42 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)Greece and the Birth of Natural Law
It has been observed that the Greeks had a consciousness of their own cul-
tural unity, notwithstanding their po liti cal divisions, and that the funda-
mental social division was not between the Greek states but rather between
the Greek world as a whole and the barbarians. Th is was true even of the
most enlightened Greek thinkers of the fi ft h and fourth centuries bc. “To a
Greek,” as Plato put it, “the whole Greek race is ‘his own,’ or related, whereas...
the barbarian race... is alien, and ‘not its own.’ ”
It was in Greece, though, that the seeds of an important change fi rst be-
came evident. Th is was the development of a body of thought that became
known as natural law, which would become one of the most distinctive and
far- reaching contributions of Western civilization. It would run like a vein
through international law throughout its history, up to the present day. Its
roots lie in the ancient Greek belief that the workings of nature are not arbi-
trary or random, but instead exhibit— to those watchful enough to see it—
regularity and predictability. Th at alone did not make the Greeks (or their
successors) unique. What made them unique was their insistence that the
operations of nature could and should be, in some sense, a model for human
conduct— and even a source of legal norms.
At the core of early Greek thought on natural law was the belief that hu-
man laws and customs were divisible into two broad categories: practices or
rules that were universal throughout the human race, as distinct from those
that were peculiar to individual states or groups of states. Aristotle called
them special law and general law. Special law was “that written law which
regulates the life of a par tic u lar community.” General law, in contrast, com-
prised “all those unwritten principles which are supposed to be acknowl-
edged everywhere.” He went on to assert that “there really is... a natural
justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even those who have no as-
sociation or covenant with each other.” In time, the distinction oft en
came to be expressed in terms of laws derived from nature (physis in Greek),
as opposed to laws derived from human convention (nomos in Greek). Th is
fundamental distinction— which would later be denoted as one between
natural law and positive law— would have a very long life ahead of it.
In the period following Aristotle, two schools of Greek philosophy arose
that were especially noted for placing the primary emphasis on nature over