Are Humans Animals, Or Are They Something More?

Human beings should be more than animals, but are they really? In Republic, by Plato, Antigone, by Sophocles, The Aeneid of Virgil, by Virgil, and On Justice Power and Human Nature, by Thucydides, it seems as though human beings really are nothing more than animals.

Animals are thought of as not caring about anyone but himself or herself. It is survival of the fittest, if you are not strong enough, someone else will take your place. Human should be caring for other human beings, if someone is in trouble, another human should help them. This is not the way it is in these 3 works. Humans don’t care about anyone but themselves, they kill so they can better themselves, and don’t care what happens. It seems as people are getting murdered all the time to take power, and the killer, instead of being jailed, is now the leader.

In Plato’s Republic, he basically designs a caste system. People are chosen at birth what level they will be in society, and there is nothing they can do about this. This is almost like a food chain. In regards to reproduction, Socrates severely regulates sex. Socrates proposes a rigged lottery to ensure that the best man has sex with the best woman, and all women and children are shared between all the men. People can only have sex within their own class to guarantee the finest genetics. After the babies are born, the rulers will take them; the babies of the lesser classes will be left to die, whereas the babies of the upper class will take care of by nurses. This is totally barbaric, even animals know what happens to their offspring, whether they die due to a predator or they become healthy adults. In this situation it is humans being the predator. (Plato p.125)

In Antigone, Creon is about as close to an animal as you can get. He refuses to bury his own nephew, Polynices. Even if Creon didn’t want him buried in Thebes, he could at least have his body sent back to his city to be buried. Then, after he finds out that Antigone buried Polynices, he sentences her, and her sister Ismene to death. He just assumes that Ismene helped Antigone, even though Ismene tried to talk Antigone out of burying Polynices. Even though Antigone seems the most human, or least animal like for trying to give her brother a proper burial, she tells Creon that she would not have ...

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.... They would be so vulnerable; they would have no chance to win if they were attacked.

“Civil war ran through the cities; those it struck later heard what the first cities had done and far exceeded them in inventing artful means for attack and bizarre forms of revenge.” (Thucydides p.90) People should not be getting more barbaric as the war spread; the leaders should have been trying to make peace, instead of finding more horrendous forms of attack and revenge. “To take revenge was of higher value than never to have received injury.” (Thucydides p.91) Even if there was no serious damage done, people were still taking revenge to levels so high, that it was totally unnecessary.

Are human beings animals, or are we something more? Human beings are nothing more than animals. Going to war over nothing more than to gain territory when they sustained perfectly well in the first place, selling dead men for gold, plotting for an even harsher revenge is all barbaric. There was never a need for so much war, and the punishments people received for petty crimes such as burying a dead man, which should not be a crime in the first place