An idea · Hellenistic & Roman · first attested 55 BCE
Humanitas
The cultivation that makes a person fully human and kin to every other.
Cicero's word for the ideal of a cultivated and humane dignity that classical culture set out to grow in a person. Humanitas joins learning to gentleness: the cultivated person recognises in every other a creature like himself and therefore treats him humanely. It is the concept from which the Renaissance named itself – the studia humanitatis, the "humanities" – and the modern word "humane" still carries its echo.