History of Disability: Ancient West

The “ancient West” is a difficult term, calling into question cultural and geographic perception (whose west?). For the purposes of this entry, the term will refer to the ancient Graeco-Roman world, which was itself a shifting amalgamation of cultures, often distinctly “non-Western” cultures. The ancient Graeco-Roman world spans several millennia, from the third millennium BC through the fall of Rome in the fourth or fifth century AD. In short, the generalizations presented here do not necessarily apply to all places and phases of Graeco-Roman society.

Ideas about disability in the ancient world are part of our common consciousness. Images of Homer, Oedipus, and the Emperor Claudius—along with the phenomenon of Spartan infanticide of deformed infants—are often the first images that come to mind.

Greek civilization, especially fifth- and fourthcentury classical Greek civilization, is generally considered the cultural and philosophical ancestor of the West. Current scholarship, though, is quick to qualify the view of antiquarians such as Johann Winckelmann, the eighteenth-century foundational scholar of art history, who viewed classical Greece as the pinnacle of human achievement and who assumed that Greek people themselves were the embodiment of perfection. As Charles Freeman wrote in The Greek Achievement (1999), “This was certainly a sanitized version of the original Greece and one could be forgiven for believing that ordinary human beings did not exist in ancient Greece at all.” Indeed, people with disabilities are simply omitted in the earliest accounts of daily life such as Jerome Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1940).

But people with a wide variety of somatic and psychiatric variations did inhabit both the Greek and Roman worlds, and disability is one of the most recent categories of ancient social history to be examined. Interpreting disability has been influenced both by the romanticized vision of a heritage of perfect Western antiquity and by modern assumptions about what disability means. If one assumes a medical model of disability, in which disability is an individual misfortune to be corrected as far as possible by medical technology, the picture is indeed bleak. Howard Haggard's The Lame, the Halt, and the Blind (1932) tells dramatic tales about societies that lack rational medicine.

There has been a growing scholarly interest during the past decade in variations of the human body in the ancient world. Veronique Dasen couched her 1995 iconographic study, Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece, as a study of physical minorities. Daniel Ogden published The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece in 1997. In addition, interest in the study of the human body in the ancient world is represented by a special volume of Arethusa, titled “Vile Bodies: Roman Satire and Corporeal Discourse” (Braund and Gold 1998). In 1999, the University of Michigan Press published Constructions of the Classical Body, a collection edited by James Porter.

A few scholarly works explicitly employ the perspective of disability studies, which is based on the tenet that disability is at least in part a socially constructed phenomenon—that is, no matter how real a missing limb or a psychiatric disorder might be, the meaning that any given society applies to the condition shifts over time and between cultures.

...