There’s a special place for judges and fair judgment in ancient Greek literature. In the depiction of the city of peace on the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, we find a dispute between families of a murdered relative and the accused. The sides argue their cases, but prizes of gold are set out for whoever passes the fairest judgment. The promise of justice, however, is forestalled–we move to another scene before any decision is rendered.

At the beginning of Hesiod’s Works and Days–a poem framed by a dispute between the narrator and his brother Perses who has somehow used the courts to cheat his brother of his inheritance–we encounter something of the opposite: corrupt judges who issue crooked judgements for bribes. When Hesiod rails against the “bribe-swallowing” kings who issue “false judgments”, I can’t help but think of today’s U.S. Supreme Court whose most recent series of judgments were prefaced by months of revelations of corruption and partisanship.

The recent slate of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States has presented a stunning series of attacks on people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, and people in debt. While many claim that these judgments are without precedent, I think there is an ancient principle at the core of their actions over the past few years: the (very) ancient Greek definition of justice as helping friends and hurting enemies.

Justice: helping friends and hurting enemies

In his classic dialogue, The Republic, the Athenian philosopher Plato has Socrates interrogating his friends about the meaning of justice. They start with a definition to be found as early as Homer’s Odyssey, that justice is helping your friends and hurting your enemies. There’s something simple and straightforward about this idea, and it is core to our impulse to seek vengeance, to build a legal system that facilitates revenge.

Yet, Socrates and some of his interlocutors object. It is, according to Socrates, the activity of justice that makes one a good person. To be good, according to this argument, is to do good. And, by this logic, committing injustice is doing wrong. True justice, according to The Republic, consists in helping people become better. To the surprise of his own audience, Socrates argues that by extension it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.

Socrates anticipates the Christian turning of the other cheek

Socrates’ argument should sound familiar–it ethically anticipates the radical Christian practices of turning the other cheek and loving your enemy. These are the values that a majority of the members of the current Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) allegedly espouse.

But anyone familiar with modern American Christianity would not be surprised by any cognitive dissonance produced by comparing their actions with their claims.

Two generations of conservative activism have produced a Supreme Court constructed for the purpose of rolling back the gains of a more inclusive society. From the reversal of Roe v. Wade last year to last week’s rulings, most two years’ opinions have been about limiting the rights of women, people of colour, and anyone who dares glance outside our heteronormative constraints.

These opinions cater to an increasingly shrinking but still powerful tribe of people, the rich, the conservatively Christian, and the white. By consistently enforcing their world view, SCOTUS has returned to that ancient Greek principle of helping their friends. What keeps this tribe together is their antipathy towards those who aren’t like them: they champion aggressive laws in Texas, in Florida and elsewhere, treating as enemies those who are not identical to their friends.

Supreme Court – betray Classical values of justice

The majority members of the Supreme Court are traitors to modern notions of justice, reinstating a punitive approach to the law and our common good that even some ancient Greeks would have rejected. More ironically, many of their supporters claim traditional “classical values”. Homer’s Iliad would have us honour good judgment; Plato’s Socrates insists that justice is making all people better. Perhaps they understand what justice is differently. The alternatives are just too dire: either they are simply helping their friends and harming their enemies, or they are acting in their true belief, and they don’t consider the people they are marginalising human at all.

Joel Christensen is Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Brandeis University. He has published extensively and some of his work include Homer’s Thebes (2019) and A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice (2018). In 2020, he published The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic with Cornell University Press.