All of us have heard it said, at some time or another, that every man is born with certain inalienable rights. Although the Declaration of Human Rights is substantially flouted in most countries of the world, the majority of governments still feel obliged to pay it at least lipservice. What rights have we in mind? The right to life, to have enough to eat, to live without fear of torture or degrading punishments, the right to work or to withhold one’s labour. The view that these, or any other, rights are the universal property of men as such was virtually unknown in classical antiquity. Frequently when it is presented even now, there is little comprehension of the philosophical difficulties it entails. It is in many respects an ethical survival whose first espousal depended on a now-abandoned theological belief that man was formed in the image of God. That belief provided the basis for maintaining, at least in theory, that all men are in some important sense equal, and above all, that all men are endowed at birth (or before) with a certain value. Classical antiquity had no such theory of the value of man, though some of its philosophers took certain steps towards a theory with certain resemblances to it. Let us also notice that since the ancients did not possess such a theory, they could not abandon it. (RIST, John M.. Human Value. Leiden: Brill, 1982, p. 1)