Disability in Ancient Greece

Transcript:

Okay. We're talking about a big topic today. Talking about disability in ancient Greece. And for that, we need one of our guest experts. Would you like to introduce yourself, please?

Yeah. Hi, thank you for having me. My name is Dr. Debbie Snead. I'm an assistant professor of classics at California State University, Long Beach. I also serve as the field supervisor of the Agora excavations and summer training program for the American school of classical studies at Athens.

When we're talking about disability in ancient Greece, I think it's worth starting with asking you about common misconceptions that you come across quite often, and I'm going to guess that that's got a lot to do with statues of men with six packs and huge rippling muscles, the epitome of health, and then you've got stories on the other side of that coin of babies being thrown off of cliffs...

Probably the biggest misconception that I have encountered in my work, especially since I started doing more public facing work after I finished my PhD, is about whether there are disabled people in ancient Greece. You'd be surprised by the number of people who don't believe me that there are disabled people or people living with things that we would call disabilities in the ancient world. And some of this goes back to this idea of infanticide. People assume, there's this kind of perception that the ancient Greeks, in particular, the ancient Spartans, would kill disabled infants at birth. And people move from that and they say, look, if these people are killing babies because they're disabled, there's no way they're letting people who aren't babies survive with disabilities. And so they kind of extract from this understanding that they think they have about disabled infants being killed at birth and go from there and assume that no one was allowed to live who was disabled in the ancient world.

So can we trace where this myth about infanticide has come from?

Yeah, the myth is a really interesting one. We do have a few sources that talk about this as a potential practice. So the most prominent one comes from this Roman author named Plutarch. So Plutarch tells a story, he writes these biographies of famous Greek and Roman men, and he intends these biographies to be didactic, to teach Roman men how to be real good men. So he does these character profiles. And one of them is of this Spartan lawgiver named Lycurgus. Now, if Lycurgus is real or not, we're not completely sure. If he's real, when did he live? We're not completely sure. But if he lived, it was between the ninth and the seventh centuries BCE. Plutarch is writing in the second century CE. So we're talking hundreds of years intervening. And Plutarch says that Lycurgus was such a, he was such a harsh lawmaker. He was such a strict guy that he created many rules. Including one that Spartans had to bring their babies to a council of elders. And the council of elders would evaluate the infants to determine if they should be allowed to live. Or if they were low born and deformed is the sort of easy translation of those words, they would be killed. They would be taken to a place and killed. And then people go from this and they're like, Oh my God, the Spartans killed disabled infants. And this fits for us into our sort of mythical understanding of the Spartans. Who were these martial, these very war like people. And we're like, yeah, this makes sense.

And then people go to these fourth century BCE philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, both of whom write these texts that are utopian. So they're trying to imagine what the perfect world would be like if they as philosophers could create it. Where would it be located? How many people would this city have? What kind of laws would govern it. And both of them in these utopian texts, both of them sort of imply, Aristotle's a little bit more explicit, kind of imply that disabled infants would be either hidden away or killed at birth, or at least not raised, I think is Aristotle's phrasing. And so people put these three sources together and they build this picture that disabled infants were not allowed to live. And then they go into stories related to sort of mythical infanticide.

So they look at the figure of Oedipus. Oedipus, whose name means swollen foot, he's sort of famously exposed at birth. So there's this awful prophecy about him and his parents are like, we're not going to let this baby live. So what they do is they pierce his ankles and then they put him out onto a mountainside. And the idea is that they don't kill him. If the gods wanted to save this infant, they could. And so it sort of absolves the parents of the blood guilt of killing their child, but by piercing the ankles, makes it less likely that this infant will be picked up and raised by someone else and then fulfill the prophecy that he has. Spoiler alert, kill his father and marry his mother.

Yep. Right.

And sometimes people do a little conflation and they'll say, see Oedipus is an example of one of these infants exposed. And they kind of conflate the order of operations here, which is that he wasn't exposed to die because of his disability, but he was disabled in order to bring about his death, but they kind of mix these things up. So all of this kind of comes together in this package and people make this argument, they make this claim that the Greeks broadly, or sometimes they localize it to the Spartans, just would not allow infants with physical disabilities to live.

Okay. I think it's important here to bring up the Spartan Mirage and we have an episode with Owen Rees about that, about do we know what we think we know about Sparta? So if anyone hasn't listened to that episode, go back and have a quick listen and then come back. And then you've spoken about Aristotle and Plato and their utopias. And I'm kind of trying to remember back to my Greek political thought module that I did a million years ago, and they were saying some other, you know, weird stuff in those texts about ideal societies. It's not just infanticide, there was all babies should just be had in common. So it's not just one idea that's weird.

They've got loads of ideas.

Their whole plan is batshit. It's really interesting, isn't it, that you've got a biographer who's writing about someone he doesn't really know that much about hundreds of years before. You've got philosophers who are hypothesizing about what society could be like, and we've taken those sources and said, yeah, this is definitely what happened.

Yeah, it's interesting because with Plutarch, we know that he's not someone that we can 100% rely on. And scholars are really, they're careful about the data that they take from Plutarch and trying to make sure if it's corroborated. Plutarch himself says in his Life of Alexander, he says, my goal isn't to tell historical facts. My goal is to sort of build an image of a person. Through stories, he's not writing histories exactly, but he's giving examples of things. And scholars are careful with this, with Plutarch. They're also careful about Aristotle and Plato with these utopian texts. They're like, look, they're not saying what's happening. They are not descriptive texts. They are not describing society. Instead, they are prescribing it. They're saying what they think should happen. And we can't know exactly just on these texts alone, if these things are happening and they're saying it should continue or if it's not happening and they're saying that it should. So scholars are really careful about these texts and about the relationship that they have to what we might call real historical fact, except on this point of disabled infants. This is one where they're like, no, for sure. That part is true though. And it's interesting that disability enters into this. And this kind of goes with our progressive mindset that we have in the modern world where we kind of think about disability and everybody.

We have this kind of internalized ableism. And we've got this idea of what we think disability is. And so these texts and the reason that we take these stories as fact about disabled infants is that it makes a kind of logical sense to us. We're like, look, we let disabled infants live because we're a progressive society. We have modern medicine. We have social safety nets. The ancient world on the other hand is very difficult. They don't have civil rights. They don't have progressive legislation. And so it makes a kind of logical sense to us with our modern perspective on disability that of course that is what they would do. Is it natural that a society would kill disabled infants? Is it natural that disabled people are valued less as members of a community? They don't really question that. It's just kind of taken for granted that this makes sense, even though the evidence arguing for the practice is incredibly tenuous.

We kind of have this idea, don't we, that the ancient world, no medicine, that we would understand it, no social safety nets. As you say, we've got this idea that life was so brutal, that people wouldn't care for each other.

Yeah, it's interesting. A few things are interesting about this. First of all, there are social safety nets in the ancient world and we can talk about that, including for disabled people. But when you're talking, if you're just trying to sort of reason out an answer to this question about disabled infants and whether or not they were killed, if you were just going to ignore evidence and you're just trying to hypothesize based on what we know from the ancient world or what we think we know, then actually it doesn't make sense that they would kill disabled infants. Maternal mortality rates are incredibly high. Infant mortality rates are incredibly high compared to our rates today. If you have a live birth, there's no guarantee you'll get another one, right? Because either the mother could die or the infants could die. And so it actually makes a logical sense that they would invest in every live birth because you don't have a guarantee that another one can or will come after that. They also don't really understand things like prognosis. And so an infant born with a condition, they don't necessarily know what that means for someone. Realistically, you're not that many people in the ancient world and they don't have social media. They don't have international news. Where they can look up statistics for things and like what happened to other infants born like this, you know? Something like, I think one of our most common congenital disabilities is something like clubfoot. I think the occurrence is like one in 10,000. So the likelihood that someone knows of another baby born with the condition that their baby is born with and knows what that means, practically speaking, is incredibly low.

But also we have tons of evidence of people not killing disabled infants. Not only do we have this tenuous evidence arguing for the practice, we have a lot of very practical, grounded evidence of people investing in infants who have disabilities. We have a Hippocratic physicians, we've got these medical practitioners in the late fifth and fourth century BCE, and they're writing these texts. Some of them are written for each other, just as kind of practical manuals. And one of them is called on joints. And it is basically just a doctor who is writing a manual to give to other doctors. This is what happens when you have a joint dislocation of the shoulder. Here's how you fix it. And he talks about infants born with a number of congenital disabilities, right? Including infants that he calls weasel-armed from birth. This is somebody with a congenital limb difference. He's using the term weasel-armed just as a description. Somebody whose limb is shorter relative to their torso and body length than what we would expect. And he says, look, these people are fine. Sometimes they experience pain, but with a little bit of physical therapy, it's fine. They can use that arm just as much as they use the other arm. He talks about infants with congenital club foot, whatever club foot means for this physician. It's some sort of foot related congenital disability. He goes through a lengthy treatment program for it. And then he says, when they get to the point of needing shoes. So when they're old enough to require shoes, these are the types of shoes that work best. So not only do we have a physician here going through the treatment options for a lifelong experience with these congenital disabilities.

So he's not recommending death, but also the fact that he even saw these infants means that they weren't killed. Birth was not a medical event in the ancient world. So physicians were not typically present at birth, which means that if he saw infants at or shortly after birth, it means that the parents or the midwives or whoever was responsible for that did not kill the infant, but instead sought recommendations from a medical practitioner about what to do and how to help them. These texts in these references in the Hippocratic Corpus, they show multiple people choosing not to kill an infant with a congenital disability.

So let's say that I've given birth in a small town in Greece, and I noticed that there's something about my baby that I think maybe I need some medical assistance here and I need an expert. Where do I go?

Unclear. So it's really, we don't really know how physicians operated in the ancient world. We have evidence for what we call public physicians. We've got some evidence of people who are sort of paid by cities, not to treat people on behalf of the city, but to be present in the city so that people had someone they could go to. We have evidence that these Hippocratic physicians traveled around. There are healing sanctuaries. You could go to a healing sanctuary and you could seek treatment or relief or something at those places. But probably most medical care for most people in the ancient world was like people in your community who'd been around a long time, midwives with their extensive training, for example, people we might call folk healers, magicians, okay? People working with these types of medicine that we don't classify in sort of as a medical these days, but that there's this sort of medical pluralism. We call it in the ancient world where there's kind of a variety of options that people can take, but probably you're relying on the elders of your community and their experience in the world.

So you've mentioned sanctuaries. Does that mean that there were places where medical health was mixed with the idea of religion?

Yeah, definitely. So we have the sort of the most famous healing God in ancient Greece was this guy called Asclepius. He's not our only healing God, but he's kind of our big one. And there are sanctuaries for him all over the place, hundreds of sanctuaries of Asclepius. The most famous one, the biggest one, sort of the center of Asclepius worship in the ancient world was at a place called Epidaurus, which is in the Argolid, which is in the Peloponnese. And people could travel there and they could seek relief on any number of things. It's not just stuff that we would consider medical. We have records of people who visited. They're probably not literal records. We probably should not take them as literal records. Some of them are fantastic. They cannot actually have happened in terms of treatment, but we get the sense of, you know, somebody goes, an enslaved person goes, for example, and he's got these tattoos on his head, right on his face, and he wants them removed. There is another enslaved person who goes because he accidentally broke his owner's favorite cup and he would like the cup to be healed. There are people who go with things that aren't actually medical concerns, but like that are related. People go with questions about fertility and struggles with childbirth.

They can go for any number of reasons, but also you can visit non-healing deities. So we have a lot of evidence for people seeking healing at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Acrocorinth, for example. And so there are a lot of different options. You don't just have to go to a healing sanctuary, but that is a popular place that people can visit if they have probably a long-term or chronic condition that they would like help with.

Right. Because if it was a short illness, you might not want to, you know, spend that long on this arduous journey.

Yeah. And you could go to the one in your city. So Athens has one. You don't have to go to Epidaurus, but you might, if you have the time and the means, you might want to go to sort of the main one. And the idea is that when you arrive at these healing sanctuaries, what's going to happen is you're going to go through this ritual called incubation. So basically there's a room for patients, okay? So you, you make your requisite sacrifices or dedications. Then you go and you sleep in this room called the Abaton. And the idea is that the healing God will come to you in your sleep and either heal you or tell you how you can become healed is the idea. And you wake up and you're either healed or you have a treatment plan ready that you can follow.

So what kind of votives am I needing to give to Asclepius for him to come and visit me in my sleep? You know, this is the really interesting thing. We should really be talking about a variety of options. So the most famous thing that people think about are anatomical votives. Sort of representations of a body part that was injured or ill or something that you would like healed. The thing is we have those at the Sanctuary of Asclepias at Corinth, for example, but not at Epidaurus. We don't have any at Epidaurus. In Athens, we don't have any either. We've got some references to maybe some being dedicated there, but we actually have more medical tools dedicated at the one at Athens than we do anywhere else. So it seems like it's possible that different healing sanctuaries kind of specialized in different types of healing or had different ritual practices. And so it just kind of depends on which one. We have a ton of these anatomical votives from South Italy. And I really love those ones because the ones that we have in Greece from Corinth in particular, are external body parts, legs. I think the closest thing we get to an internal body part is up. There's somebody who's like missing part of his skull and you can see his brain. Some people think it's hair? Question mark, okay. But in South Italy, the anatomical votives that we get there are largely internal organs. So we get representations of wombs, for example, or uteruses, and they don't know what they look like. But they really try. And it's interesting that we have all of these different types of anatomical votives, different types of dedication practices, different types of rituals that are performed in different places.

Yeah. I'm trying to imagine visiting my local ceramicist and saying, would you mind just knocking me up a uterus out of some terracotta?

They mostly look like hot water bags. You know, there's like hot water bags here. That's what the uterus looks like to them.

Do we have evidence then of physicians or indeed just people in the community coming up with inventive ways to help people with disabilities live their lives with a little bit less pain?

Yes, for sure. So one of the things that I think is really important to know about disability in general., is that it is a creative condition. So disabled people often talk about how creative they have to be in their lives because they need to sort of make life work in a world that's not necessarily built for them. This is true in the ancient world as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that there's one Olympian god who is physically disabled and he is the god of creative fire. He makes things. He's a maker. And I don't think that that's a coincidence because we actually, we have a lot of evidence of what we might call assistive technology in the ancient world or assistive aids, tools that are either purpose-built or could be modified in order to be beneficial to people with various kinds of disabilities. I mostly have focused on mobility impairments and mobility aids in my research, but you know, using crutches and canes, for example, which non-disabled people used as well, but definitely the Greeks understood that these things were beneficial for people with physical disabilities. They could ride horses or mules or donkeys as a part of their transportation needs. They helped each other.

So we have a lot of evidence of community care and sort of mutual support of each other. So people assisting their disabled family members or community members, also people had enslaved attendants who could help them if they were rich enough. We have plenty of evidence of that. In Rome, for example, we have enslaved attendants who do things like read for their owners, who physically cannot for one reason or another, who assist with bathing, who assist with all sorts of sort of personal tasks. And so we have a lot of evidence of people adapting themselves or adapting the world around them in order to make this work.

I'm thinking about mobility. And the one thing that I always think when I'm going to a Greek or Roman site is, my God, these staircases are so steep and the steps are so tall. I mean, I know my knees get really tired and I don't have a physical mobility issue. What would happen with all these staircases around? Is there anything that we can see that was helping people that found it difficult to walk?

Yeah, I think this is a bit of a leading question, Alexandra, because I think you know, but I have an article about ramps in the ancient Greek world, and I really love this article. And, you know, most of the ancient world is on level ground. So a lot of houses, you just walk right in. Stairs are actually, we do have second stories. But it's not mandatory in most places. Where you need something for elevation is at monumental architectural spaces, like at religious sanctuaries. And so most religious sanctuaries., the temple is up on this platform, usually with three stairs. And you're right, those stairs, the rise is ridiculous. I don't understand why anyone would make it. And I think it's because most people did not go up into the temple. So it's kind of irrelevant. So most sanctuaries are, their temple is sort of up on this stepped platform and most of the other monumental buildings at these sanctuaries are also on a stepped platform. Some sanctuaries., the main temple in that space has a ramp put on the side. Mostly these are Doric temples.

Katya Sporn did this really great article where she kind of traced where temple buildings have ramps in the Greek world. And I think there was something like 18 ramps. That's not a lot. There are hundreds and hundreds of religious sanctuaries. And she kind of tracked that if you just look at the main temple buildings and a sanctuary, 18 of them have ramps. So what I did is I started from that and I broadened the search to not just the main temple building, because sanctuaries have tons of buildings on them. They've got the main temple, they've got minor temples, they've got other sorts of buildings. And I saw that, okay, so Greek world, largely 18 temples of the main temple of a sanctuary have ramps. At the healing sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, nine of the buildings are ramped at that one sanctuary alone. The other buildings that don't have ramps are built at ground level. So they don't need ramps in order to access them. And so then my question became, okay, if ramps are uncommon in the Greek world, but extremely common at this one sanctuary, and actually it's at this one sanctuary type, healing sanctuaries in general, not all of them. But we do see a trend that healing sanctuaries have more ramps at them than non-healing sanctuaries.

My question became, why? And to be honest, this was not a very difficult answer to arrive at. The Greeks definitely understand that if you're going to build something for a purpose, you should make sure that the people can use it for that purpose. So we could think about the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, for example, and about how it hosted these huge athletic competitions every four years, the Olympic games. There are athletic facilities at that sanctuary because if you want to host athletic games at that sanctuary, you had better have athletic facilities. It's the same thing. If you're going to build a healing sanctuary, which by the way, is not mandatory for a society, but if you're going to, and you want to attract people with a variety of bodily conditions, of illnesses, of ages, then you should make sure that they can use the spaces that you have built for them. This is a very simple form follows function argument. Which is that the Greeks understand that people should be able to access the buildings that are built for them.

Which is fantastic because I know that it can be quite difficult to feel that the world is not designed for you when you have issues to be dealing with and just the ability to go outside of your house and still be able to do what you need to do can feel monumental in itself. So it's fantastic that we can see them thinking this through in architectural design.

The ramps are a really great example of how different disability was understood in the ancient world versus the modern world. So, okay, we've got this situation where the ancients have ramps for disability access, and we have ramps for disability access. And the question is like, is this the same phenomenon? It is not. It is a distinctly different phenomenon. So for us, ramps very often represent accommodations. And what that means is that the building is not built with disabled access in mind and ramps are added on after the building is built in order to comply with federal law, with international law, who knows. Often these ramps are ugly. They're not built in the same style as the rest of the building. And they're often tucked away on the side of the building behind the building, but they are not integral to the building. They are after the fact modifications of a space that was not built with this in mind. When we go to the ancient world, however, those buildings were built with ramps, disabled people. And people with mobility impairments, which by the way, includes elderly people, pregnant people, children, people carrying other people. So it's not just about disability. It's about anyone whose mobility is impaired. Who finds staircases difficult. That's built from the beginning. This is not accommodation. This is just access. It is built with that in mind.

The ancient world is not a utopia for disabled people. Not every building obviously has a ramp. So we're not talking about this being like a widespread phenomenon, but they understand that if we're going to ask people with impaired mobility to come to this space, we should make sure that they can get into it. And we see this in other non-healing contexts as well. There's a ramp that leads to the top of the Athenian Acropolis, for example. And it's incredible. And you might think why, except it seems pretty clear to me. So first of all, in the sort of vein of universal design, when you build something like a ramp, when you design with disability in mind, it's beneficial for a lot of other purposes. So having a ramped access to the Athenian Acropolis is beneficial for leading animals up there for sacrifice if necessary, getting building materials up there if necessary, but also the Acropolis was the kind of final destination for the Panathenaic Festival. The festival held in Athens every four years that was celebrated by all of the Athenians. That's what Panathenaia means. And you can think about how, as part of the procession, you're going to want to bring some of your most esteemed citizens up to the Acropolis for this celebration, and a lot of those people are going to be elderly.

And so having a ramped access actually just makes it easier for everyone. People are carrying baskets. They're carrying hydrii, carrying jugs full of water. Some of them might be carrying children. Some of them might be leading animals. Some of them might be carrying musical instruments. It's beneficial for everyone when you consider the fact that in this vein of universal design, that having ramps, which they definitely understood as beneficial to people with mobility impairments, by incorporating that, you've actually sort of enabled access for everyone.

Yeah. It's quite a contrast to some modern architecture where, as you say, very much feels like an afterthought that they've really reluctantly only put on to comply with some law. And here we see people thinking in advance, how can we make this as easy as possible for everyone?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, and that's one of the big differences. In a lot of my work, it's not about saying that the ancient world is better or worse in terms of disability, but that it's fundamentally different. And that's because of how they think about bodies differently, how they think about each other, how they think about ability and disability differently. The way that disability is a contingent contract. It's not something that has a universal definition. We can't say exactly what disability is until we look at it in any given situation, in any given historical context, cultural context, whatever. But the ramps is a really great way to sort of make that clear, is that even if you see the same thing like ramps, it doesn't necessarily mean that the same thoughts underlie.

So I'm thinking about thoughts that my friends have voiced about their concerns that they will never be able to live life as fully as they might want to because they have a disability. In the ancient world, do we see people with disabilities being able to have a career or start a family? Is that possible in the ancient world?

Yeah, it's a great question. This is the topic of my book that I'm working on right now is basically in order to convince people that there were disabled people, I've had to do a lot of kind of foundational work. But my next step is to convince them that they also did things. And so what I'm doing is I'm going through the kind of spheres of life in ancient Greece that we expect people to experience. So marriage and childbirth for citizens, military service, labor and employment, and participating in the religious life of a community. Those are kind of my four chapters. And what I'm looking at is, okay, so if there's an expectation, so we can look at the military, for example, if there's an expectation that citizens will perform military service, does that apply to all citizens? Meaning does it also, does that expectation also apply to disabled citizen men? Do they fulfill their military service? And then what happens in terms of their citizenship and their belonging, if they can't because of their disability, are they disenfranchised, are there limitations to their citizenship as a result? And so this is what I do for each of these different spheres of ancient life, as I'm looking at, are disabled people expected to fulfill the same things as others of their age and gender and social status? Do they, and what happens to them in the community if they can't because of the disability?

Do we see any prejudice, any insults being thrown around for people with disabilities? Was there any negative aspects to being a disabled person in ancient Greece?

Sure. There are tons of negative aspects of being a person in ancient Greece. Well, that's true. Life is really hard. It's interesting because, so first of all, we see disabled people occupying every possible role in the ancient world. So even if you're just looking at the military, we have disabled generals. Two of our most famous generals from the fourth century BCE. So we've got Agesilaus II, who was a king of Sparta and Philip II of Macedon, both disabled and they're fine. They totally succeeded at whatever they were trying to accomplish. War. We have infantry men. We've got cavalry men. We've got rowers. We've got people at every level of the military with evidence of disabilities. We have evidence of people getting married, who were disabled, people who are disabled having children, people with physical disabilities. I focus on physical disability. They have jobs, they have income. And we also see things in place for when that can't happen. So there are military exemptions for people who have disabilities who cannot fight that allows them to retain their citizenship status. That differentiates them from people who refuse to do their military service when they're able. Those people experience consequences. Disabled people are given exemptions that allow them to retain their citizenship.

There is a pension in Athens, at least, for disabled people who are so disabled that they're unable to work. So that they can still contribute financially to their families. Okay. So all of this is in place. This doesn't mean that everyone lived a perfect life. Ancient life is hard for everyone, especially when we think about it. So ancient life is just hard. The vast majority of people are living at subsistence. So they are living agriculturally. They're living at subsistence. Okay. The vast majority of people that's difficult. It's a difficult life. So when you're talking about, was it difficult to be disabled? I mean, compared to what?

And this is one of the things that's really important is that our expectations for quality of life and for what constitutes a well-lived life are very different than the ancient world. So for example, we expect life to be relatively pain-free. If you experience pain, this is unusual for you and you are trying to figure out a solution. Sometimes you know the cause, like maybe you're hung over and you have a headache and you take some Tylenol or some other kind of over-the-counter medication. If you've got a toothache., you go to the dentist. Okay. Because it is unreasonable to us in our conception of living a good life that you would live with pain. And so people who have chronic pain are disabled because it diverges so much from the expectation of what a good life would be. In the ancient world, they don't have Tylenol. They have ways of dealing with pain, but if you have an infected tooth, either it stays infected and painful until it falls out. You get the tooth removed. It's just sort of like, I think people have more pain in the ancient world.

Things like pain, things like disabilities, it actually doesn't diverge as much from what the majority of people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis. And so thinking about quality of life., according to whom, compared with what, is the question that I encourage people to ask.

Sure. That's an excellent question that we should definitely be asking. We've talked a lot about architecture and we've talked about some physical items that we've been able to excavate that help people to live their lives as much as possible. I love a good multidisciplinary approach. So what are the kind of things that you are looking at when you are asking these questions?

You know, I take a very multi and interdisciplinary approach to my work. Not everyone does. And that's okay. I'm, as somebody who does interdisciplinary work, I really rely on specialists, right, and them doing good work so that I can take advantage of it. But one of the things that is important in this kind of work is for number one, you to understand that you're going to get different pictures. So a literary text is going to give you a different insight onto the topic as a sculpture, as a vase painting, as anything else. And so it's not necessarily like you're looking for everything to correlate and to coincide to tell the same picture. Instead, you recognize through multidisciplinary work that the ancient world, just like our world is very complex, that two things can be true at once, which is that somebody can present something in one way and somebody else can present the same thing in another way. So one example that comes immediately to mind is the historian Herodotus tells us this story about the ruling family of Corinth in the, I'm going to say seventh century BCE, and there's one, they're endogamous. Everyone in this family kind of marries within the family. Okay. Not necessarily siblings, but like in the larger family context. There's one daughter, her name is Labda, and no one wants to marry her because she is disabled. So she gets married outside of the family.

Now I'm going to stop here because this is already important because she's still expected to get married and have children. That doesn't change because she's disabled. How she fulfills it is different from other women in her family, but she has still expected as an elite woman to get married and have children. So she does, she gets married outside of the family. She has a son who eventually like overthrows his biological family and he becomes the tyrant. His name is Sepsilis. So we have this one picture., of a woman who is disabled, potentially from birth, who knows, we think some kind of a mobility impairment and her family is like, we don't want you marrying within our family and we presume it's because of the disability in the text. So then there's that one, there's that one case. Okay.

Then there's this sculpture. I've got an article coming out about it any day now. There's a sixth century BCE. It dates to about 510 BCE. It's a sculpture that was dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis. This is a sculpture type called a kore, so it's a representation of a young woman. And there are dozens of these, okay, that were dedicated at the Acropolis all over the Greek world. Okay. And people are kind of divided about what they are, but these are statues of very beautiful young women. And we kind of think that in addition to these being dedications to a god or a goddess, that they also kind of advertise like the marriageability of the daughters of these elite families, at least some of them potentially do that. So one of them that was dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis, around 510 BCE, represents a dwarf woman. So somebody with what we might call a physical disability, asterisk this because not everyone in the dwarf community agrees, but for the purposes of my work and sort of the perspectives that I take, this is somebody with a body that diverges from what we expect to be part of some quote unquote norm., which the Greeks don't have a concept of, but we do. And so we have somebody dedicating a statue of their daughter. This is a married couple that's making the dedication, and they actually dedicate two statues of female figures, either they're both the same daughter, potentially it's two daughters, it's speculation that it's a daughter, but I think it fits. Anyway, kind of advertising their daughter., in a sense, and she's physically disabled, so she has dwarfism. And so it's a role, it's a representation. The statue doesn't have anything, but it's a representation of a person with dwarfism. And so we've got these two pictures.

On the one hand, this one family that doesn't want this disabled woman married within their family. On the other hand, this couple, Lysias and Euarchus, dedicating a statue of their daughter on the Athenian Acropolis being like, hey guys, we're in line with what everyone else is doing. Both of these things exist. They're both true. It is in the sense that it's possible that one family can feel one way and another family can feel another way. Those things can both be true. And so my job is not necessarily to say this is what people thought about disabled people, it's instead to try to tease out the diversity of experiences that disabled people could have, and that would depend on things like your age, your gender, your wealth, your status. Are you a citizen? Are you enslaved. Or something in between that depends. And so disability and a disabled life is as complex, as varied, as diverse as any other type of life. And so my job isn't to say this is the one thing that they thought about disabled people, but instead say, guess what, it's complicated. Anyone could be disabled, anyone could become disabled, and it all depends on just a variety of factors, including what your disability is.

And you've just touched on something there. I think there are a lot of people that still to this day seem to believe that either you are born able-bodied or you were born disabled and that is your lot in life, but we all know someone who has had something happen to them and everything changes. Have we got any evidence of, let's say, a Greek who has gone to war and had a life-changing injury? What would that be like? Is there something that the Greeks are doing to look after people that become disabled after childhood?

Yeah, I mean, people can become disabled at any point from any cause, known and unknown. So you can just develop a condition. And again, it really just depends. So some people think there's been some arguments that this pension in Athens is specifically for disabled war veterans. We have no evidence of that. In fact, we have some pretty good evidence of not that, that that's not what this pension is for. In my work, it doesn't seem to matter how you became disabled. And this is actually true in the modern period as well. I know we like to think of ourselves as, you know, being very helpful to disabled war veterans. These people sacrifice their lives in order to protect us. And so we should honor them and we should respect them and care for them. And that's true for like the immediate after war period. And that's it. So the statistics of like disabled war veterans who are homeless, for example, are appalling. And so it doesn't seem to matter in the ancient world, how you became disabled, to be honest. There's even this really fun, fun, it's not that fun, but there's this anecdote, it's kind of apocryphal.

So we don't know if it's true or not, but it kind of highlights that there is no set answer to this question. So the idea, I forget it's either in Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Diodorus Siculus, I can never remember. But basically Alexander the Great is triumphing through Persia on his military campaigns, and he comes across a group of Greeks who had been held as prisoners of war by the Persians. And the text tells us they've been mutilated. There's nothing human recognizable about them except their voices. Because they've been so horribly disfigured or mutilated as captives by the Persians. And Alexander the Great is like, man, that really sucks. So I can either get you guys back home to your hometown or found you a colony here in Persia. What do you want to do? And these men, these sort of mutilated men, have a conversation about whether or not they can go back home. Some of them are like, look, we're war veterans, like we sustained these injuries in war, they will honor us for it. They will accept us. And others are like, no, man, look at us. Like, it doesn't matter how we got them. We should just stay here. You know, start over, not burden our families with this. And they do ultimately decide to stay in Persia. But the fact of this as a conversation, as a sort of discussion shows that this is not settled.

Not everyone agrees about this question in the ancient world. And we shouldn't expect them to either.

We've talked very briefly, I want to come back to him, the God with a disability. For those who don't know a lot about the Greek pantheon beyond, you know, Disney's Hercules, can you talk a little bit more about this particular God?

Yeah. So Greeks have tons of gods and goddesses and, but there are like the core, the Olympian gods or the core 12, sometimes 14 gods that are just sort of the main ones of the pantheon. Pantheon just means all the gods. And one of them, Hephaestus, is the God of the Forge. He's a blacksmith God and he's physically disabled. Whether he is disabled from birth or disabled from shortly after birth is kind of a question. But I think most sources have him disabled from birth, or that's kind of the implication. It ultimately doesn't matter, but he's one of our core gods. And it's interesting the ways that people talk about him. So either his disability is his entire identity. So it becomes explanatory for everything that happens to him in his life, if it's bad, or the disability is erased if there's something good. This is what scholars do. The Greeks don't do this. They are happy for all sorts of things with all of their gods. And we first meet Hephaestus actually in book one of Homer's Iliad. Hephaestus shows up. He's kind of pouring wine for the gods and goddesses in the kind of awkward aftermath of an argument between Hera and Zeus. But he shows up in a lot of, he's actually, I think he's mentioned more than many of the other gods in Homer's poems in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He's married to Aphrodite. She does cheat on him with the god Ares. And that's a pretty good example of the ways that people talk about stuff. So Hephaestus gets cheated on by his wife Aphrodite, who, by the way, Hephaestus says she doesn't love him because he's disabled. So he says that.

So Aphrodite cheats on him with Ares. And people are like, well, you know, it's because he's disabled. The thing is other gods get cheated on by their spouses and they're not disabled. So it's actually not a specific feature of his disability is having an unfaithful wife. It just turns out the gods are not very faithful to their spouses. I think having Aphrodite as monogamous would be weird. Yeah, it'd be a little bit weird. And people will talk about how Hephaestus is like, he's kind of Olympus and then brought back. And they're like, well, it's, you know, makes sense because the disability, the thing is like, in the Iliad, Zeus tells Ares that he hates him more than any of the other gods. Zeus is like, I hate you. And if I could get rid of you as a god, I would. And Ares is non-disabled. So it turns out being a god, disabled or not, is just complicated. And it comes with good things and bad things. And we can't sort of blame everything on the disability, everything bad on the disability. I think all of these things happen to Hephaestus and he's disabled.

Exactly. I love the idea of that. I think, you know, those of us who have grown up in a Christian tradition, God is perfect. It's not the same in Greek thought.

You know, Hephaestus, I really love. I've got an article coming out about him next month in March of 2026. And Athens, the city god of Athens is Athena, obviously. But Athenians go really hard in the fifth century especially on this idea of autochthony, right? Which is just another way of saying indigeneity. The fact that they are born from the soil and they have always lived there. This is their land. They're literally born from the soil. This is the story that they have. They say other Greeks are migrants from other places. They're settlers on their land. The Athenians are the only Greeks that are indigenous to their own territory. And they go hard on this narrative. And the thing is the father of Athenian autochthony is Hephaestus. They develop a myth in probably the fifth century, possibly late sixth. They create this myth of indigeneity, of autochthony.

And the myth is that basically Hephaestus attempts to rape his sister, his half-sister Athena. And in the process., you can't rape Athena. She's a virgin. It's one of her whole things. You can't rape her. And so he ejaculates onto her leg. She takes a tuft of wool, wipes it off, throws it onto the ground. And from that, the mixture of Hephaestus' seed with Gaia, with Mother Earth, is born the first Athenian. Athena takes up this baby, raises it. It's a whole situation after that. But Athenians create this myth. And because they created it, they could have picked any god. They could have picked Aries. They could have picked Poseidon. They didn't. Sometimes people talk about, oh, the Athenians have this kind of uncomfortable relationship with Hephaestus as their progenitor, as the father of Athenian autochthony. They don't. They picked it. They built a temple to him in the Athenian Agora. He has an altar in the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis. This is Athena's main temple in the city of Athens. He has an altar on the Parthenon Frieze. It's a very famous sculptural decoration on the Parthenon. He's sharing a couch with Athena.

He's got festivals in the city of Athens. And I think it's a play by Sophocles. I forget which one. Athenians are referred to as the children of Hephaestus. The Athenians are not the ones with the problem with Hephaestus. They picked him. They loved him as their god. They celebrated their relationship with Hephaestus. Anyone saying that the Athenians had an uncomfortable relationship with Hephaestus as their progenitor, they're the ones with this uncomfortable relationship, not the Athenians.

And just so that we're clear, if we're going to get stuck potentially on the idea of he was trying to rape Athena, was there any male god who didn't try to rape anyone?

Well, that's such a great question. Um, did Hermes? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe one. Maybe one. I don't know about Hermes. That doesn't mean he didn't. But yes, they're all trying to do rapes. And so not to be flippant about it, but like it's just a big part of the god's behavior. And so yes, that has nothing to do with his disability. They all did it.

Yeah. Just to make it 100% clear, it's because he's a god. It's not because he was a disabled god.

You know, actually, he's one of the few that seems to have like stable, romantic relationships. So after his relationship with Aphrodite goes south, he gets married to one of the Graces, to Kharis. And in the Iliad, that's who he's married to. And he's got kids. So in different mycological cycles, he's got kids. And so it just seems to be, actually, he might be one of our most romantically stable.

Which is saying something.

It really is. Mm-hmm.

What is the kind of current field of scholarship on disability in ancient Greece? Is this something that has been studied for a long time? Or are you one of the pioneers?

I'm not one of the pioneers of the study of disability. So the first book that came out in English on this topic was in 1995. So about, what was that, 30 years ago? Oh my god. So about 30 years ago. And that was Robert Garland's book, The Eye of the Beholder, which I do not recommend. But at the same time, Martha Edwards published, she finished her dissertation on disability, which she eventually in 2003 published as a book called The Staff of Oedipus. That's like the main, the first part of the title, which I think is fantastic. And since then, there's been a growing body of work. So in this century, I would say, is where the study of disability in the ancient world has really taken off. And since then, I mean, it's grown exponentially year to year. And the work that I do is different from a lot of the earlier work in the sense of how engaged I am with the fields of disability studies and critical disability theory. I think it's safe to say I'm kind of a pioneer of that, such explicit engagement, theoretically.

But other people are doing just really fantastic work. And in fact, some of the most exciting work is being done by graduate students right now. And so the future of this field, I think, is particularly bright with the kinds of work that I'm seeing being performed by graduate students. And can we see what kind of directions they're going in? Yeah, they're, oh my god, so many different directions, which I think is just fantastic. So they're not doing work like I am, where I'm just trying to understand sort of life in the ancient world. But instead, people are looking at really more specific things. They're integrating disability research, disability perspectives, disability theory, into more mainstream types of research. So looking at, for example, Greek tragedy. Looking at Sophocles's Philoctetes, for example. Looking at the figure of Oedipus from a disability-informed perspective, OK?

Also, we've got really great people using disability theory, but not explicitly looking at disability. Seeing what disability theory can do for our understanding of aspects of society. There are concepts, there are theories that are applicable to other types of things. And so we've got a lot of great work. There are people who are integrating disability theory, into bioarchaeological research, looking at human remains. And actually looking at integrating disability theory into those kinds of studies. And so we're seeing a lot of more specialized work instead of these kind of broad overviews, which is more of what I do. And actually trying to integrate that disability theory into more subfields so that it's not just its own thing. Disability work doesn't just exist in this bounded silo, but instead disability work is everywhere. And that's what I'm seeing and that's what I'm particularly excited about.

Yeah, it sounds wonderful.

You know, in the same way that like feminist analyses, it's not just about studying women. Instead, you're looking at the concept of gender and seeing how gender structures a society. It's the same thing with disability. Disability isn't just about disabled people. It's about the ways that we think about our bodies and about the expectations we have of our bodies. And guess what? Our bodies are everywhere in the ancient world. They're not just talking about disability. You've got bodies in everything. So it's really heartening to see the ways that people, especially graduate students right now, are using these theories to really improve our understanding of ancient world broadly. And just so that we wrap up on the big question, what is the main takeaway that you want listeners to come away from this episode with? The new knowledge, the main thing that you think is the most important way that we should be approaching this topic. It's really important to remember that disability is everywhere. So when you're looking, people ask me, where do you find disability in the ancient world? It's everywhere. It's in every genre of literature. It is in every type of art. It is in every cemetery that you excavate. It is in every household. So it's not a question of whether disability is there. It's a question of, are we asking the right questions to get at answers that inform us about disability? It is, can we distinguish disability? So could we distinguish a user of a cane or a crutch as disabled from non-disabled? It's not about whether it's there. It is about what we bring to the evidence that exists. And about sort of unpacking our own biases and actually letting the evidence tell us what's going on.

That's wonderful. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

It's our pleasure!