A long, long time ago, way back in ancient Greece when the very first political pundits were trying out their rhetorical devices like new toys, the very first city-state leaders (think of them as Proto-Bushes) were attempting to figure out how to relate the power of the law and the state to individual people in a meaningful way. Despite the best efforts of the modern Bush, today we do it with the justice system, which lets judges relate the laws to individual cases. We owe this system to the Greeks, who came up with the idea for it. At about the same time, the Greeks came up with the idea for another practice, and laid the groundwork for one of the modern world's larger controversies. The two concepts aren't commonly related in today's discourses, so I'm here to connect them: law and torture, then and now.

To understand why we conceptualize torture the way we do today, it helps to understand the history of the practice, and the history of torture begins with Greek law. The earliest Greek system of litigation began as a simple physical contest between two disagreeing parties, arbitrated by friends and neighbors. Whoever had the most friends that could show up to watch the fight generally won. With the rise of city-states, and with them codified law, this personal system
of justice was quickly recognized as inadequate: it was unevenly applied and
problematically unpredictable.

The Greeks thus hit upon the idea of creating professional jurists, who would go around and systematically apply the laws to settle disputes. This solved the problem of trying to standardize the legal system, but uncovered a host of new problems. Unlike the friends and neighbors of the previous system,
the professional jurists didn't know the participants in a given dispute personally, and therefore had to deal with the problem of legitimating evidence,
particularly from classes considered de
facto untrustworthy. The Greeks kept slaves as a matter of routine, but how was a jurist to compare the evidence given by slaves to the evidence given by full Greek citizens?

Under city-state law, there were two classes of
recognized legal personalities: citizens, and non-citizens. Citizens, by
agreeing to submit to the rule of the state law, gained the privileges of the
judicial system, and obligations related thereto. By doing his duty in the
workings of the state, a citizen gained honour (time, in the Greek), and in judicial practice, when he gave evidence at a trial
it was considered valid by dint of this honour. Slaves and foreigners, however, didn't fit into this citizen-centric system of justice. Their testimony in a
trial was often necessary to decide the facts, but could not be validated through
the system of honour that constrained the citizen. Something more was necessary to ensure the
validity of such testimony, and the 'something more' that the Greeks came up with was torture.

That's right, systematic torture for evidence originated as a way to make slave testimony valid in the eyes of ancient Greek law. Jurists of the time believed that non-citizens
could not be rational or intelligent enough to give false evidence under pain,
so torture became an accepted method of elevating the testimony of non-citizens
to the level of trust-worthiness enjoyed by citizens. From the earliest, then, judicial torture
constituted an attempt on the part of the state to establish a law of proof
that might encompass all parts of a divided social hierarchy. There was the Greek state, made up of citizens, and there was everyone else. Torture was a way for the law of proof to put everyone on approximately equal footing.

Even though it was millenia ago, these ideas about torture still pervade our modern understanding of the practice. Over the next few weeks, I intend to write more about history of torture, and attempt to relate it to how we understand torture now, and why we debate torture in the terms that we now do. It's a fascinating subject, and not always in a morbid way. The history of torture and the judiciary are pretty closely entwined, and today's headlines are illustrating just how close that bond still is. We justify torture in terms of law and the need for evidence. If we want to talk about why that perception is warped or flat-out wrong, it's time we take a look at what caused it in the first place.