Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights,
frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost
identical with it. But this equality within the range of the law,
which the word isonomy suggested, was not equality of condition - though this equality, to an extent, was the condition
for all political activity in the ancient world, where the political
realm itself was open only to those who owned property and
slaves - but the equality of those who form a body of peers.
Isonomy guaranteed ισότης (equality), but not because all men
were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men
were by nature (φύσει) not equal, and needed an artificial
institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος [law] would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political
realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private
persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality
and our notion that men are born or created equal and become
unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made,
institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis - its isonomy - was an attribute of the polis and not
of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship,
not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not φύσει, given by nature and growing out by themselves; they
were νόμφ, that is, conventional and artificial, the products of human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his
peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the
master of a household - even though he was fully liberated and
was not forced by others - was free. The point of Herodotus's
equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself
was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived
himself of those peers in whose company he could have been
free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself,
with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom an
equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human
activities, and that these activities could appear and be real
only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them.
The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together - the agora (the market-place), or the polis (the political space),
proper.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1990: 30-31)
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1990: 30-31)