Special Episode – Disability in Ancient Greece

There are many groups that are often overlooked in both ancient and modern societies. One of those are people with disabilities, and we were fortunate to talk to expert Dr Debby Sneed about her work on impairment in antiquity. Dr Sneed has examined a range of sources about this topic, including human remains, temples and textual evidence.

Her focus has mostly been on physical impairments that leave a trace in human remains. Sneed's focus is ancient Greece, but we couldn’t resist bringing Rome into the conversation every now and then! 

In order to make this episode as accessible as possible, a full transcript will be provided for this episode.

Special Episode – Disability in Ancient Greece with Dr Debby Sneed

What's up for discussion?

In this conversation we delve into a number of questions, including:

• How do you classify a disability in this line of research?
• How many people in the ancient world would have had a disability?
• What kinds of sources are available for studying disability in the ancient world?
• What would life have been like for people with disabilities in the ancient world?

Topics that come up in the conversation:

• Artistic representations of disability in Greece and Rome
• The Panhellenic Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidauros with its eleven ramps!
• The practice of infanticide in ancient Greece
• Disability and impairment among the elite including King Agesilaus II of Sparta, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Emperor Claudius
• Welfare systems in ancient Athens, as highlighted by Lysias 24, For The Disabled Man.  

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out some of the suggested readings. This is a huge topic, and we did not get the chance to discuss issues that leave less of a physical trace, such as blindness or muteness, nor did we touch on disabilities that might have arisen from disease or mental illness.

You can also follow Dr Sneed on Twitter @debscavator and track her research at Academic.edu.

This vase by the ‘Clinic Painter' is one of Dr Debby Sneed's favourites.
It may show two men in a courtship pose, but this is still debated by scholars. One of the men is a dwarf or little person.
Photograph by Maria Daniels, courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, January 1992.

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Dr Rad 

Hello, there! You are in for a treat and you're going to be hearing a special episode from The Partial Historians. Today we're going to be talking to Dr. Debby Sneed. Dr. Debby Sneed is a lecturer in Classics at California State University. She has a PhD in Archaeology from UCLA. And a MA in Classics from the University of Colorado, at Boulder, as well as a BA in English and History from the University of Wyoming. She has worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Italy, Ethiopia, and the American Southwest.

[00:00:46] And she's currently working on a monograph about disability accommodations in ancient Greece. She's got some publications that are also forthcoming. So keep your eyes peeled for that. But in the meantime, here is our episode with Dr. Debby Sneed.

[00:01:09]

Welcome to a special edition of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr. Rad. 

Dr G

And I'm Dr. G. And we are super excited today to be sitting down with Dr. Debby Sneed. And we're going to be looking at disability in ancient Greece, and potentially also, as a side note, a little bit of ancient Rome coming from us.

[00:01:31] 

Dr Rad

Absolutely. You know, we can't resist that and I must admit, this is a topic that, I'm going to admit full disclosure. I apologize to both of you. I have never really thought that much about disability in the ancient world, which is actually doubly shameful because, on a personal note, I'm just going to throw it out there. I actually have a condition which means that I'm gradually losing my hearing. And I've actually lost quite a lot. I wear hearing aids now. And so, I suppose, I have a very mild disability, which, I'm really lucky, it doesn't affect my life too much at this point in time. But it's something that I suppose has been coming more and more into my life as I lose more hearing.

[00:02:08] So I'm really fascinated to get talking about disability in the ancient world and what that entails. 

Dr G

Yeah, so it's fantastic to have you here, Debby, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr Debby Sneed

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here to talk about this. 

Dr Rad

So like dive straight in with, uh, with one of our first questions, which is exactly how do you define or classify a disability in your research?

Dr Debby Sneed

[00:02:30] This is a really difficult question for a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with a lot of the attitudes that people bring to the topic of disability in the modern period. Um, but for me, in my research, I focus specifically on physical disabilities. My work is primarily interdisciplinary, which means I look at material and evidence from a lot of different fields and reconcile them in various ways.

[00:02:52] So I look at not just literary evidence and artistic evidence, but also physical remains. So I studied human remains as well. And so in [00:03:00] order to do this correctly, I tried to look at things that could potentially be archaeologically recovered, uh, in that is specifically physical disabilities. So I look at things like cleft palate, missing limbs, short stature, stuff like that.

Dr Rad

[00:03:16] Maybe just building on that. Can you tell us a little bit about this, the sites that you've looked at in your research when you've been looking at the human remains or do you, or do they – the human remains – come to