Where do ‘human rights’, as a concept and as a legal regime, come from? In the present book S. argues that the Athenians of the classical period ‘invented humane values’ (p. 2) and that a ‘parallel wave’ of humane discourse arose in the eighteenth century in Western Europe, in the work of authors directly influenced by Greek texts. Across an introduction, six chapters, three ‘explorations’ and a conclusion, S. traces the language of compassion and ‘humaneness’ in classical Athens, comparing those values to similar-looking ideological developments in eighteenth-century Europe. S.'s purpose is couched in interested terms, as an attempt to correct a recent ‘phase of polemical disdain for and partial rejection of the Greeks’ (p. 7), by showing that, ‘[f]or all our political correctness or genuine Angst’, ‘this heritage has borne important fruit’ (p. 8). While S. addresses an important subject, the book suffers from numerous errors and insufficient argumentation.

The first ‘exploration’ introduces us to an odd work of the French abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, which was first published in 1788 and featured in the personal library of Thomas Jefferson. The work purports to be the travelogue of a Scythian in Greece in the fourth century bce, replete with descriptions based on the author's knowledge of the ancient sources. S. suggests that Barthélemy understood ancient Greek slavery to be relatively ‘humane’ and that this understanding, conveyed through Anacharsis’ description, would have informed Jefferson's picture of Greece. (Jefferson is elsewhere said to have ‘treated [his slaves] as kindly as possible’, p. 18; compare the official Monticello website, which maintains that ‘there is no such thing as a “good” slaveholder’.) S. also wishes to read Barthélemy's work in its historical context, as reflecting the concerns of Enlightenment France. Some thoughts are not Barthélemy's editorialising, however. For example, S. sees ‘intriguing ambiguity’ in his description of the painter Parrhasius’ portrait of the Athenian dêmos, which shows it as ‘violent, unjust, gentle, compassionate, vain-glorious, crouching, haughty, and timid’ (p. 14, emphasis in S.). But any ambiguity here is due not to Barthélemy but to Pliny the Elder, whose description of Parrhasius’ painting Barthélemy has copied word for word (iracundum iniustum … clementem misericordem; gloriosum … humilem, ferocem fugacemque, NH 35.69).

Chapter 1 depicts both classical Greece and eighteenth-century Europe as periods of progressive enlightenment, with Protagoras’ rationalism, for example, finding its counterpart in the work of Adam Smith. One reads here very traditional accounts of the Greek move from mythos to logos and of the superiority of ‘difficult’ Thucydides over Herodotus, ‘old-fashioned fun reading’ (p. 27). The Greeks are credited with ‘the beginnings of city planning’ (p. 27), but planned urban space goes back thousands of years earlier, as can be seen in sites like Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan (mid-third millennium bce). Chapter 2 claims to test the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz's theory that notions of rights develop in reaction to wartime atrocities. S. argues that this happened in classical Greece and in eighteenth-century Europe, but she does not examine other time periods or places. Dershowitz's theory would seem to predict that rights talk would emerge anywhere there was terrible violence. The theory is pertinent here only if fifth-century bce Greece and eighteenth-century Europe were uniquely bloody. Chapter 3 plausibly argues that the Athenians became more emotional and prone to crying as the fifth and fourth centuries progressed, much like their counterparts in the eighteenth century. It is misleading to claim, however, that the Athenians fined the poet Phrynichus because he made them cry, and ‘emotional outbursts … were strongly discouraged’ (p. 43): Herodotus makes clear that they fined him because he reminded them of the sufferings of the Milesians (6.21.2). Chapter 4 charts parallel developments in notions of pity and humaneness in the two time periods, with special emphasis placed on the emergence of philanthrôpia as a value in the fourth century. The second ‘exploration’ looks at the early modern reception of the figures of Cyrus and Panthea from Xenophon's Cyropaedia.

Part 2, ‘Ancient Greek Roots’, begins with Chapter 5, which explores four central elements of the Greeks’ notion of respect for human beings: individuality, dignity, freedom and compassion. S. (pp. 71–2 with p. 133 n. 1) seems to follow the historian Anthony Pagden in believing that the Greeks were exceptional in that they had a single word, anthrôpos, that applied to all human beings regardless of gender or status, but this is a feature of multiple languages, including Sanskrit and Chinese. S. repeats Herodotus’ account of Xerxes having his troops whipped at Thermopylae as evidence for the Greeks’ love of freedom and for Persian despotism. Chapter 6 charts the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity throughout European history, via Hellenised Jewish writers, the Christian church, university education and travel, among other routes. The final ‘exploration’ turns to exploitative aspects of the two societies in question. S. describes Athenian slave torture and compares two slaveholders, Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson, the latter of whom she views as never overcoming the contradictions between his Enlightenment ideals and his ownership of human beings.

While the book adduces striking parallels between ancient and modern thought and suggests promising future avenues of research, the argument is too cursorily made to achieve the impact to which it aspires. Ideas and authors are introduced suddenly, usually through other scholars’ treatments, only to exit the stage after a sentence or two. In Chapter 2, for example, we get (pp. 38–9) three very brief thumbnail sketches of the anti-imperialist attitudes of Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, all based on a study by the political scientist Sankar Muthu – for what purpose it is unclear. S. relies repeatedly on private communications with other scholars in order to make mundane points, such as that ‘Athens fought war after war, initiating conflict even when the odds were against them’ (p. 34 with p. 130 n. 6; see also pp. 128 n. 2, 129 n. 10, 130 n. 22, 131 n. 14). There are passages where S. reproduces her previous work on tragedy and compassion, often verbatim (e.g. pp. 2, 32ff., 72ff., 87, 112–14, all acknowledged in the endnotes). Errors of fact proliferate: the Hephaisteion on Kolonos Agoraios is a different structure from the sanctuary of Theseus where slaves sought asylum (p. 17 with p. 128 nn. 11 and 12, and again at p. 113); the historian of ancient Greece's name is Virginia Hunter, not ‘Virginia Hunt’ (p. 84 and bibliography); Constantinople did not fall to the Ottoman Turks in ‘1493’ but in 1453 (p. 92); ancient Greek was not part of the education of elites in the Latin West ‘for more than fifteen hundred years’ (p. 101); there is no good evidence, comic slander notwithstanding, that Aspasia of Miletus was a ‘courtesan’, nor did she live with Pericles only ‘after the death of his wife’ (p. 102) – Pericles divorced his first wife (Plut. Per. 24.5). For a short book, lapses in editing have rendered it repetitive: pp. 104–5 replicate virtually unchanged material from pp. 63–6 about the character of Panthea in Xenophon's Cyropaedia, including the same quotation from the play Cyrus the Great: or, the Tragedy of Love, in the earlier passage credited to Thomas Maurice and in the later to John Banks. Finally, on a more structural level, one should note that S. has not shown that the Greeks ‘invented humane values’, since she confines herself to ancient Greece and early modern Europe; she does not consider, for example, that the Chinese word rén means ‘individual person’ and is related to the homophonous word for ‘humaneness’, so important in Confucianism. In the absence of a comparative study of the Chinese classics, then (to name only one example), there is insufficient evidence to claim priority and exclusivity for the Greeks in ‘inventing’ humane values.