Show notes
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 you? Dr Debby Sneed Well, the human remains come to me. I am not a bio-archaeologist, so I rely on the work and the reports that are filed by people who are skeletal archaeologists, osteoarchaeologist, bio-archaeologists. [00:03:38] And so I am beholden to who’s doing work where. And so I have used things like, uh, there’s a lot of great work done from cemeteries in Northern Greece, specifically Pydna, for example, Amphipolis, um, a lot of great work being done from cemeteries and deposits in Athens. But also in places like, Thebes. [00:03:58] Um, and so it just sort [00:04:00] of depends on what’s available and who’s doing the analysis. And if they’re asking the kinds of questions that will help me in identifying who is potentially disabled and what we can say about it. Dr Rad Absolutely. And so roughly how many people do you think would have been classified as disabled in the ancient world? Dr Debby Sneed [00:04:20] It’s kind of an impossible question for a lot of reasons. Uh, first of all, there’s not really a category of the disabled in ancient Greece. So now we have sort of legal definitions as included, as well as societal definitions of what is disability, who is disabled, but that just didn’t exist in the ancient world. [00:04:38] So even if the ancient Greeks did keep, sort of records of things like this, they wouldn’t have used disability as a category for keeping track of the population. Second of all, disability is, it’s really fluid as a concept, right? So you can be disabled for a period of time and then become cured or well, or something like that. [00:04:57] Um, you could also be non-disabled for most of [00:05:00] your life and then become disabled. You could be involved in a battle, for example, where you become injured and it leads to a permanent disability, old age leads to disability. So right now, the World Health Organization estimates that about 15% of the world’s population is disabled. In the United States [00:05:18] the estimates are somewhere between 20 to 25% of the population. Uh, it’s actually the largest minority group in the United States. So these are modern statistics and it’s not possible to sort of import those to the ancient world. The reasons that people are disabled, how people become disabled, and how we classify disability would have been quite different. [00:05:37] But we can probably guess, based on a variety of evidence, that a great number of people in the ancient world either lived with a disability from birth or became disabled or interacted on a very close basis, either as a family member or a close community member with somebody who was disabled. Dr Rad Yeah, it’s actually something that I suddenly realized how horrifying it [00:06:00] really was. [00:06:00] How many people must have had to live in discomfort or just with constant inconvenience in the ancient world. Because when you think about it, when I was looking at the research, I really liked this idea that, you could really only classify someone as having a disability, if the society they live in doesn’t really help them out anyway. [00:06:20] And it doesn’t meet their needs in some ways. So for example, I wouldn’t classify myself as having a disability per se, because I have access to hearing aids because I live in a society and I have a job where I can afford them. But in a different context, I might be, I might be classified that way because I wouldn’t have access to an aid, which allows me to do my work. [00:06:39] And when you think about the lack of technology and all that kind of stuff available in the ancient world, it is really quite staggering, isn’t it? Dr Debby Sneed So, what you’re describing there is actually called the social model of disability. So people who are engaged in studies of disability in the past and present, people involved in disability activism, operate – at least tend to operate – according to different models of disability. [00:07:00] And the social model of disability is one that is very prevalent in disability studies, but it’s specifically organized against what’s called the medical model of disability. The medical model is something that situates the problem of disability in the body of the disabled person. It says you are the problem. [00:07:17] And in order to overcome your disability, you need to overcome your own body, right? And so this is where treatments and cures and rehabilitation specifically focus on correcting the person with the disability so that they can function in a quote unquote, “normal” society. Right. The social model of disability is kind of the opposite of that, right? [00:07:37] So what the social model of disability does is, sort of like what early feminist scholarship did with sex and gender where sex is considered sort of a biological fact and gender was something that was imposed on to sex, right? So the social model of disability does something like that with impairment and disability. [00:07:56] Impairment being so the biological reality of a body [00:08:00], so missing limbs, loss of hearing, deafness, uh, vision impairments, things like that. And disability is something that’s imposed externally on the impaired body. So disability is then a problem of society and not a problem of the individual and correcting disability means disability accommodations. [00:08:19] It means creating an environment that allows the impaired people to survive. Not just survive, but exist and thrive and participate in society. Dr G If we’re thinking about ancient Greece and how these models might be playing out, because obviously even though ancient Greek people themselves might not be thinking in terms of these models, they might still be useful ways of looking and thinking about the evidence that’s left behind. [00:08:45] How would you say that you see these kinds of models present in the evidence from the ancient world? Dr Debby Sneed Well, some of these models are in my own research, keeping in mind that, for example, the social model of disability is not without its problems. So there’s [00:09:00] some really great work done by, for example, Tom Shakespeare, on the problems of the social model of disability, talking about how it kind of treats the impairment as if it’s irrelevant, right? [00:09:08] Um, but that’s actually not the reality for a lot of people with disabilities; that, while there are problems that are created by society, impairment in and of itself is not neutral, right? It is something that they live with. It is something that affects their experience of the world, their interactions with people. [00:09:25] And so, um, there’s a lot of movement away from the social model, not just to amend the social model, but actually to take a completely different approach. One of the things that I really like about the social model of disability is its emphasis on contingency. And what that means is that, um, what is considered disabling, what impairments are considered disabling is going to change depending on the context. [00:09:47] And so what I do in my research is I try to look at accommodations for disability, so ways that I can see that society changed to account for the fact of impairment, um, and [00:10:00] use that as a kind of metric for understanding how the ancient Greeks thought about people with disabilities. So, um, not just looking at the instances in myth or in tragedy, for example, where we might have comments about people who are disabled, but looking instead at the structures of society to see how they changed or didn’t change depending on the needs of the population. [00:10:20] It’s specifically focused on, um, things that were intended or could have benefited people with disabilities. Dr Rad It’s been really fascinating actually, to look at some of your work. I believe that you’ve done quite a lot of study on the use of, uh, ramps to try and help people access temples or sanctuaries and that sort of thing [00:10:39] in ancient Greece, if they had some sort of mobility impairment. Dr Debby Sneed Yeah, definitely. So this is an article that, that I wrote on ramps specifically, focused on ramps and healing sanctuaries in ancient Greece. So ramps are a kind of feature that we’re really familiar with, especially in a type of Greek architecture called Doric architecture, [00:11:00] which we primarily situated in the Peloponnese, even though it’s not completely confined to the Peloponnese. [00:11:06] So we don’t really see a lot of ramps. I think a recent study of – a sort of catalogue of ramps in the ancient Greek world – found fewer than twenty, like total ramps on temple buildings, specifically in the Greek world. So that is not a lot of ramps or a lot more temples than twenty. And so when I was looking at the distribution, however, of those ramps, um, and looking at not just temple buildings, but also secondary and subsidiary buildings at sanctuaries, the healing sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus has eleven built ramps. [00:11:37] So if I consider the fact – Dr G Oh wow Dr Debby Sneed – yeah. If you consider that most sanctuaries have no ramps or one ramp, the fact that this one sanctuary has eleven ramps needs to be explained in some way. And so I moved to then to think, okay, how could we explain this? So the traditional explanations for ramps are having to do with animals. [00:11:57] You know, that this would be an easier way, uh, [00:12:00] for animals to enter the buildings. Except that animals didn’t enter the buildings. And so that doesn’t really work as an explanation. Animals that were sacrificed were sacrificed outside of the temple. And you can’t really imagine bringing a bowl, for example, into a temple with all of this, the furniture, all of the dedications that were housed in there. [00:12:19] Uh, other explanations, um, include, uh, sort of wheeling dedications in and out. So if you imagine people dedicate stone statues, for example, or marble statues, those are very heavy. So maybe you would want to use a ramp so that you could wheel it in and out. However, there are specific treasury buildings in ancient Greek sanctuaries. [00:12:38] We can think of the treasuries at Delphi, for example, or at Olympia. And the explicit function of these very small buildings was to house really expensive and heavy dedications. And these buildings never have ramps. And so if ramps facilitated the movement of th…
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