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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (114839)	9/15/2003 9:33:47 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 281500

True, Roman citizenship was prized and made some people more "special" than others. But it wasn't too hard to get if you wanted it. And there were many people who certainly had concepts of inalienable rights, dating at least back to Plato and Aristotle (and almost certainly before them), and expressed by individual Romans like Cicero and Marcus Aurelius and groups like the Stoics. At any rate, for sure neither Madison nor Hamilton believed that that was how the American republic was distinguished from ancient ones. They said so explicitly in the Federalist Papers. Try skimming numbers 10 and 14, though the really explicit mention of how the Americans differed from the ancient examples may be elsewhere, I don't exactly recall. Possibly in 18, or 38 or 39? Those are all on the structure of govt, if I recall correctly.