Disabling Classics

Had we lived in the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans, chances are we would have been disabled. Writes Martha Rose in The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability) (2003):

…the ancient Greek world was inhabited by people with a wide range of visable physical disabilities. …….This variety of physical forms would have included…..children affected by clubfoot and rickets, people with spastic cerebral palsy, disabled war veterans, and people with a host of other somatic variations. (p. 9)
…….
Permanent physical disability was not the concern of doctors in antiquity beyond recognition of incurability, and the vocabulary for physical disability appears vague, at best, to the modern audience. References to permanent physical handicapes are scattered throughout nearly all the literary material, but handicaps did not belong in the domain of rational medicine, which treated curable diseases; in fact, a Hippocratic practitioner’s ability to distinguish an incurable case as opposed to a curable one was part of his skill. (p. 11)

From this, one might posit that the proportion of disabled vs. non-disabled persons in the ancient world would have been tilted towards the former, to the point that, it would have been highly less likely for a person to reach old age without incurring minor, or even grave, physical, injury.

In teaching about the literature and culture of classical Greece, classicists refer often to the notion of kalos kagathos, of being “beautiful and good.” This is the ideal that outer, physical beauty was a emblematic of goodness—of moral beauty—within. Greek heroes from Achilles to Hercules to Odysseus are never, can never, be ugly. The one character in Homer’s Iliad who is not good-looking, Thersites, is portrayed as ignorant and insolent; when Odysseus beats him so that welts rise on his shoulders, the Greeks laugh (book 2).

But a modern reader does not or, if he or she does, he or she ought to think twice of the source of the laughter. Students tend to be taught to take up the perspective of Odysseus: What if a student took up Thersites’ instead?

And of the clubfoot children, the persons with spastic cerebral palsy, the disabled war veterans, and the whole host of those with “somatic variations”?

I will occasionally being considering the topic of such “somatic” and also cognitive variation in the ancient world here on Autism Vox in a series of posts under the name of Disabling Classics.