A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. As Julia Annas remarks in her Introduction to Plato’s Republic, in Plato’s ideal city “all classes are protected in freely having and doing what is necessary for them best to fill their social role.” At the same time, Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two.