Civil Disobedience in Antiquity

Book excerpt: This book derives from the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. In it Daube provides a synoptic view of nonviolent civil disobedience in the Ancient World. His learning lets him draw freely on Greek and Roman sources--theological, legal historical, literary, dramatic, and popular. From these he shows that there is hardly a variety of civil disobedience known today which is not anticipated in some form or another by the ancients. Is this book more than an entertaining exercise of scholarship? Professor Daube writes, "To speak through historical figures is sometimes wiser than to declare in one's own name. The word 'person' originally means a mask . . . Civil disobedience can at all times profitably avail itself of persons."