Tera Kirk
Classics 341

The View of Disability and Deformity in Ancient Greco-Roman Culture


It is extremely difficult--if not impossible--to come up with a concrete answer to the question of how people with disabilities were thought of and treated in the ancient world. A major reason for this is simply that, for whatever reason, people with disabilities were rarely a subject that ancient writers discussed. Though it may seem “obvious” to us in our modern Western culture that the ancients actually avoided writing about people with disabilities because they considered them inferior and may have feared them in some way, we have no way of knowing whether or not this is actually true. I propose that the Greeks and Romans did not consider people with disabilities inferior as a group, although they made fun of individual disabled people.

I. Archaic Greece
Robert Garland writes in his book The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World that “...the social response to the handicapped was in part determined by religion, since beauty and wholeness were regarded as a mark of divine favor, whereas ugliness and deformity were interpreted as a sign of the opposite” (Garland 2). There is a mythological basis for this statement in the story of the god Hephaistos, as it appears in Book One of Homer’s Iliad. Hephaistos, who is lame and often portrayed as having feet turned backwards, tells his mother Hera that, “ ‘...there is no standing against Zeus. Once before when I was trying to help you, he caught me by the foot and flung me from the heavenly threshold’” (Iliad Book 1, ll 590-2).
The god’s disability is also used as a vehicle for laughter. In the Odyssey, the singer Demodokos entertains Odysseus and the Phaikians with the story of Hephaistos’ cuckolding. In this story, his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with the god Ares. Hephaistos finds out, and vindictively fashions strong but barely visible chains all around the bed. The lovers are caught in the chains, and Hephaistos says, “ ‘...Zeus’ daughter Aphrodite is dishonoring me because I am lame. She is in love with Ares, who is handsome and clean-built, whereas I am a cripple...” (Odyssey ll 326-8). While discussing the matter at Hephaistos’ house, Apollo asks Hermes if he would sleep with Aphrodite, chains or no chains. Hermes replies, “ ‘I only wish that I might get the chance, though there were three times as many chains, and you might look on, all of you, gods and goddesses, but would sleep with her, if I could’” (ll 339-42). Garland says that, “Hermes’ lewd response...was presumably intended to strike an echoing chord among Homer’s audience, who would have sympathized with Aphrodite’s yearning for a more wholesome--and whole--lover’” (Garland 82).
Though it is certainly possible that Aphrodite may desire a lover without a disability, perhaps there is another reason why she has so many lovers. We must remember that Aphrodite is the goddess of love and desire--perhaps it is her own abnormal capacity for lust that causes her to cheat on Hephaistos, and not the fact that he is disabled. Greek males, after all, felt that women were inherently wicked, and in the ancient world, adultresses were punished while men were allowed to seek sexual pleasure from prostitues or mistresses (Creel 3). Thus, Aphrodite's sexual liasons may do more to prove her female wickedness and lack of self-control, rather than Hephaistos's ineffectuality.
Also, if Hephaistos were meant to be seen as ineffectual, he wouldn't have a special domain of expertise. In fact, Hephaistos is the god of metalwork--no small profession to the Greeks or the Romans, as they frequently fought wars, and needed weapons. He also plays an important role in the lives of two epic heroes, Achilles and Aeneas. He is asked to make armor for Achilles and a shield for Aeneas, on which he portrays Aeneas's great descendants. Ancient poets and historians were thrilled to be assigned such tasks--delineating the achievements of great men was an honor that reflected on the abilities the person who had the privelage of doing it.
However, it is undeniable that others do laugh at Hephaistos, and in the examples described, it seems that they do so in order to relieve tension. In the scene from the first book of the Iliad, Hera is angry with Zeus because she suspects him of doing something mischievous without her knowing it. As they argue, Hephaistos urges them to stop and he pours the wine, “and the blessed gods laughed a loud applause as they saw him bustle about the heavenly mansion” (Iliad Book 1 ll 600-602). In the scene from the Odyssey, a bard tells the story about Hephaistos, Ares and Aphrodite in order to relieve the tension caused by the youth Eurytus’ offensive remark about someone’s appearance. The bard is successful because, “...both Odysseus and the sea-faring Phaecians were charmed as they heard him” (Odyssey Book 8 ll 915-6).
Thus, Hephaistos is a comic figure, but is he being laughed at because he is disabled, or because he is someone who has humorous quirks? It seems that Hephaistos is funny mostly because he is Hephaistos--he is an individual, and the laughter he causes seems more affectionate than derisive. It is possible for a person to get into funny situations because of his or her disability, and the laughter that ensues from those situations isn't necessarily mean. I have a disabiliity that, in part, affects my visio-spatial skills, and I frequently manage not to see things that are right in front of me--more frequently than most people. When I was younger and this was more of a problem, my friends, who could easily see what I couldn't, would laugh. They knew I wasn't stupid and didn't know that I had a disability--they just thought I was being myself. Perhaps Hephaistos is being laughed at as an individual rather than as a disabled person, much like people laugh at the antics and errors of their friends.
However, at least one man felt that people with disabilities were being mocked unduly in his culture. Kautilya, the chief minister of Chadragupa Maurya in India in the fourth century BCE, whose name suggests that he may have been physically disabled, put into writing one of the earliest laws against referring to people with disabilities and deformities in derogatory terms, and even spoke out against ironic euphemisms:
“ ‘Among abusive expressions relating to the body, habits, learning, occupation, or nationalities, that of calling a deformed man by his right name, such as “the blind,” “the lame,” etc., shall be punished with a fine of three panas. If the blind, the lame, etc., are insulted with such ironical expressions as “a man of beautiful eyes,” “a man of beautiful teeth,” etc., the fine shall be twelve panas. Likewise, when a person is taunted for leprosy, lunacy, impotency, and the like. Abusive expressions in general, whether true, false, or reverse with reference to the abused, shall be punished with fines ranging above twelve panas in the case of persons of equal rank’” (Kautilya, 3.18 trans. Shamasastry, 1923 p. 236).
People with disabilities were certainly employable in the ancient world. In ancient Greece the employment options for people who were blind included that of seer, singer, bard, and musician. A man named Kallistratos is said to have told Dio Chrysostom, “ ‘All these poets are blind and people do not think it possible for anyone to become a poet otherwise’” and Dio replied, “ ‘The poets have contracted blindness from Homer, as though from opthalmia’” (Garland 33).
However, this idea that there are a substantial number of blind poets is probably more of a cultural perception than a reality, much as in modern Western culture we tend to think that almost all blind people become blues singers or piano tuners. In Homer’s Odyssey, the blind bard Demodokos seems to be well-respected. In Book Eight, King Alcinous says, “ ‘...we will have Demodokos to sing to us; for there is no bard like him, whatever he may choose to sing about’” (Odyssey Book 8, ll 755-7). Later, Homer calls Demodokos, “the famous bard...whom the muse dearly loved, but to whom she had given both good and evil, for though she had endowed him with a divine gift of song, she had robbed him of his eyesight’” (Odyssey Book 8 ll 800-5). Though many people--including the ancients--believe that Homer was blind, the only "proof" we have of this is that the poet Demodokos is blind. It is more likely that Homer was a sighted person echoing the cultural stereotype that all blind people were poets, but, if he really was blind, perhaps the poet has used Demodokos as a representation of himself--or, at least, fashioned his character from personal experience.

II. Classical Greece
When people with disabilities are mentioned by classical Greek authors, it is not necessarily with fear, disgust or contempt. For instance, in his Histories, Herodotus mentions the two sons of King Croesus of Sardis, one hearing, the other deaf. He describes the latter son as “a worthy youth, whose only defect was that he was deaf and dumb” (Herodotus 23). The oracle which Croesus consults about his son advises the father not to fear his deafness, but instead “ ‘Wish not ever to hear in thy palace the force thou hast prayed for, uttering intelligent sounds! For better thy son should be silent! Ah! Woe be the day when thine ear shall first list to his accents!’” (Herodotus 30). When the kingdom was seized and a Persian was about to kill the king, the heretofore mute son said, “Man, do not kill Croesus.” Herodotus says that “afterwards he retaied the power of speech for the remainder of his life” (Herodotus 65).
It is a commonly held belief that most, if not all, infants with conspicuous physical abnormalities were left to die. However, an infant’s disability was only one factor in the decision to expose him or her--others included the child’s gender and the family’s ability to afford the new baby. Even healthy male children might have been exposed if their parents had weren’t able to provide for them. In Plato’s Theiatetos, the philosopher has Socrates “advise his interlocutor to inspect his spiritual offspring from every angle in order to make sure that he has not been deceived by ‘ a lifeless phantom not worth rearing.’” (Garland 15). However, Robert Garland argues in his book The Eye of the Beholder: Disability and Deformity in the Graeco-Roman World that “though Plato leaves the reader in no doubt that Socrates regards the rearing of defective infants as an act of irresponsible folly, the latter’s remark suggests that some Athenian parents might have been moved, and were evidently permitted by law, to spare such offspring” (Garland 15).
Spartan parents had less choice in the matter of raising disabled children than Athenian parents did. In his book The Greek Way of Death, Garland says that the Spartan government required deformed infants to be exposed. According to Plutarch, every male child was presented by his father to a Spartan court of elders called a gerousia to be examined. If the child was found to be healthy and sturdy, his father was ordered to raise him; if not, he had to be left at the foot of Mount Tagetos to die, because, as Plutarch says, “ ‘the life of that which nature had not provided with health and strength right at the beginning was of no value either to itself or to the state’” (Garland 82).
Martha L. Edwards also believes that deformed infants were not universally destroyed. In her paper “ ‘Let There be a Law that No Deformed Child Shall be Reared’: The Cultural Context of Deformity in the Ancient Greek World,” she says that a conspicuous deformity was only one factor of many in a familiy’s decision to expose a child. These other factors, along with the disability, worked together to shape an individual’s experience. She writes, “There were differences, surely, in the experiences of a wealthy family whose second daughter was born without arms and those of a poor island family whose first son was born with cerebral palsy” (Edwards 89).
Though some would argue that persons with disabilities would have been economic burdens to their families, Edwards believes that this would not necessarily have been the case. Those who had a disability could have found ways to do certain jobs. A Hippocratic author writes in his treatise On Joints that a person with congenitally deformed arms can still use tools like saws, picks, or spades, even though he may not be able to lift his elbows (Edwards 85). Of course, there were also many jobs which involved the risk of becoming disabled, such as mining, soldiering, and metalwork. Thus, it may not have been unusual for a person with a disability to be employed.
This attitude is a contrast to the belief that ancient Greeks held about women. The activities of women were severely restricted; it was believed that a virtuous woman was one who did not make herself noticable at all, for good deeds or bad ones. Certainly, the employment of women was out of the question. (Knowles 2). It seems that males with disabilities could work, and perhaps they were expected to unless it was absolutely impossible. They do not seem to have been restricted in the ways that women with and without disabilities were. A possible explanation for why we may not have much information about people with disabilities is that they were common enough--mostly through acquired handicaps and disabilities not automatically evident at birth, such as dwarfism--that Greek authors may not have found them interesting enough or unusual enough to write about.
Females with disabilities may have been less desireable or “successful” than males with disabilities, but this was probably because females were generally less desirable than males. A disability would probably not have prevented a woman from fulfilling her role as wife, mother, and housekeeper, but a girl with a deformity which negatively affected her appearance may have been more difficult to marry off. (Edwards 90). There were most likely still other factors involved, such as the wealth of the girl’s father.
In ancient Greece, epilepsy was considered by many people to be of divine origin--more so than other disabilities or illnesses. However, around 400 BCE the physician Hippocrates, or one of his students, stated his belief that “the sacred disease” was no more divine than any other disorder. In his treatise On the Sacred Disease, the author writes, “Men regard its [ie epilepsy’s] cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like other diseases and this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is cured, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations” (Hippocrates 1). He also questions the effectiveness of various cures for epilepsy, including, among other things, abstaining from baths, avoiding foods such as eel, goat, and dog meat, not wearing black--as black represented death--and not sleeping on or wearing goatskin. However, as the Hippocratic author skeptically points out, “none of the Libyans...would be free of this disease, for they all sleep on goats’-skins, and live on goats’ flesh” (Hippocrates 2). He also records for us his observations of how people behave when they feel that they are about to have a seizure. He writes, “they avoid company, going home if they are near enough, or if they are not near enough, going to the loneliest spot they can find...and they at once wrap their heads up in their coats. This is the normal reaction to embarrassment and not, as most people suppose, from fear of the demon” (Hippocrates 65).
The author felt that the true cause of epilepsy was an improper amount of secretion from the brain. He explains epileptic seizures this way: “the veins are excluded from the air by the phlegm and do not receive it, the man loses his speech and intellect, and the hands become powerless and contracted, the blood stopping and not being diffused, as it is wont” (Hippocrates 13). He thought that a person foamed at the mouth and sometimes lost control of bowel and bladder functions because of suffocation caused by the phlegm. Therefore, this demystification of epilepsy probably worked to make people with this disorder less feared and more easily welcomed in society.
The question of whether or not people with disabilities were able to hold public office is literally answerable in the affirmative. There are accounts of politicians with disabilities, so disabled people were not prohibited by law to participate in the public arena. However, it is probably impossible to determine the extent that they could do so. Robert Garland writes in his book The Eye of the Beholder that, “It is unclear whether those whose disability prevented them from leading a fully active life enjoyed the same political rights as the rest of the citizen body and were entitled to stand for public office, or whether their rights would have been curtailed de facto if not de jure” (Garland 31). Garland says that the first archon of Athens, whose name was Medon, was lame in one foot and that he “faced considerable political opposition because of his deformity, which he overcame with the support of the Delphic oracle” (Garland 32). In the Ekkleziasousai by Aristophanes, Neokleides, who is either blind or partly sighted, is heckled as he gropes his way to the speaker’s platform: “ ‘Isn’t it a scandal that a fellow who hasn’t managed to save his own eyesight should dare to give us a lecture on how to save the state?’” (Garland 32). Of course, it is difficult to say how this example reflects the actual attitudes of people toward disabled politicians in the ancient world, as Aristophanes was a comic playwright and, as such, was prone to use exaggeration and distortion for comic effect; however, there is probably a grain of truth in his portrayal of the response to Neokleides, considering that Medon was not responded to favorably, either.

III. Rome
Robert Garland mentions the apparent popularity of deformed slaves in wealthy Roman houses. Quintillian says that, “some Romans were prepared to pay more for deformed slaves than for physically perfect ones” and also, according to Garland, slaves of average intelligence pretended to be idiots. In one of Martial’s epigrams, the speaker laments that he has paid the incredibly large sum of 20,000 sesterces for a slave advertised as an idiot, who he discovers is not really a fool at all. Martial also praises a genuine idiot: “His stupidity is not assumed or contrived by crafty art” (Garland 47). Petronius’ famous neuveaux riche dinner party host Trimalchio had a favorite slave who was a “wrinkled, blear-eyed boy uglier than his master” and Pliny says that the shortest man alive during the Augustan Principate, Conopas, belonged to the emperor’s granddaughter Julia as a deliciae, or “pet” (Garland 47). Since most of these examples are fictional, we should beware of completely believing Garland when he says, “it would almost seem as if no fashionable household was complete without a generous sprinkling of dwarves, mutes, cretins, eunnichs and hunchbacks” (Garland 46).
Though slaves with disabilities were forced “to undergo degrading and painful humiliation in order to provide entertainment at dinner parties and other festive occasions” (46), it is difficult to say how much of this was due to the fact that a slave had a deformity or that a slave was a slave. In Greek comedies, (and consequently Roman ones, too, since a lot of Roman plays were adaptations of Greek ones), slaves, especially clever ones, were useful as vehicles of humor--whether or not they had disabilities. In Plautus's play The Haunted House, Theopropides's slave Tranio finds a clever ruse to keep the old man out of the house when he returns home unexpectedly as his son is having a party--namely, that the house is haunted: " 'The owner of the house murdered a fellow who was staying with him--after a struggle. I imagine it was the chap you bought the house from' " (Plautus 16).
It is also possible, since there were so many ways one could become disabled and no two people with disabilities have the exact same strengths and difficulties, that disabled slaves were not seen as inferior but exotic. Their popularity may have been due to the fact that it was unlikely that anyone else had a slave with that particular disability in that particular way. Perhaps, then, Romans bought slaves with disabilities in much the same way people today buy pirahnas or pot-bellied pigs.
This same difficulty in determining if someone with a disability was exploited because of his disability or because of other factors can be seen in the story of Gemellus of Antioe, a landowner with one eye. In a letter to the Egyptian prefect, he writes, “ ‘now Julius and Sotas, wrongfully, with violence, and arrogance, entered my fields after I had sewn them and hindered me therein through the power which they exercize in the locality, contemptuous of me on account of my weak vision and wishing to get possession of my property’” (MacMullen 10). It is hard to say to what degree Gemellus's attackers took advantage of his disability, to what degree they were men of higher economic and social status demonstrating their power, and to what degree they simply wanted his land.
Both of the above examples concern disabled people of a lower class. What happened when a member of the Imperial family was disabled? Tiberius Claudius Nero, who became emperor in 41 CE under bizarre circumstances, had a motor disorder that was obvious to his contemporaries. He dragged his right foot, his hands trembled, and he stuttered. When he got emotional, he would laugh uncontrollably or, when angry, he snarled, slobbered, and his nose ran. It has been suggested that Claudius’s disability was causd by polio, psychological disturbance, his desire to avoid being killed (i.e. it was pretense) and spastic cerebral palsy (Levick 13).
Even though Claudius wrote histories and was “a keen student and devoted himself to literature at an early age” (Levick 14), many people considered him an idiot. His mother Antonia called him “ ‘a monstrosity of a human being, one Nature began and never finished’” and after Claudius’s death Seneca said, “ ‘Nobody thought he had even been born’” (Levick 14). Seneca also says in his Apocolocyntosis that when Claudius came to Mount Olympus, even Hercules was shocked at the sight of him: “When he saw the monster’s strange appearance and weird gait, and heard the hoarse and inarticulate voice of no earthly creature, such as might belong to a creature of the deep, he thought his thirteenth labour had come. On closer inspection, it turned out to be almost human” (Garland 51).
The first known attempt to hide Claudius from the public was when he was fourteen, and it was time for him to take the toga virilis. This coming-of-age ceremony is usually a joyous, celebratory occasion, when a boy is led into the crowded Forum by his father (Levick 14). Claudius, however, was “transported secretly to the capitol [at night] and concealed in a litter” (Garland 41). When Claudius and his brother Germanicus presented gladitorial games in their dead father’s honor, Claudius was draped in a cloak (pallum) in order to be less conspicuous (Garland 42).
In a letter to his wife Livia, the emperor Augustus addresses her concern about Claudius’s effect on the family’s public image when he is before the public eye at the festival of Mars. Augustus writes:

For if he be sound, and, so to speak, quite right in his intellects, why should we hesitate to promote him by the same steps and degrees as we did his brother? But if we find him below par, and deficient in body and mind, we must beware of giving occasion for him and ourselves to be laughed at by the world, which is ready enough to make such things the object of mirth and derision (Suetonius, 5).

Though it may seem that Claudius was “an object of mirth and derision” simply because he was disabled, I doubt that this is true, and my reason is a subtle one. In her book Claudius, Barbara Levick says, “For his family, what was most important about his disabilities was the unfavorable impression they made...It was the sensitvity of the Romans to matters of decorum...that made his family hesitant to let him appear in public” (Levick 15). Thus, Claudius’s family did not hide him from the public eye because he was handicapped; rather, they hid him because he was an embarrassment. In other words, his disability was not shameful in itself--the behaviors it caused were. Even Seneca does not deride Claudius for being disabled. He picks out individual features of Claudius’s disability (e.g, the fact that his speech sounded like noise a sea-creature would make) and makes fun of them.
Roman cognomina --family names--were a source of pride for the Romans and, for the upper classes, status symbols. According to Garland, one of the most popular categories of cognomina was that which denoted that the person it belonged to originally had some sort of disability or deformity. Cognomens in this category include Strabo (Squinter), Ocellus (Little-Eyed), Paetus (Blinky), and Cocles (One-Eyed). These, Garland says, “in earlier times reflected congenital defects in the original bearer” (Garland 78). Others were given to someone who had acquired a disability through injury--Luscinus, which also means One-Eyed, is an example. Ovid’s cognomen Naso means “Big Nose,” Horace’s (Flaccus) means “Big Ears,” and Cicero’s cognomen means “chick-pea” and refers to the chick-pea sized blemish on his nose. However, Garland says that the stigma of such cognomina did not carry over into future generations, though the names themselves did, and that Romans seemed to express pride in their names rather than shame. A man named Publius Furius Crassipes (“Splay-Feet”) commemorated his curile aedileship by minting a denarius with a picture of a deformed foot on the back (Garland 79).
Thus, from my research on the subject of the disabled in the ancient world, I do not believe that the ancients had any clear stereotypes about people with disabilities or felt that the disabled were somehow lesser than them as a group. (It is clear that they felt this way about women and foreigners). A person's characteristics don't influence others' opinions about that person in isolation, and it is difficult to say how much any given individual's disability influenced the way he or she was thought of and treated. It does not seem that we have enough evidence to determine how exactly the Greeks and Romans responded to people with disabilities. The only conclusion is that there is no conclusion, mostly because of a serious lack of evidence. There is evidence that they may have seen them in a positive light, and evidence that they may have seen them in a negative one. Perhaps the real answer is that the ancient Greco-Roman view of people with disabilities is complex, and the idea that the disabled were seen either as “good,” “bad,” or “normal” is too simplified.















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