Liberty is perhaps the oldest tradition of the Western world. The first historian of the West, Herodotus, makes clear the cardinal importance of this tradition in his Histories, where he attributes the victory of the Greeks over their Persian enemies in no small part to the freedom that the Greeks enjoyed. They were fighting for hearth and home — for their own independence. The Persians fought because they were slaves to their king, and he would kill them if they didn’t fight. Freedom for the Greeks was not the same thing as modern freedom, of course. For starters, the Greeks … Continue reading Freedom and the Free City