Teratology

In the twenty-first century, freak shows are more about performance than somatic oddity. Suspension of disbelief must accompany the exhibit that purports to be a cross between species, and even the most naïve person knows that unusual physical features such as extra limbs or variant statures do not result from supernatural forces. In the ancient world, people were not equipped to understand physical configurations as we do in the modern world, and ancient scientific thought provided no reason to disbelieve the combination of a horse and a man or the existence of a human with a hundred hands. Monstrous beings—terata, in Greek—usually inhabited lands around the edge of the earth and the mythological past. Monstrous beings also inhabited the Roman imagination: Historians of the Roman world frequently reported monstrous births as portents.

A distinction must be drawn between people with disabilities and monsters. People with disabilities comprised a significant proportion of the ancient landscape, and an ordinary community member who had some sort of disfigurement would not have been considered to be a monster; indeed, the unknown characterizes the monster. In the ancient world as today, physical configuration alone does not make a monster; rather, a confluence of social forces defines what lies within the bounds of human normality and what lies outside it. Plutarch, the first century AD biographer, refers to a Roman “monster market,” where one could buy human oddities such as people with three eyes. This may have been a market in which people with variant bodies were sold and may have doubled as a sort of freak show; it must have had as much to do with salesmanship and showmanship as with somatic variation.

Monsters lend order to the world by defining the boundary of normal human parameters. The ancient world was not guided by the statistical bell curve of the eighteenth century; instead, the monster delineated physical normalcy by reflecting its antithesis. In the fourth century BC, in Generation of Animals, Aristotle described monstrosity as the failure to resemble a human being at all. Monstrosities, in Aristotle's view, included aberrations such as animal heads on human bodies or humans with extra heads.

In addition to defining physical normalcy, monsters also reflect social and moral bounds of their culture. Robert Garland (1995), in The Eye of the Beholder, argues that the Roman emperors, often reported to have people with physical anomalies amongst their courtiers, were themselves in the category of the monstrous. Sexual ambivalence, too, was seen as a monstrosity, as argued by Luc Brisson (2002).

A collection of essays on monstrosity in the Graeco-Roman world (the majority on the Greek world) can be found in Catherine Atherton's (2002) Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture.