�Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto’

�I am a man: I deem nothing pertaining to man foreign to me.’ The words of the comic playwright P.Terentius Afer reverberated across the Roman world of the mid-second century BC and beyond.

There is one short rule that should regulate human relationships. All that you see, both divine and human, is one. We are the parts of one great body. Nature created us from the same source and to the same end. She imbued us with mutual affection and sociability, she taught us to be fair and just, to suffer injury rather than to inflict it. She bids us extend our hands to all in need of help. Let that well-known line be in our hearts and on our lips: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.¹

With access to an intellectual coterie in which culture, influence and realism all played a part, Terence’s message epitomised the Roman conception of human rights. It was not a starry-eyed concept. Prompted by the need to define their relations with non-Romans, the new masters of the Mediterranean world sought to combine the tenets of Greek philanthropia with traditional Roman values. The resultant product, humanitas, was given theoretical form by thinkers like Cicero and Seneca, and practical expression by laws and trials. The idea of humanitas was not confined to the external scene. It also had an impact on the domestic scene, primarily with reference to relations between ruler and subject, but also taking in relations between fellow-citizens.

The word humanitas, together with its adjective, humanus,¹ has a broad semantic span. Its primary connotation is the quality of civilised and cultural behaviour that is inculcated in people by education and training. Fom there it broadens out so as to become an incentive to do the right thing. In particular it acts as an incentive to avoid savage and brutal behaviour towards other members of the human race, either as individuals or in groups. But there is even more to it. There is a considerable amount of material pertaining specifically to human rights that is not identified by a specific humanitas label, or indeed by any label. That material must be given full weight in order to complete the picture of Roman human rights in the round. But no barrier will be erected between the humanitas/humanus material and the unlabelled material. At any given point the context will show whether it is a question of humanitas/humanus as expressly used in a source, or of human rights as a whole.