Ancient Greek Ideas of Equality under the Law - Melissa Lane

So some ancient Greek political ideas were incarnated in goddesses such as Theus, the Goddess of Divine Justice, and her daughter Dke, the goddess of human justice here, also known as Asa. And anyone who happened to see my last Gresham lecture might remember these two images. Dke also had two sisters, Irene Peace and Uno, Mia, the Goddess of Good Legal Order. And you can see the three sisters here in their guys also incarnating the Seasons. And here they're following the God Dion, ISIS. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time, but because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now let's get back to the lecture, But the main subject of my lecture tonight was never turned by the Greeks into a goddess at all. So I don't have any beautiful image to show you. It is equality under Law Equal Legal Order, Mia, which the Greeks considered entirely human. So I'm going to begin with this contrast between these two ideas. Unia, the archaic idea of good order or good legal order, who was a goddess and is Nomia equal legal order? Who or which was not? So is Nomia, as we'll see, can also be described as a quality of law, a quality under law, equality through law. And I wanna emphasize that it was seen by the Greeks from its inception as the product of human effort and especially of democratizing human effort. So we see this connection between democracy and is nomia in the historian ous and ti gives us this famous, um, debate. It's a constitutional debate about the relative merits and disadvantages of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. But he doesn't call it democracy, he calls it is nomia. So he actually puts this debate in the mouth of a sixth century Persian aristocrat, actually a group of these sixth century Persian aristocrats. And the one who speaks in favor of the rule of the majority calls it Mia in this dialect form. Um, a slightly different spelling. So this is an interesting thought. Isia equality of law is actually a way of thinking about democracy. It's a product of democracy and it incarnates democratic values. And so what I wanna do is to explore how and why that is. Now, Heredi was actually writing about two generations after a major breakthrough in the slow process of democratization in Athens. So we can fix our ideas about the emergence of Greek democracy here in the very late sixth century, BCE 5 0 8, when a democratic revolution in Athens overthrew a family of tyrants. And they brought to power this man ese, who then built up a new popular democratic identity. Now that's all the detail I'm going to give you about the history of democratization in Greece tonight. That's going to be the topic of my next lecture. But for tonight, what I want to explore is how this, the, this democratic change brings with it this new idea, this human idea of equality of law. So all you need to do is think about this cusp. If you think about the year 500 or so, that's the turning point from the sixth to the fifth century, b, CE. And that's this major step towards the realization of democracy in Athens. And from there it spreads to elsewhere in Greece. Now, when I stress that is Noia grew up out of and is so closely connected to democracy, that doesn't mean that it was confined to the political sphere alone. So we also find it beyond politics. So at about the same time, at about 500 BCE, we have a medical doctor that, like our provost of Gresham College, a medical doctor who describes health as an mia, an equal balance of powers within the body. So he's bringing arguably democratic political ideas to a metaphor for physical health. And it's also been argued that a bit earlier, this is a kind of prehistory of Mia, that the pre-Socratic philosopher, an enact mander, um, modeled his ideas of the cosmos of the universe on Greek political circles. So going back to Homer, we have models of Greek politics in which there's a speaker in the middle of a circle who is equidistant from everyone. So we see a kind of a quality there that gives rise ultimately to equal law. Now at Axander, doesn't use the word Mia, but the scholar Jean Pire Nan and others have argued that the idea is already kind of taking shape in his cosmological thought. So we see a son Mia now emerging and becoming a kind of way of organizing one's thinking about the nature of order in the body, in the universe, all of that connected also to politics. So here's my plan for the lecture. My next step is going to be to develop further this contrast between aristocratic unia and democratic mia. And after that, I'm gonna take a step back to explore rival ways in Greek philosophy of understanding the meaning of equality itself. What is equality? And then I'll bring those rival understandings of equality to bear on understanding is, and we'll look at three dimensions. Equality under law, equality through law, and the effort of equalization as a political challenge. So three parts. And then the third part will itself have those three parts. So a little bit more than to begin with, you know, Mia as an ancient aristocratic value. So the word comes from the roots for good or well, that's the ooh or ooh word and law or lawfulness, the word for the word nomos. And so that's how it comes to mean good legal order. And some of our richest evidence for this is an archaic ideal comes from the Athenian log verse, Solan, whom I've also spoken about previously here at Gresham. And you see this, for example, in this poem, which is ascribed to Solan. And Solan writes good legal order. Uno Mia reveals all that is orderly and fitting and often places fers round the unjust. And then notice the feminine pronoun. She makes the rough smooth. This is the goddess, you know, Mia so personified. And at the end of the quotation, she puts an end to the anger of grievous strife. So you can see that this is a kind of ideal of good order of obedience and of a kind of justice, but there's nothing here about the equalization of political power. That's what's missing. So this is the sense in which this is a kind of aristocratic ideal. Everyone stay in their place, my station and its duties. Everyone should maintain order as it's been inherited. That's in a way probably the idea of unia that Solan himself inherited. So this idea never becomes a slogan for democracy. We have to turn to Mia for that. Now, to be sure there is a kind of formal equality that the Greeks must have cared about, even in this idea of unia, because that's part of any idea of law. After all, law is about treating equal cases equally. So what Mia is doing is that it's going to build in something stronger. We can say it's not just going to be formal equality, it's going to be a substantive move in which seeming social and political unequals are treated radically as equals. So the scholar John Lardini has emphasized this contrast and again, just to drive that home, right isia is equal order versus a kind of more generalized idea of good order. And what I wanna emphasize there is that the crucial claim here, what was radical in this democratizing humanizing move, is that equality can generate order too. And that's a claim that elites then as now have tended to question and reject. So that's the radical democratic move. If what we want is order equality also can bring it about. Now, as you see in this, in the second quotation on the slide, Lombardi emphasizes that EA involves an equal distribution in regard to law. So it's different from that traditional elite vision. And when he speaks of an equal distribution, this actually picks up on a different etymology that some scholars have seen in the word Mia. So I follow those who connect it to Nomos law, but it has been suggested that it might also be connected to this verb ing, which means to distribute. And what's interesting about that is that even though I think the nomos route makes better sense of these parallel words, as another scholar has pointed out, so we know that in Uno it's a nomos route for law. An anea it's a nomos route for law. An Mia it's a nomos route for law. So it makes sense that an mia, it's a nomos root as well. But nevertheless, I think the idea of distribution is also at work because achieving a genuinely equal distribution of political power in relation to law is what Mia would come to mean. Okay? So to sum up this first part of the lecture, as I began by saying in contrast to those goddesses of divine and human justice, those beautiful incarnations and of good legal order, there's no goddess for Issa nomia, no divine genealogy, no imagery. It's a thoroughly human affair. And it was much later as a word and an idea than other roots that the Greeks had. Um, other words that the Greeks had with the isso root. So ISSO has an older history, but isso nomia seems to be something new under the classical Greek sun from around 500 BCE. And it's defiantly human rather than divine. But what exactly did it mean? So this brings me to the second part of the lecture where I want to explore two rival Greek understandings of the meanings of equality itself. So I'm gonna start with something that I invoked in the announcement for this lecture, uh, which is the remark by the Nobel laureate economist and philosopher Amarus sin who pointed out that whenever we talk about equality, we must always ask as he put it a quality of what. So if you think about it, that's actually intuitive. If we say that Karim and Layla are two equally good tennis players, we're summing up across all the domains of their tennis skills in making an overall judgment, but it wouldn't necessarily follow that they're equally good at serving or volleying. They might have different skills that even out across their performance on the whole court. So if we say they're equally good tennis players, we have to always answer a quality of what, what are we talking about in saying that they're equal? And actually, whenever we judge two things to be equal, we always have to abstract away from dimensions in which they are unequal, otherwise they would be identical, not simply equal. So to bring this home, let me call up a modern remark, um, by, uh, the novelist anal France, who remarks that two people in liberal democracies are held to be equal before the law. And he said the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges to beg in the streets and to steal bread. So what this is saying is that the law in this case announces these facially equal prohibitions. They're formally equal, but we can predict already that they're likely to be violated out of necessity only by the poor. So here, the rich and the poor are equal with respect to their this law in one way, but they're clearly unequal in another way, the law hits the poor much harder. So conversely, if a law announces an equality of opportunity, we also know that it won't necessarily result in equality of outcome. So we always have to decide equality of what, what is the equality that we care about? Is it the starting line? Is it the condition in which people come to the starting line? Is it the conditions in which they find themselves afterwards? And the political theorist, Humira Iar has drawn on the Muslim thinker madu to expand on Son's Point, arguing that different domains of equality have to be defended in different terms. Okay? So that's the general logic of political equality. It's always equality of what, but how did they think about that question in ancient Greece? So if we transpose that question back to ancient Greece, of course we have to acknowledge that we find, first of all, a total negation of equality. In the widespread phenomenon of slavery, the pervasive exclusion of the enslaved was a way of setting their political worth at zero. So they couldn't figure in any calculation of equality at all. But beyond that, Greek philosophers identified a contrast between two kinds of equality. And I wanna develop the, this contrast. So one is equality via weighing, we can call this geometric equality. And the other is equality via counting. And we call this arithmetic equality. So let me illustrate this with this example. So consider on the left, imagine that this is a bag of a few heavy and valuable gold pieces versus a bag of a lot of small light sticks. So in this example, the gold physically weighs more, and so it's monetarily worth more. So if we talk about geometric equality, the gold is unequal to the sticks because it weighs more heavily, it's worth more in these terms. But if we think about arithmetic equality, we just count pieces individually and there are more sticks X hypothesis than there are pieces of gold. And so in arithmetic equality terms, the sticks are more than the gold because there are more of them. Now, the philosopher Aristotle, and this is a picture of him in a statue put up in his birthplace of staa, developed this contrast and he defined these two kinds of equality as follows. So geometric equality, he said is the equality of ratios. That's where we weigh and we assert a different worth versus arithmetic equality, which is sameness in number or size. And we figure that out by counting. And this contrast had real political implications. So think of what might seem like the simplest, most straightforward political task, counting votes. We might think it's obvious how you count votes. You just count them each for one. Surely that's an example of arithmetic equality. But the scholar Melissa Schwartzberg has pointed out that it was only at a specific historical moment that the ancient Athenians started to practice individual vote counting in key political institutions before that. And outside Athens votes were often taken by cheering. So the side that cheered loudest was taken to win. And we refer to this as voting by acclimation. So this happened in some elections, for example, in ancient Sparta, this is the marketplace, the aura of ancient Sparta, um, for the election of certain office holders. So imagine that a committee is sequestered inside that building that you can see at the back of the slide, and the crowd is cheering outside. And this, the committee inside has to try to gauge how much support is there for each of the candidates. And that's how these office holders were elected. Now there's something interesting I think to be said for that because sometimes what one wants to know is not just how many people are for something, but how strongly they are for it. But it also shows us that even something that seems so straightforward as voting is actually subject to this question, a quality of what we have to decide. Are we aiming in voting to weigh collective enthusiasm like the bag of gold or to count noses, to count discreet individual votes like the individual sticks? Now, Aristotle again pointed out that this difference between weighing and and counting amounted to two different ideologies of political equality in the time that he was writing. So he identified a contrast between the way that oligarchs and Democrats thought about equality. So for the oligarchs, as he wrote, if they are unequal in one respect, for example, wealth, they consider themselves to be unequal in all. So for the oligarchs, wealth is a measure of worth and value, and it's geometric because it extends into another dimension. There may be a certain everywhere, all everyone has noses, but oligarchs in addition, have this extra wealth that gives them extra worth. And in Sparta, again, so still with this image, which was essentially an oligarchy political freedom and full citizenship was restricted to a very small number of men who called themselves the peers or the similars, the homo homo. And it, they were similar in being judged equally worthy so that they, there wasn't an abstract ideal of equality, it was their special worth that made them weigh as citizens. So Democrats by contrast wanted to claim that every free male citizen was equal and they counted noses, arithmetically, and these opposed views of equality were the source of political tension and unrest. And again, Aristotle describes this in the politics in book five, when he speaks of the causes of revolution. So he says, the Democrats think that as they are equal, they ought to be equal in all things, while the oligarchs under the idea that they are unequal, they're worth more because of their property claim too much. And both parties, whenever their share in the government does not accord with their preconceived ideas, stir up revolution. So as this suggests, this distinction between geometric and arithmetic equality picks up on real fault lines, real historical political struggles. And we can see it at work in much more recent history as well. So consider for example, the partial moves in Britain in 1918 toward enfranchising women and young men serving in the armed forces. And of course, 1918 is the mo is a moment of the great war, the first world war, the very moment in which suffragettes, um, were agitating for the vote and soldiers were fighting in the trenches. Now if we look at the text of the 1918 representation of the People Act, we see geometric equality at work. So women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification were enfranchised by this act to vote. So notice that distinction even in this move towards enfranchising women, there's still a view that some women are worth more than others. A view that an ancient Greek oligarch would have recognized wealth and property still made a difference to your worth as a citizen. And interestingly also for young men, men in the armed forces who were serving in the armed forces as the war was continuing were allowed to vote from the age of 19. They had extra political worth compared to most men who were enfranchised only at the age of 21. And so even in this key moment in moving towards an equalization of the franchise, we see elements of an oligarchical view, a geometric equality view of weighing political worth, not just counting noses. So democratizing the franchise in ancient Greece, in modern Britain and elsewhere required effortful moves to count rather than to weigh. And as I now turn to the final part of the lecture, where I'm going to bring these rival views of equality to bear on is nomia as equal law. What I'll be arguing is that even in supposedly arithmetically equal democratic contexts, aspects of geometric inequality can still be hidden. So now I come to the third and final part of the lecture, which is the meanings of is nomia. So coming back to that democratic human idea of equality of law, and I'm going to look at three different ways that we can understand that because as you will have noticed, I gave this lecture the title Ancient Greek Ideas of Equality under the Law. But actually remember when we saw the different etymology of the word Mia, there's no preposition in it, it's just equal law or equal legal order or equal distribution. If you go with that etymology, there's no under, but in English we tend to add preposition. So I added equality under the law. But of course that's just one possible interpretation. And so now what I want to do in this final part of the lecture, I'm going to begin with equality under the law. Contrast that with equality through law, and then conclude with the political effort of equalization of making someone count as an equal. So equality under the law. And here I'm gonna emphasize the content of the laws. So how might laws fail to be equal in the sense of treating people equally under the law? So just to remind you again of this anatol uh, France, uh, quotation, right, this is one way we know in advance that laws against vagrancy are going to hit harder against the poor than the rich. And this sort of problem was already recognized by the post-classical author, plu tar, who took the Athenian law giver Solon to have tried to ward it off by abolishing the debts of the poor to secure their equal standing. And I talked about this in my previous lecture, but here I wanna call your attention to the words in green in the middle of the slide, right? What plu tar argues here about solans abolition of debts is that equality under the laws is of no avail if the poor are robbed of it by their debts. So it's exactly the Anatol France point made, um, in, um, the first to second century ce. And it's interesting there no, you can see is related to Mia, right? This is a noun for equality. So this is literally a quality of laws, but the standard translation translates it as equality under the laws. And so we see here how laws that are formally equal may not always treat people sub substantively equally. So even more egregious are laws that are formally equal but intend to discriminate. So you might argue that a case like this or the vagrancy laws, they don't intend to discriminate. It's just that the way society is set up, one knows that there will be a disparate impact. But Plato has one of his characters in the Republic actually argue that each kind of constitution intends to discriminate for some people and against others. So this is Plato's character thymus who's based on a real ambassador from another Greek city to Athens. And he's civically describing the way that he sees laws functioning in various political regimes. And he says democracy makes democratic laws, tyranny, makes tyrannical laws, whoever's in charge in each constitution is making laws to their own advantage. So this is a even more pointed, um, unveiling of law as formally equal, but substantively unequal people in this case aren't actually equal under the laws even though the laws might pretend that they are. So these examples highlight how is nomia can be undermined by forms of hidden privilege in which elitist geometric equality is still concealed or geometric inequality. We might say just because laws look facially equal doesn't mean that they actually do affect people equally or are intended to do so. So one can think of a recent scandal in the UK over the fast track that was set up to authorize government purchases of personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, right? This was a scheme that might have been formally equal, but only the elite and well connected were likely to succeed with the way that the scheme was actually set up. So when we think of is Mia as a quality under the law, we see that it requires constant interrogation and critique to ensure that laws that are genuinely democratically equal and we have to constantly expose and root out pretenses to even handedness that may conceal hidden privilege. So the next interpretation of Mia that I want to consider is equality through law. So we were just talking about equality under law. Now I wanna talk about equality through law. And here we can think of law as granting rights and procedures that one can exercise to vindicate one's equal political standing. So think for example, of the equal right to a jury trial of one's peers. Now of course that right doesn't necessarily ensure an equal ability to make use of it if you can't afford to hire a lawyer or if you lack the money and leisure to be able to bring a case. So this is why one of the important features of Athenian is Nomia was actually the existence of open public prosecutions. So if this were an ancient Greek jury, the person bringing the case wouldn't be a paid official appointed by the state. It could be anyone who could bring a case on behalf of someone else if it was a matter that affected the citizens as a whole. So the citizen prosecutor was as important as the citizen jury and the citizen assembly to the realization of Mia as equality through law in ancient Athens. Now this is another way in which hidden privileging or dis privileging can hide beneath formally open laws. So the victim's commissioner for England and Wales has stated that backlogs in the UK criminal justice system are now resulting. And I quote from an article in The Guardian in Victims of Crime Dying Waiting for Justice as they face delays of up to six years for their cases to be dealt with in court. So we can see from the Athenian example of public prosecutors that legal aid and investment in public prosecution to avoid undue trial delays has a Greek pedigree as being at the heart of a conception of equality through law. Justice delayed is too often justice denied, and we see a different kind of threat to Mia as a quality through law today in regimes of authoritarian populism, sometimes called elected autocracies. So there we see equality through law being undermined. My colleague at Princeton, Kim Shepley calls this autocratic legalism. It's a phenomenon of hollowing out rights and procedures so that they continue to be observed in form, but they lose their protective power and their moral point. So a legally equal right to a fair trial means little if you can't afford a lawyer. But it also means little if judges have been cowed or captured, fired, appointed, or intimidated by a political movement that rejects judicial independence. And this is something that we're seeing in many countries around the world. Shepley's pointed out that the EU is now working to embed rights into structures to try to make equal law part of a more robust infrastructure so that it can be genuinely realized and protected. So again, from the ancient Greek point of view, the thought here is that is nomia is never just a given with formal rule of law. We have to always return to that democratizing force, that push of the isso root equality through law. And that has to be constantly defended and enforced against powerful institutional and ideological forces that have always been arrayed to resist it. And this leads me to my final point. And here I wanna talk about not the adjective equal and not the noun equality, but the verb equalization. So ancient Greek has a verb that means to equalize, and this means to make equal to balance. It can be used of a person holding scales, but this verb, like many Greek verbs could be used in the grammatical middle voice. And the middle voice is a verb conjugation that implies often a self effecting a reflexive dimension of the action that the verb describes. So in the middle voice, this verb means make to make oneself equal to another. This is an effort that a person can carry out themselves to equalize their standing. And this usage goes back as far as Homer in the Iliad book 24, where Homer describes how a human being Nebi had dared to compare herself to make herself equal to the goddess Lato. And she was punished by Lao's daughter Artemis for this audacity. In fact, NBI had bragged that she had more children than the goddess. And so the gods and goddesses killed all of Neo's human children. Now, in that case, making oneself equal is an act of hubris. But I wanna rec to rescue the idea of making oneself equal and connect it back to the winning of the vote by women, by working class men, and originally by the poorest male citizens in ancient Greece, all of which was integral to the consolidation of democracy. All of these changes, these claims to arithmetic equality were not just mathematically or politically obvious, they were enacted through acts of equalization that were really acts of self equalization. So I started by mentioning that Democratic revolution in 5 0 8 BCE, right? That was an act of self equalization. And in later centuries, enslaved peoples have made written and spoken appeals that enacted their claim to equality efforts of self equalization. And for example, we see this in the great 19th century orator and political thinker, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery in the United States, and he rejected the demand that he should have to prove his claim to freedom in equality. So in a famous speech called What to the Slave is the 4th of July Douglass, it made his point not by offering an argument, but by self equalizing with the claim as he put it, there is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him. So Douglass is, Annette is comparing himself to everyone else who would know that slavery is wrong for them. And saying so too, is it for me and for my fellow, um, African Americans. And most significantly in my eyes, Douglass began this speech which he delivered in 1852 with the words fellow citizens. Now this was a time when even free black men in the United States could generally not vote. There were a few cases where they were temporarily enfranchised in some cities or states, but generally they couldn't vote. So this is a moment when Douglass is not technically a fully equal citizen. He's not entitled to the right to vote at that moment, but he self equalizes by calling other Americans his fellow citizens. And in this way, he made a claim of self equalization as many others have done, to write themselves into politics. And I wanna offer one last example of this act of self equalization. And this is about voter registration drives in the contemporary United States. So the legal scholar, Catherine Abrams, has described state voter registration drives that have been conducted by young people who are themselves undocumented immigrants to the United States. So they are not legally entitled to vote, but they have volunteered enthusiastically to register others. And Abrams calls this an act of contentious citizenship. So these young people are unable to vote themselves, but they self equalize. They make themselves into participants in a political and civics framework that does not yet count them as full legal equals. Now, that might seem a surprising story to have arrived at starting from ancient Greek ideas. But what I've tried to indicate is that it should not be so surprising because the idea of Mia equal law equality under the law, equality through the law was itself a radical idea in ancient Greece. It had to be vindicated through struggle, self-assertion, self equalization to try to construct more fair, those still flawed political institutions. So these acts of self equalization then as now go to show that even arithmetic equality is far from being a given. It's not obvious that this is the answer to the question, equality of what it's a political demand and part of a political struggle outside mathematics and certainly of the domain of ethics and politics, claims of equality are always acts of equalization. And at a time when democratic equal legal order or is nomia is under threat in many different places and ways, these kinds of acts of equalization and self equalization continue to offer paths to its fuller realization. Thank you. Thank you Melissa, for another brilliant lecture. Thank you. I mean, for those of you, um, don't know, Melissa came over on the red eye last night from the States. So to be able to perform like that after no sleep and is brilliant. Wonderful. Thank you. My previous flight was canceled. I didn't intend to arrive this morning, but, but so it, so it transpired.<laugh>, Um, I'll take a question from online first, but it's quite an interesting one given what you were talking about self equalization and the power of it. Is it unrealistic to expect laws to be equal or applied equally for the poor when the law makers are themselves not poor and therefore have, if you like, a cultural disconnect Yeah. From the people for whom they're legislating? Yeah. Thank you so much. That's a great question and it really picks up on some of the ancient Greek thoughts that I, that I highlighted in the lecture. So I think that thought was very thinkable to the Greeks. That was the thought that, uh, Plato's character thymus is putting forward when he says the people in power make laws to their own advantage. So I think sometimes we tend to idealize the ancient Greeks and think, oh, you know, they were so high-minded, they didn't entertain these cynical and skeptical challenges. But actually it's the opposite. They pose these really deep challenges. And I think my answer to that would be it's an effort, it's a struggle when can't simply assume that laws that are passed in any given political system are going to be fair. And of course, that also is something, as I'll argue in my lecture next time, that's also something that the critics of democracy saw from the other side. They said, well, if the poor were in in power, they're going to make laws in their own favor. So there's a real question and a kind of challenge about what does it make to try to make laws that are genuinely equal. And you know, I think it's sort of a struggle where people are always, in a way overshooting, falling short and what one has to kind of, you know, simply work with every particular law in order to, to try to redress that balance. You talk a lot about lawmakers in, in this talk. What, how does that relate, say in the modern world or even the ancient Greek world to the concept of an independent judiciary separate from the law makers? Yeah, so it's interesting. So it, part of ancient Greek democracy in Athens is that the demos, which means this is an anticipation of my next lecture, all the people, but it also has a special emphasis of the common people who were the majority, who were relatively poor compared to a much smaller elite of about 10 to 15%. So the people staffed the judiciary and they also kind of staffed the, the assembly. So there's a sense in which they're ju they are judging the very laws that, you know, kind of maybe were, were, were in part formulated or in part inherited, um, in, in their, um, political order. So, um, you know, I think I think today with the professionalization of the profession of law, the profession of the judiciary, then we have a different kind of set of problems. So for the Athenians, that was one set of problems where, you know, they thought it was thought, well this is actually all people from a certain social class dominating all these roles. Now we almost have the opposite. We have, you know, these roles are professionalized in ways that mean that people from lower social classes are more rarely represented in them. And so again, I would say there's a, there's a tension that what I've tried to, to argue is that equality of law, it sounds like we could just get it right once and for all. And there's a simple answer and actually that just isn't true. It there, there's always a question, a quality of what equality for whom equality how and law is part of that story. It's not a kind of separate domain that that could give us a neutral set of, of conclusions. Let's, Let's take some questions from the floor. There's lots of, um, you know, high-minded people who undertake voluntary activities to try and help redress legal imbalances. And you gave the example of the voter registration folks in the states. And here you might think of volunteers at citizens advice bureaus or even lawyers who do pro bono work. Uh, I mean in, in ancient Greece, were, were there similar people who were actively trying to do things to, to, to address some of the imbalances that were being discussed by the philosophers and the, and the thinkers? Yeah, so I mentioned the, this figure of the kind of citizen prosecutor where anyone in Athens just to take Athens as the example could, if it was a case that was thought to affect the society broadly, anyone could bring a case. So somebody might not be able to bring a case themselves, but somebody else could bring it for them. Now it has to be said, you know, motives are often mixed, you know, they're not always pure. And so some of the time those people were doing it to make a name for themselves in part, you know, in some way. Um, and I think we also do have to be conscious of the dangers of a kind of, um, vigilantism if people start to, you know, bring cases when they think that they see a cause. But you know, other authorities may not. So I'm kind of giving it as an example, but again, I don't think there's any one perfect answer to these problems. I think, you know, every effort that we make to try to achieve this has advantages. It has strengths, you know, the, the, the existence of people like that can be a very great boon. We also have to be aware that, you know, there can be unintended consequences. Any institution can be misused. So, you know, I think, I think it's a balance, um, in that way. But, but I think that this, I I I, I exactly wanted to bring out that this role of citizens acting on behalf of others is an important role that can in, in some circumstances really help to vindicate the equality through law, um, for, for people who can't do it for themselves. Next question, I think, mark, thank you Very much for the, it was, um, uh, very fascinating. Um, I just had a, a question regarding, um, I think it was Arif metric is the, yeah, the term. Was there any critique during the ancient Greeks of how it might affect equality on the, for minorities as in the majority would choose a law? Uh, Yeah, In regards, Yes. Thank you very much. No, that's a great question. The question of majority minority relationships, and I know it seems like I'm harping on about the rich poor divide in ancient Greece and all of my lectures, but it's because it was so front and center in Greek politics. I mean, again, if you go back to that constitutional debate that I presented, um, and I'll talk about it more next time, um, you know, exactly the choice of politics is essentially should we have an oligarchy or should we have a democracy? That was kind of the live choice. So, um, and, and we'll see next time again, there's actually this amazing text that is anonymous text, but it seems to have been written by an anonymous kind of wealthy Athenian, observing how the democracy was working, but being very critical of it. Exactly, because he thought that it was being unfair to the minorities. So there's definitely a kind of observation that, you know, any majority can be unfair to minorities. And, and I, and I think that is, that is an important point. Democracy is majority rule, you know, incarnate certain values, but it also incarnates certain risks. And so again, we're looking to balance the values that we're standing for and test different institutional arrangements rather than saying any one is the perfect solution. So come or tune in next time. And I will talk more about this actually next week, it's next Thursday, in fact, To extend that question. Yeah. Do you think that equality under the law depends on having equality of morals within and between societies? Yeah. Uh, this is a, yeah, this is a very interesting question. I think certainly legal equality, incarnates values that again, we have to care about them if we're going to really keep it meaningful. So that was the example that I meant with the autocratic legalism. Legal order can just be hollowed out. It can be abused. It can be manipulated, right? And we we're seeing this again in these elected autocracies where formally they have democracy, they have a quality of law, but the judges have been suborned. And so, um, you know, really one can't expect a fair trial even though notionally the motions will be gone through. And so this is where I wanted to really emphasize it really is about values. It's about what we think a quality of law should stand for. And then we always have to interrogate is whatever way we think we're doing it is, you know, does it have flaws? Can we improve it? And again, however we try to improve it will probably air to the other side and we'll have to improve it further. So it's a kind of never ending struggle, but the, the effort to articulate the values and really stand up for them, I think is what's critical. Um, today we think of equality to some extent being underpinned by, um, checks and balances. Yeah. So by camera two houses, yeah. Apart, so in Hungary, urban doesn't have a second house. He can sort do what he wants. In the Czech Republic, there's two houses and the second house says no and is voted in slightly differently. So you get that it's an anti majoritarian kind of thing. Yeah. How did that stand in ancient Greece? What did they think about that? Yeah, so this is, um, this is interesting. So again, if we just take the example of Athens, there is a council, well, there are two councils, but I'll focus on one of them in particular as well as an assembly. So it formally looks like a kind of second house, but its role is actually not the role of, um, revising or approving the way, for example, the House of Lords functions rather its role was primarily to prepare the agenda for the assembly. And it had some functions of its own, like receiving ambassadors and doing some things like that. So it's again, an interesting example where it looks like there's a second house, but actually the second house is kind of subordinate and kind of instrumental to the, as it were, we might think, the main house. Now, on the other hand, um, one of the things that's kind of tricky about this though is that the, the Greeks tended, as I argued in my last lecture, they tended to think of their laws as largely inherited. So they didn't really think that there was this danger that the assembly was tomorrow going to change all the laws. You know, that just wasn't something that was going to happen. So the power of the assembly was more about policy decisions, um, rather than about lawmaking. I mean, I'm gonna try to talk about this a bit more next time and also in my series next year, because it's quite hard for us to get our heads around that when we think about an assembly or a leg, we think of it as a legislature, but that's not actually how the Greek, the, the Greek assemblies typically functioned. But having said that, so when we then look for, well, are there models of, um, you know, more like a divi checks and balances, we find that discussed in the post-classical Greek historian Polyus, and he sees it in Sparta and also in Rome, um, which was already developing at the time that, that he was writing or, you know, was well known to him. He was kind of living under its way. So there is an ancient pedigree to the checks and balances ideas, but it's not so much in Athens. Um, Thank you very much for a very thought provoking talk. My question is this, uh, what would the, um, ancient Greeks make of Karl Marx's demand for equality to each according to their needs and from each according to their ability? Because doesn't it address the, that's superb critique that, um, um, uh, France makes in his poem about the equality of law that it's forbidden for both the rich and the poor asleep under the bridges and bail on streets, Right? Yes. So what would, What would they think of, of, of Marx? Well, Well, it's, you know, another thing that Mark said, which is interesting in this context is that he said democracy is the revealed mystery of all constitutions. So in a sense, he, he is making that point that it's the, as an earlier question, put it right, it is, it's a concentration of power of a certain kind of people, and that's what that constitutes. Now, I don't wanna over, so it's interesting, I think the Greeks were very aware of this rich poor divide. It doesn't follow that they would've, most of them endorsed the, the kind of, um, socialist formula that you were talking about. Um, there, there were some movements for equalization of land, for example, um, both in Greece and in Rome. Um, so there's some movements that say we should redivide the lands so that more poor people can enjoy land. So there's some idea of that, but a lot, but yet we also have to say there, there was also even the poor were kind of privileged compared to, compared to the enslaved, right? So this was not a kind of universal emancipatory vision for the most part that we find, um, Greek thinkers, um, endorsing. I mean, having said that, there are arguments that, um, you know, um, other Greek thinkers, Epicurus, for example, is kind of anticipating modern ecology and maybe anticipating Marx in some ways. So it's, well, of course, one can't generalize. The Greeks thought many things. One can't say they all thought that, but I think not many would've gone in fully in that direction. But there's certainly, as you say, elements of that idea that, that we can recognize. Thank you so much for your lecture. I really enjoy that. I just want to ask you, what do you think were the, um, the actualization of equality, um, and law making in say, state capitalist or socialist countries? Would you say that is more viable? Um, so yeah, so thank you. So, so the question about socialist socialism or state capitalism? You know, I think it's a, that's a big question. And so I, I would need to think about, you know, more specific cases, which I'm not an expert on. Um, I mean, I, I think that, you know, the, the certainly socialist countries, and, and maybe this picks up the mark's point as well, central to that ideal has been the kind of distinction between formal and substantive equality that I've been drawing on. So, so I do think that socialist thinkers have really driven that point home. They've said, you know, there's formal idea, formal equality in capitalism, but we have the poor sleeping under bridges and so on. And so in that sense, I think that that recognition has maybe been more pointed in socialist traditions of thought and practice than in, than always in liberal ones. And so part of what I'm trying to say is liberal democrats too have to recognize that formal equality isn't always enough, and it can be self undermining. And, you know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for it, but it means we shouldn't assume that it's going to kind of just realize itself easily, or, or, or always. Yeah. So we'll take your question. So then I'll take one more from the online audience. Did the Greeks have a concept of universal law, or was it specific to particular cities and states? Yeah, um, the example I have is that Gladstone specifically forbade officials in, in broader, to do anything to stop smuggling into Spain because he thought that Spanish duties were I immo. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, that's a wonderful example. So the Greeks, this is a really interesting question about the Greeks. There's certainly language of certain kinds of laws that are divine and therefore would apply to all human beings. And so in soles, Antigone, for example, the duty to bury one's kin, that of course, then Antigone acts on, and that ultimately costs her her life. That's described as a kind of divine law. And we find in the, in especially in stoic philosophy, an appeal to natural law that again, is kind of universal and extends as a, as a kind of part of the order of the cosmos. But at the same time, they recognized, you know, distinctive bodies of law. So most of their laws were the laws of solen, which applied to Athens or the laws of like kga, which applied to Sparta. So there's a kind of combination. There are some laws that are universal, but, but certainly in the classical period that's very few, mostly these, these things about kind of our fundamental obligations to kin to the gods. Those sorts of ideas were thought to be more universal. But, but certainly there would be many laws that they would say, these are laws for Athens, they're not laws, you know, for Sparta. And then there are some things in between, like all of them recognizing Delphi, all of them, you know, sort of honoring the Olympic games and so on. So there's, there's a sort of continuum, I think. Right. I'm going to read out the last question online 'cause Sure. Melissa will need a drink very shortly. Um, c could you say something about the Egyptian influence on those Greeks who, um, admiring Egypt's long term stability supported you Knowmia as opposed to omi? Yeah, thank you. Um, that's a wonderful question actually. Heredi mentions that Solan, for example, borrowed one of his laws from ancient Egypt. And the Greeks were very aware that the Egyptians, as they thought of it, had a much more ancient civilization than the Greeks did. And we find this very pointedly and Plato, partly because Greek cities seemed to be more subject to kind of, um, uh, sort of natural and political earthquakes as it were. And even though in Egypt, of course, there's the ebb and flow of the Nile, the thought was that the Egyptians had learned to manage that. And so they had achieved a more stable civilization with longer written records. The Greeks were aware that the Egyptians had had writing for longer than they had had. Um, so I hadn't connected it specifically to, you know, Mia, and that's a great thought that I want to explore. But I think certainly the idea that the Egyptians are practitioners of religious and legal ordering that is more ancient than anything that the Greeks thought that they had achieved. And that was, um, a kind of model in, in many ways, um, for the Greeks. I think that's definitely true. Well, what a fantastic lecture. Wonderful answering of questions as well after such a long flight. Ladies and gentlemen, please thank Professor Melissa Lee. Thank you.