The ancient world considered the powerless morally negligible

Holland opens by reconstructing how thoroughly different pre-Christian moral assumptions were from modern ones. In the Greco-Roman world, strength, honor, and the capacity to dominate others were treated as the natural foundation of virtue, while weakness, poverty, and enslavement carried no automatic moral claim on anyone's sympathy. A crucified person wasn't a tragic victim in the classical imagination; crucifixion was designed precisely to signal utter worthlessness, a death so degrading it excluded the victim from any dignity at all. Holland stresses this point because it's easy for modern readers to project contemporary compassion for the suffering backward onto antiquity, when in fact that sympathy is itself the historical anomaly requiring explanation. Understanding how alien this worldview is to us is, for Holland, the necessary first step to seeing how radical Christianity's inversion actually was. Takeaway: the instinct to sympathize with the weak is learned history, not a human default.