment is more equivocal. Cicero fulminates against cruel punishments, but it is not the death penalty as such that troubles him. As long as it is inflicted in an approved manner, and after fair trial, he has no complaint; any twinge of conscience is allayed by the panacea of utilitas publica. Seneca is equally selective, though on a somewhat different level. His bete noire is the special kind of nastiness served up at the games, something to which Cicero is indifferent. Yet both in the Republic and in the Principate strenuous efforts to reduce the incidence of death sentences were made. The Republic pinned its hopes on voluntary exile, to such good effect that executions were, at least under regular criminal process, transmuted into exile for much of the first century BC.

Universalism is another grey area. In theory the idea was firmly entrenched; the essential unity of mankind has seldom been proclaimed as cogently as by Seneca. But that was offset by the court­craft of Cicero, and even more drastically by the intransigence of Cassius Longinus. The elitism so admired by Aristides does nothing to season the dish. The mischief is compounded by the blatant second- century division of society into upper and lower brackets, which brought with it punitive differentials that no one seems to have found reprehensible. Racial prejudice is another dislocating feature, though Rome is not alone in this. But despite the adverse impact that it must have had on other ethnic groups, Rome went down to posterity as the great exponent of multiculturalism.

One of the unequivocal successes is the reverence for the human form displayed by rulers from Domitian to Antoninus Pius. The repeated restraints on castration and other assaults on nature reveal an ability to give practical expression to natural law that is well ahead of anything that the moderns have been able to achieve.

Special pleading is required for the really dark areas. However much the treatment of slaves may have improved in the Principate, and however widespread slavery was in antiquity, the institution was a gross denial of people’s fundamental humanity. In the case of the s.c. Silanianum and other punishments it was more than that. Even a tu quoque, in the shape of the vast indifference of today’s world to similar manifestations, cannot detract from its innate wrongness. The prospects for genocide are slightly better, not because it was less atrocious in itself, but because it was discontinued (under the influence of humanitas) after Sulla and his lukewarm imitators.

Perhaps the best credential that humanitas Romana has to offer is its recognition by the law as a definitive canon of interpretation. If a submission by Cicero or an opinion by a classical jurist could be based on humanitas, that was its title to elegance. It acquired a rationale in accordance with the accepted principles of aequitas. It broke away from the straitjacket of the strict law, importing a degree of flexibility that allowed members of the human race to be treated as individuals with diverse problems rather than as cyphers.

There is something more to be said about the link between Roman humanitas and modern human rights. A memorable passage in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall runs as follows:

If a man were called to fix a period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.

Madame Necker described his masterpiece as a bridge that carried one from the ancient world to the modern. The comment was even more apt than she knew. Gibbon not only looked back to the second century AD as the quintessence of humanitas, he also looked forward to modern human rights. If the Universal Declaration of 1948 had any direct ancestors, they were the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. Both documents were exactly contemporaneous with the publication of Decline and Fall (1776­88). Gibbon was a child of the Enlightenment, he was steeped in the same liberal climate as the sponsors of the two declarations. The American founding fathers absorbed the same classical tradition as Gibbon. And the author of the French declaration advertised his debt to Rome by covering both �The Rights of Man’ and �The Rights of Citizens’. Gibbon would not have quibbled about modern human rights’ debt to Ancient Rome.

The many similarities between the ancient and modern systems can readily be gathered from the summarised references in this chapter. But at the end of the day there is a more fundamental question. Has the modern system borrowed wisely from Rome? Has it been able to benefit from its inheritance? We live in a world in which the global village, lacking the cohesion and dedication of the Roman empire, threatens to destroy humanitas. Greed and corruption, for which no repetundae remedy is available, are everywhere. Technology has debased freedom of information into a licence to disinform. Human rights now grow out of the casing of a bomb. Quo vadis? Where will it all end? There is no satisfactory answer. The writing is on the wall, but who has understood it?