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 equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its nomos 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 given by nature and growing out by themselves; they were, 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.