ABSTRACT
The political expansion of the Roman Empire, its success in conquering and transforming the entire Mediterranean world, brought its ideas regarding natural law and/or natural right to those nations they had conquered. Judaism turned inward, transforming itself and locating another, different way to assure the continuity of its people. What was once a Jewish desire for a unified theocratic nation became, in Judaic Christianity, a Jewish concern for the brotherhood of man united by a common spiritual bond. Christianity's passive acceptance of slavery as punishment deservedly imposed brought along with it acceptance of a correlative doctrine that, among the millions of equals, there are some who have been selected by God to be sovereigns and who, therefore, reign with the grace of his authority. Natural rights, for Hugo Grotius, are moral qualities. They are natural qualities only in the sense that they are grounded in what Grotius took to be man's natural sociability.
