Liv speaks with PhD student Cecily Bateman about their research in disability in the ancient world (spoilers: it's as horrifying as it is fascinating).
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.
Hello, this is let's talk about mits baby, and I am your host live and I am here with another conversation episode. So back in it was probably August early September, Mikaela and I sat down and recorded a ton of conversations with loads of incredible people, which has worked out really well because as I'm moving across the country, I'm realizing that when ADHD, when a person has ADHD and their apartment is completely packed up, slash everywhere all the time, and all you can think about is is a ridiculously long distance drive. It just turns out that like brains don't work very well. So I'm thrilled to have these conversations that were already recorded for you all. And today's is something special. I spoke with Cecily Bateman, who studies I mean, lots of things that were utterly interesting, but their main one for today's episode is disability in the ancient Roman world. Spoilers slash trigger warning. The ancient Roman world had very very like May constructed. There's a lot of enslavement. You can see what I mean about the brain, that's my trigger. There's an enormous amount of talking about enslaved people in the Roman World because it's Rome, and you know, they just made a real habit out of it. But we had an absolutely fascinating conversation. We might slightly devolve into a ranto capitalism surprise, surprise, but ultimately, oh my god, my conversation with Cecily was absolutely wonderful.
So sit back and enjoy.
Conversations the horrors persist disability in the Ancient Roman World with Cecily Bateman. Honestly, I, MICHAELA and I were going through, you know, possible guests for the show, and we literally just saw the words like disability in the ancient world and I was like, yep, okay, perfect, Like I always want to hear about that. You know, I've covered it here and there specifically, though more so in Greece. So I love that you study disability in Rome. So yeah, like I mean what led you into that? Like what do you study exactly? How do we know about disabled people in Rome? Like it's so interesting? Yeah, no, it's it's incredible. And right now, disability studies in classics as such, it's just about to have its moment, Like early chorist scholars and mid carest scholars are just starting to release these incredible, hard hitting monographs and edited collections. So it's it's a really exciting time.
I got into thinking about disability because of my experience as a disabled scholar, and this is when I was starting my master's. I wrote an essay on the intersection of disability and slavery and Roman law. And you might think, oh, my god, thinking about law is so boring. Actually, you know what, Roman law has a lot of really interesting bits.
I'm willing to bet I'm willing to bet as ridiculous things like I've heard some on Athenian law, and actually I realize I think in line with disability as well. But and like Athenian law is wild so I can only imagine Roman law is wilder.
Yeah. Yeah, they were on, they were on some they were on some intense, intense stuff. Then, but I mean, I don't know. I try. I think about classics and like how I do my scholarship in quite a political way, and then I'm going, Okay, how can this contribute to classics? But also how can this contribute to like the world and wind of things. I think that's something that's really important with humanities academia, and I think that studying disability in the ancient world has these really fascinating implications for disability activism and disability studies today. I mean people so like Machell Award and Hannah silver Blank, they've talked about how so many ablest tropes have the kind of roots in the ancient world, so like use of disability is metaphor was just put out this book on on blindness in ancient theater.
As if she wasn't already on my list of people to get on, Yeah.
She was already like completely iconic.
I like, I've literally had on the list for a while now, and I'm like, okay, we'll add another reason, right, Yeah, we're Twitter friends. I just kind of actually make.
The Oh yeah, no, I mean she would be a fantastic guess, but yeah. She talks about how this makes these tropes seem like these timeless things that are essential to human nature that we can't escape, and you're like, no, we must upick. How all these they're contingent, they're constructed, they're reconstructed at all these different moments, and by I'm picking that you kind of shape the ground that that they stand on in terms of being these things that we supposedly can't change. Yeah, and for ancient disability, Like I mean, this is where over kind of overlaps with my PhD research, which is actually on the far right in classics.
Oh my god, well yeah, into that at all.
All my research is just laugh a minute stuff, you know, a conquest over her I bet light and breezy, but like a lot of it, and it does kind of go into mainstream discussions today, especially around kind of like state stay welfare spending.
Hmm.
There's this there's this idea that disabled people today that should be like so grateful for how how we have it. You know, in the ancient world, disabled people would have been left to die or like ostracized or perish. So you know you should have complained about you know, you should just think about how good you have it. But obviously disability history shows that this is just completely untrue. You know, disabled people have been like crucial actors.
Absolutely, but also like just from so from a personal standpoint, my younger sister has been disabled by chronic migraines for the past like eight years, like literally all of the time she has a headache and so and literally just last week she got denied for disability by the government of Canada and and even like and it's so wild, and like the little in the Little Thing said, you know that that like disability is not determining whether you can work in society. It's determining whether you need you can care for yourself. And so she got denied because she can care for herself. But like that's literally all she can do. It's like it's so it's so wild the way they treat these things. And so I'm just I didn't realize like that connection was gonna come to me, but like obviously it would, but it just, yeah, it makes me so angry, just as like the older sister of somebody doing dealing with this. But like the when it comes to like the the that argument that you said, you know, like about saying like, oh well it's better than in the classical world. Like I feel like that argument is used for so many things that are so it's so fucking wild because it's also like even if that was true, which isn't, Like why would that make it okay? Like why would that like just because it's not the absolute worst doesn't make something good or functioning.
Yeah, well I think it ties in this whole idea of like return to this state of this state of humanity where we were untainted by modernity. We return to man's like natural instincts, and then everybody is somehow you know, great and you know, like the warriors of ancient Greece or or whatever. But again it's it's not true like disabled people have They've been obviously actors, they've been accepted in their in their communities. But what I like to think about when we think about ancient disability in the past is kind of using it as a tool to think further about the relationships between disability and other social and economic structures, because I mean, a lot of disability theory and scholarship today obviously think talks about capitalism in the modern world and how you know, likes with work. They're like, oh, if you can't work, you're you know, you're you're a bad disabled person. Or you must get disabled people into work, but we won't actually make allowances.
Yeah no, no, and you won't like help them if they can't work, even though they're yeah yeah yeah yeah. And certainly even if you get on disability, it doesn't actually match like the cost of living in oh this country, Oh my god, Like I swear like even if she had been you know, accepted, it would have been like it wouldn't have even paid her rent a month, and she has incredibly cheap quote unquote cheap rent for like where we live. You know. Sorry, now I'm like turning it into like, oh my god, I'm the angry older sister. I didn't realize it was going to connect so much, but yeah.
I feel like it takes like a five minutes with a brush with any kind of state disability of bureaucracy for you would just be like this, this is a nightmare. This is a Byzantine labyrinth of cruelty.
Yeah, it's great. Capitalism is doing awesome.
We're all fun, we're having a great time.
Absolutely definitely not in its death throes, and we're all suffering under it.
Oh my god. Yeah. And I mean this kind of this kind of leaks back to what I think. I know you and Kyle discussed probably three years ago now, but you know I recently listened to it.
Yeah, like I keep thinking it was like it was a long ago.
I yeah, yeah, like the different models of disability like this the social model, so I'll quickly go over that. So like the medical model is is a kind of outdated model that goes, Okay, how do we fix people so they can interact with the environment better. So, okay, person who uses a wheelchair, we're going to try and make you walk, or instead of putting ramps so you can get around in a way that's not painful to you, or a way that's like your preferred method. And then there's the social model, which I'm really interested in, which looks about looks at how different structures and institutions disable some people and enable others. So it's really like it's not so much about bodies, it's about like the society and and who it's accommodating and who it's not. So that's what I that's what I kind of look at, and that really came forward in So I have two kind of projects on disability. So one this this projection disability and slavery in Roman law, and another that I'm working on, which is this comparison between the display of disabled bodies and the Roman Empire and Victorian Freak shows the British empire and how it's used to construct these ideas of normalcy and this this relationship of empire and like the imperial core is the people who look at the other who are very different. And how then, how the kind of imperial cores of Rome deals with the disabled people that are that are born in Rome, because obviously disabled be able of born everywhere. There's this one. I think it's in in Sutonious He records that this is I find this really interesting in terms of how disability is constructed socially. So Augustus was praised for displaying all kinds of oddities across the empire. I know, some of the animals. Such a great guy, such a model for what we want to be doing. Yeah, so he would display animals people, they would be like the kind of the tallest person and the smallest person. But he notes that Augustus didn't display people of respectable parentage apart from one exception, and like, okay, already this is this is fascinating. So I mean, by putting someone on display, you're making their body into a spectacle. There's no such thing as a body that's inherently freakish. I think in disability studies they call it in frequent wow, which is they position a disabled body or a body that that society at that particular moment has decided as outside of the normal next to a normal body to create the spectacle and underlie the differences. And obviously, like if you turn to Victoria Britain, this is super racialized, so you'd have people from across across the British Empire being displayed then and like made into into a spectacle. It's not just this kind of objective, objective display of bodies. Like one example that I find really interesting, it's a guy called Mohammad bou So. I think the son name is. It's French, it's spelled Baux, who was a person with warfism from India who exhibited himself, which is actually more and more common than some one might think. This is around kind of the eighteen sixties, and all the time his identity is this multiply other person. It's someone from who's Indian and someone who's disabled. Is constructed in the leaflets, he was called the miniature Man of India. India at this time is obviously a British colony, and everything about his presentation underlies this English anxiety about controlling the colonies. Like the adverts have him wearing a British military office outfit and this kind of like showing the effective management of the colonies via adoption of British dress and like literally moving people from the colonies to the imperial core to then to then put them on display as this ultimate like display of control over over everyone's bodies. So yeah, so I asked to complete bramble that not at all. I mean, it's fascinating. It's just fucking empire. And yeah, so Augustus is doing a similar thing, but he won't make a spectacle out of people with respectable parents, and he won't make a spectacle out of his own upper class. And I think that's really interesting in how disability and class and in the ancient world, how that's how that's constructed. Like for the upper classes, disability is something that is is the is the exception. It's something that disrupts their put their self image and self portrayal of superiority. And that's why you hear so much about upper class figures who were disabled, like Claudius, they talk a lot about it, stuttera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's such a big deal. Whereas obviously disability and impairment in lower class people would have been super common given the you know, the physical labor, malnutrition, No, obviously not non modern medicine. So it's a hugely like disabling environment, but that depends on your relationship to labor and what kind of labor you're doing.
M hmm.
Yeah. Disability is it's just it's all wrapped up in everything.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and like I mean, Rome, Roma's always so wild. It's also, like you know, obviously not the thing I focus on a lot, but I love when people come on to tell me about Rome because that's much more preferable to me. But like, I mean, I wish it was surprising, but how you know, you talked about law earlier too, so like what was going on there in terms of like you know, what they were doing with laws and disabled people?
Oh my god, there's there's so much, so much going on. So specifically I look at I gave this intersection of disability and slavery because I think it's such an impotent, like insectual social positions that really shows how disability is constructed by the requirements of different bodies at different times. And this is really interesting and really really clear when it comes to slavery, and that there was some in how disability was constructed in relation to the slave people. So this, oh, I should go back. The social model makes the difference between impairment and disability. So impairment is a bodily difference that may or may not cause a functional impairment. So you might have you might not have a hand, or you might have a facial difference that you know, offensively would be referred to as as the deformity. And I'll come back to how tattoos were incorporated in the tradework of disability in Rome, because that's fascinating. Yeah, and then the disability which is like the social consequence of that. So stuff about disability and slavery and Rome is set out in book twenty one of Justinian's Digest, which is a compilation of all these rulings of Roman law, and it's one of our main sources, and it referenced something called the Edict of the cural A Diles, which is again these laws about buying and selling enslaved people with defects and hidden defects. Yeah, I know, Rome, it's never beating the allegations. Yeah, But what's really interesting is how it separates impairment and disability depending on the functional consequence of the impairments. So there's one bit, as someone says, I can't remember exactly which jurists because there are a lot of them, says, it's not enough for someone to be born with a hand whose fingers are all all joined together. It has to present a functional impairment. So you could be born with a bodily difference, but depending on how it affected the way you worked or the way you lived your life, that it might not be considered disabling. And then this is really interesting because you go, okay, what about two people who had the same functional impairment but they had different coping mechanisms, you know, and obviously adaptations are guided by so much else about your body flexibility, for example. Does that mean one of them would be considered disabled and one of them doesn't. And it just shows how this idea of disability rests so much on these social expectations of bodies. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then there's another example which is really interesting, of fertility.
Right.
Yeah, so all of this it's all very differ.
I mean, yeah, but at least we can laugh now.
Yeah, yeah, the kind of we laugh or we.
Cry, Yeah, exactly, you have to.
Yeah, filly, I mean it's it's such an important issue for both enslaved women and three women. So in in three women, obviously, fertility is really really important, especially the higher up you go in terms of class status. Right, the first case of Roman divorce recorded was due to the wife. I mean theoret we don't actually know if it was her being infertile and their husband's like, look, I love you, but I was swore this oath that I had to marry for the purposes of having children. You can't have kids, so gotta go. So yeah, So that then is severely disabling. If you're if you're considered infertile, you know, you can lose your marriage, you can lose your place in society because your primary role is this is this free upperclass women women, is to produce legitimate airs. Yeah, but that's completely different for enslaved women, right because enslaved so in saved families weren't legally legitimate. There wasn't this impetus to produce like a legal air. Yeah, so it's not necessarily disabling. They kind of distinguish between whether you're congenerously infertile, so whether you're like born like that and it's totally fine, or whether infertility is a consequence of your your health failing, which was a very big thing in kind of Greek and then later Roman medicine in facility is the symptom of something else being wrong with your body. I don't know how they tell the difference, but that is just what what comes down to us.
They also also thought your womb could wander up into your shoulder. I just recD the conversation that fitting well with this, so I'm like, yeah, you know, the stuff they believed about bodies Broadley was sometimes pretty wild.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like, oh, your health is fairly your wounds just it's just wandered to the wrong place, you know.
Yeah, yeah, in the middle of nowhere, there's going to be a lot going on.
Just chilling. Yeah. And then that would be situations then for enslaved women in which in fertility would actually be it'd be a benefit again more super fun, not depressing topics in that obviously a lot of enslaved women were sold for for sex work, right, in which then not being able to get pregnant right kind of ideal. Yeah, And I think I think it's OVID who has this this thing on how pregnancy like diminishes a woman's beauty and ruins ruins her body, and you're like, okay, cool, cool.
Great, he fucking would like like the way that a's metamorphoses is like beautiful. And then so much else that he wrote is like I'm kind of a shitty guy. Like it's just like a constant battle in my brain about whether I like him or not.
Yeah, like I'm a shitty guy. Here are tumble at points my thoughts. But also here's this like heartbreaking and spiring, welcome literature, enjoy future people. Yeah, but then what makes this this idea of infertility being disabling in different situations is enslaved women could be manumitted, could become freed women, and then infertility is this whole different ball.
Game, right, He's more people.
I know, everybody's having a very bad time, so you could you could then become to say people by moving social position.
But like, I mean yes, but I feel like that that phrasing suggestion like is like, oh, you know, moving the social position. But it's like, imagine if you're being freed from enslavement and the thing that made you like valuable when you were enslaved is now a disabling thing. Now that you're free, like talk about having like mixed feelings.
About I hate to say it, but it actually gets worse.
Of course it does. You could say that.
With almost anything in road you go, it gets worse where I like grace. Yeah, you know, I.
Mean, yeah, I'm not saying it's that we just have less proof.
Yeah, yeah, No, that's that's so true. No, So there was this there's this amazing article unfortunately not open access I think, but by by kathinkathin humul Are about manumission for marriage. You can see where this is going. So and she talks about how enslaved women could be conditionally manumitted and then there was a kind of gap between of six months between when they were conditionally manumitted and then the enslaver, a former owner, had to marry them otherwise they would go back to being enslaved. And she theorizes that sometimes this six months gap was used to check if it could have children or not, and if she didn't could see it within the six months, they took it back back to enslavement. Yeah.
And I do think Rome is worse. I do like because they just like Greece. I feel like all of the shitty things like this that happened in Greece were like shitty because they we're just kind of like lacking in any kind of self awareness, Whereas in Rome, I feel like a lot of those shitty things they just seem much more intentional, like they just seem a lot less like accidentally shitty, Like I don't want to take away the power of the Greek crimes against humanity, but like, yeah, I don't know, it just always feels less depressing than real.
Yeah, I mean, the Astutel was like Greek and robust slavery is interesting to me because you know, sometimes the Greeks are constructing this whole idea of natural slavery and trying to make it all makes sense as this inherent thing, whereas Robe and Roman law that like slavery is an unnatural condition kind of fucked up really, but we're still gonna do it.
Yeah, yeah, I guess I just think, Okay, Greece's crimes, I guess, always feel sillier to me, And maybe that's all it is, is that like they just feel like goofyar in their horror, whereas Rome is just like we're horrifying. But again, I'm completely biased because I have a long standing appreciated for Greece over Rome, but it just keeps getting cemented. Is that what I'm saying?
Yeah? Yeah, And it's kind of interesting then to study these societies that are so awful, because I mean, I've never got the idea of like studying the thing you love, because to me, studying something means being like very critical over Yeah. People like, oh, you study you study Robe, you study classics for living, you must love the ancient Romans. I'm like, no, no, they're fascinating, but they're awful, Like.
Yeah, like love.
Yeah. It's like if you're if you're a mega fan boy of a philosophy of you might not actually be writing the best philosophy about it, you know.
I mean, and I think there's like there I encounter like a similar issue of like when I because I do love the ancient Greeks, but I also criticize them and think that they were shitty, and so people are often like, you know, if if I say a bad thing about Zeus, They're like, well, how can you say you love this topic if you talk about Zeo's being bad? And I'm like, because I understand complexity, yeah, I can see the difference, and I can love a thing that is not perfect, and then I can also simultaneously criticize you know, yeah.
I think you can love something as a tool for thinking with Yeah, exactly, Like you know, you might love reading mythology as a tool for thinking about all these complicated ideas reading mythology think about love, or reading of it to think about transformations and.
Straight misogyny.
Yeah, yeah, you could think, Okay, this raises so many if youse in a really complex way. Yeah, it's good to think with, But that doesn't mean that you condone it. In fact, I think you have to think with something in order to unpick and then hopefully start really deconstructing the harmful things.
Yeah, come out, Yeah, yeah absolutely, So what is like, you know, you've talked a lot about fertility and stuff, which is great and horrifying when it comes to like in enslaved disabled men, Like, was there anything kind of equally horrifying if they you know, I say men, but you know, just obviously like don't have a uters people?
Yeah, oh yeah, well the also, you know, as we've seen with Rome, it's always yes, yeah, I expected yes. Yeah. So then when you talk about you know, the whole legal position. Oh my, national situation gets really really interesting because there's this disagreement about whether eunuchs were were sound or unsound. So Laveo, who's this first century jurist, He's like, unsound. You can do various returns or get kind of partial refunds on these, But that just doesn't I know, I know it's horrible, but that just doesn't line up with other juris views or even reality because we know from from scholarship that unis were generally considered these kind of expensive and luxury enslaved people generally made unus kind of prepubescent to preserve their beauty, so they were sold to kind of sex work. Yeah.
Do you think this aligns it all with like, because I know that, you know, there's definitely a group that were Unich by choice, right, like the priests of Quebec gal Yes, yeah, so like, you know, do you think that they're they're kind of heightened importance links to that at all.
Or oh my god.
Yeah, So I actually just wrote a chapter on the Galley in which I talk about the Galley and unux Yeah, and I think so so much about the Galley that removes them from this acceptable social position.
So being a unit of being enslaved, your Roman system will look at you, go, okay, I understand you. I understand your your gender position. It's contingent upon you being this item of property and made for this, for this certain for this certain job, aka made to be sexually desirable. But with the galley and you've got this kind of post pubescent boom, you know, and obviously they're not enslaved, and they're not doing it for sexual desirability. It completely confounds the the social situation, their social position, and thus becomes a disability. Hmmm, right, yeah, I mean in the in the in the law, they say, okay, yeah, construction is always it's always a defect in free men, but it's not a defect in enslaved people. And you're like, okay, so whether it's disabling entirely depends upon you on your social position, which is And then it raises all these questions about what happens when the enslaved eunuch ages like becomes old and no longer fulfills the social role of like the eternal the eternal boy. Yeah, like, do they then kind of age into being considered disabled because they be less suitable for other types of general like manual labor. Yeah, I just think seeing disability in how complicated it is and how wrapped up in other social structures is important and counteracting these narratives. It's like okay, yeah, you just have people with different bodies plung them down and then that's that's it. That's how people react to them. And it's very kind of simplistic idea of disability history that only sees disabled people like as they're impermanent, rather of them like analyzing, Okay, how does this impairment become a disability? Why is it considered disabling? And I think that's what this kind of new generationship of disability scholarship is doing and why it's so so exciting. Yeah, yeah, I mean it really is.
I you know, obviously come at all of these things from the more mythological background, so I don't I don't know how much of that applies in Rome, but like I've always I mean, it's obviously so interesting. You know, the hephaistis is disabled in these like really interesting ways. You know you already mentioned my my episodes with with Kyle and but like I guess I was thinking about it more recently because I was in Eleusis and at the new museum there and they have so much art of Triptopus and Triptoleonymus basically used a wheelchair, and you know, he it's pretty clearly what it is like in every image, and I just remember, you know, when I'm trying to think of what it would because it was about this Hades game, which I've never played, but basically I saw someone, you know, it came to me via someone arguing with somebody who thought that a god using a wheelchair is like the most unbelievable thing, and like it was like all woke nonsense and all this stuff, and it's like this idea that we've like, like there's this idea in modern society or people who are interacting with this stuff via reception that like that that is woke nonsense and that you know, it's them inserting that even though it is very clearly from the ancient world. You can see it in imagery, like it literally they had wheelchairs, they had all of that, you know in that in that and they gave it to gods. So it's such an interesting thing to like it just examined the you know the complexities of real disabled people in the ancient world as compared to the kind of like idolized versions, right like in Hephiestas and Tryptolemus. We get these like divine versions of disabled people, and I wonder, I wonder how that affected disabled people in real life, you know, like for good and bad.
Mm hmm.
That's just yeah, just not about it. But yeah, it's like, I don't know, there's no answer, I don't think.
But yeah, I mean, that's that's so interesting, and it would be it would be. I mean, one thing I would think about is how I guess Vulcan in the Roman world, I'm not sure how he wasn't really considered so much a god of of health, right, I mean, in you get a lot of votive offerings in the shape of various like limbs or organs, or sometimes you get them in the shape of bodies, and they're generally considered to be dedicated by people who were had had an illness in them or had a a kind of permanent impairment. But that I'd be really interested to see if we find those in the Temple of in the Temple of propsis whether it's he's he's very much kind of it's more about the labor.
That he does well, and that's yeah, that's why I think his is so interesting too, specifically because his impairment is so tied to his role that it seems to me like a kind of acknowledgment that people who do that role can often become impaired by their their work. But it's really interesting that they gave that to a god as well, you know, and and obviously like there's there's so much that goes into it, and we've you know, when these things got decided versus otherwise. And I don't know, I know, Vulcan is like both similar and also very not that's similar to Heffeistus, Like he has this whole volcanic quality that Hefeistis doesn't really have pre Vulcan. So it's just, yeah, it's an interesting thing to imagine, you know, like maybe like was that type of disability you know of a man working in the forge he gets disabled over just like the work, like was that considered different? And I know, I'm just talking about grease, So I don't expect you to have answers to any of this. I'm just it's interesting to consider those like aspects of kind of divine disability or divine impairment, because in the case of Hefeistis, it's not really a disability, it's an impairment because he has all of these ways that he gets by and he has people helping him and all of that. And the same with Tryptolemist. You know, he's like this divine character that just rolls around in a wheelchair and he's doing great. Like, yeah, it's just an interesting Yeah, it's an interesting kind of way to think about the way it's portrayed in the ancient world. But again, and that's so specific to Grease because it's all my brain that.
Just really got me thinks about, like why I sens an issue of reception? Why do we assume that all of the gods would have had these perfect bodies? Yeah, exactly, that's such a like we know that gods have different appearances, some are more beautiful or less beautiful. We know that god certainly don't have perfect personalities were.
Talking about they're delightful.
Yeah, So why then is bodies that the place where we draw the line and go, oh, they all must have conformed to this very specific type body when that's just not the case for almost any other aspects.
Of the well. And it's funny because with her face as we do have the you know, bit of a storyline where he's cast off Mount Olympus because he's imperfect. So we have this like this idea that he was you know, at least by his mother thought poorly of. But then that's also so tied in with like all of the stuff to do with Hara and like why she would react that way. So you know, it's there's so much going on, but we do have this notion that he has this impairment that she you know, didn't like or whatever, and so like we have this kind of we have this kind of othering of him, but then simultaneously, he is not disabled by his condition and he is like arguably one of the most impressive gods of the pantheon. Yeah, like you know, he can make fucking robots and so like it's just such a fascinating thing to have the kind of both things going on there where we are kind of told to see his disability as something to be kind of scorned, but then at the same time he is like so vitally important to like everything that God's ever did, and to me it it screams of like the disconnect between like Harah's character more than it is Hefeistus's because like her associate her like whole thing with Herphaistus is that you know, she created him without Zeus, and she did it because she was mad that Zeus could create children without a woman. And so it to me, Ha's whole styling is like just the patriarchy like jamming their heel into her face, whereas Herpistus is just like, well, that's kind of it's almost like it becomes separated, you know, that that reaction of hera and the actual god Hephaistus in his role. Anyway, now, I'm just having a lot of thought thought experiments in my head about greg mythology, which I recognize is not what you're no.
I mean, this is so. This is so because it gets me thinking about something that I've read I can't remember where, about how Hephaistus's disability is kind of like a visual representation the sense of how he moves differently through through the world, and also about how he thinks differently to the other Olympians, how he's got this very like creative, inquisitive, technical mind. And I just thought Okay, yeah, that's just a radical but but.
There's a lot going on with him. Yeah, and there's a lot of d.
Yeah, and I mean I think it's so I think the idea of them the perfect body being linked to Greece and Romans is one of the reasons why the idea of ancient disabled people or ancient disabled god is so offensive to a certain segment of people receiving it. Yeah.
Yeah, there's so much play there with the classical idea of a body in Yeah.
But like like I, like I said, the ancient world had so many ways in which you could become disabled. And something that's really interesting that's now coming out in scholarship is kind of putting disability back in the picture, where like we have a lot of ancient authors who you know wouldn't be con you would go, Okay, blah blah was disabled, but actually, you know, in their letters and their writing, they're talking about their health conditions, they're talking about the impact it has are they're talking about the things they do to to mitigate it or to avoid it, and that's just not put into the narrative or considered in how it affects their other kind of worldviews. And I mean that's just a really common thing with with historical with historical figures to kind of raise if they're if they're really well known for one thing, to like eraise their disability and then not think about how how it shapes their worldview. But kind of bringing disability back is something that affected everyone, I think. Is so it's so important.
Yeah, yeah, in the scholarship, Yeah, I mean it's it's it's also it reminds me of of the argument, you know, of regarding trans people in the ancient world and just trans people broadly, right, Like it's really beneficial to everyone to recognize that people like this existed all the way back, because they've existed forever, you know, be the people who've been disabled by social societies, you know, or with impairments or or trans people like who you know, don't don't apply necessarily in the same ways, but like just the same idea that like this has always existed, Like it's not new to recognize, you know, disability, it's not new to to like recognize the humanity it within it. And and I think it just benefits, you know, benefits people of today, specifically people of today, like with disabilities and stuff, to recognize that like in the ancient world, I mean, I mean, rom it sounds like they handled it pretty poorly. But you know, like I think about, you know, the whole notion of babies being you know, uh, exposed whatever, thrown off a mountain because they were in perfect and how there's that that rumor that goes around and it's not backed up by evidence that the evidence is that if a baby was disabled, they tended to care for it incredibly well. And yeah, it's it's like, yeah, we need to remember that while these things existed, like also, so did fucking humanity. And and it's only like often you know, the laws or the legalities are those types of things that make us think that they were treated, you know, particularly poorly, and they were in the law, but that doesn't mean you know anything about the day to day life of real people.
Yeah, and then it's like we don't know, like who's benefiting from this idea that disabled people were ostracized and exiled from from ancient society. Who's who who benefits from this idea that you know, the ancient society was all this kind of homogeneous people with very similar bodies, and now the modern day has all these diverse identities that have just been been created out of nothing, you know, and then you look at kind of how like casal Cascal reception has come up in the histories of like the eugenics or the histories of kind of racial classifications, and.
You go, okay, so, so I see it was benefiting.
Yeah, a certain imperial type is benefiting from this idea of the perfect body and the superior civilization in which weakness does not appear, and if it does appear, it's swiftly. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I know what comes back to imperialism and capitalism.
It doesn't it it does, It doesn't.
They're like what they want us to believe that that disabled people weren't cared for in the ancient world because it allows them to say that the absolute bare minimum that a lot of these countries give us is so so kind and nice. They're doing such good things for us.
Yeah.
I Meanwhile, it's just like they didn't have the like full blown notion of capitalism back then. Everything that is different, and it's so it's so.
It says so much about the the centrality of work in different socials and different So that's yeah, I mean, under capitalist. The ability to work is such a determiner of whether or not you are a good citizen. This idea of like being a good member or a contributed member of the community, and now it has to be done by performing laboring in certain ways. But the idea that that wasn't the case throughout all of history is just oh my god, completely undermines.
Yeah, yeah, all.
But the kind of idea of individualism, this idea that you know, you must be be self sufficient. Obviously we are all interdependent and we rely on other people's labor for so much of our life. We've just drawn this arbitrary line where it's like no, no, no, no no. If you if you rely on other people's labor in these ways, you're very bad. In my ways is good, but in yours is very bad. But this, this idea of this kind of almost this hyper individuality is again it's a product of modernity. And then it's so interesting to see how disability is accommodated for when say the economic unit is moves towards being the family rather than the individual. All the location of this of this production is kind of in the in the home or in a family run business where people are constantly adjusting for and compensating for on each other's differences. Like like it's like teamwork. You know, you say, oh, Blar and my team doesn't like doing this, I'm good at this, therefore ill do this. But Blar is really good at that, so they can do that. Oh, so we do actually accommodate for people's preferences and their strengths in so many other areas of life. And you can kind of flip it, like the argument that you know, the kind of the far right will makes about disability. They'll be like, look, the ancient world they just didn't have time for people who want a peak economic efficiency, so you know, just had to be exposed to Actually the ancient world didn't have time for not using or not having everybody be involved.
Yeah, it's like the difference. I mean, I think we're just losing the definition of society, you know, right, Like back then it was just that like, yeah, people didn't always have it good, but they worked together, like there was a notion of like contributing to each other and less of that that individualism that we have now. And like the yeah, this idea that like also this idea that like everything is better now in the current West is like fucking hilarious and still perpetuated all the time, right, Like, well, you know, you're lucky you don't live one hundred years ago. And it's like, I don't know, am I yeah?
Yeah? Yeah, Like the idea that technical innovation, which act would we have necessarily means that we've had the only the corresponding, only positive social innovation. You're like, not entirety. I mean, you're on your point about society. Just gotta be thinking about that. Such a quote. You know, there is no such thing as a society. There are only individuals and families. They're like, oh, okay, we can see the rap percussions of that on modern Britain.
I know Margaret Thatcher quote.
Oh yeah, one of her many classics.
Wow, she was a great lady, wasn't she. Jesus, I makes you think like that. I don't know, just no, no, I'm not going to go into women that are agents of the patriarchy. But uh, but if you did, she would I mean, yeah, if I did, Yeah, I know, I got some names. No, but you know, tell back to Rome. I guess if we should, like I would love to know more about you know, I guess do we do we know much about like the actual lived experiences or are we working mostly off of these like really horrifying laws that were that were implicated and that's not the right word.
But yeah, well I think I think unfortunately I'm bringing the horrors because of how I look at disability as this thing that's constructed by social structures. And for that, I say, you know, the social model is really useful, but it is less useful for the emotional experiences or the everyday experiences of people in which things like chronic pain would be would be impactful, or pain in walking, or pain of if you've had if you've had a break.
The invisible illness too, that would be like that. That's obviously the one that like most touches my life and I can't it's I mean, it's it's bad now. I can only imagine back then.
Yeah, And I think that's when we need to start reading these ancient texts that talk about the life of Cissutius blah blah. We need to start focusing on how they thought about their health and well being and how it would fit and how it impacted the actions they take. So I mean, like people would leave Rome in certain seasons and go and stay elsewhere because the city becomes in the summer this kind of harbor of illness. So you go, okay, actually people are taking these very concrete social actions to avoid illness or to kind of negotiate like their their bodies and their conditions. But there's yeah, again, there's so much work to be done, and there's so much Again again we run into the problem of evidence. And this is where archaeology would be obviously really really helpful. I mean, Jane Draco, I think she talks about Rome, but she's written about process in process in antiquity, and how by looking at you know, what the proceses look like, they kind of wear and tear on them where they're found, you can kind of you can get information about how people use them and what was going on in their daily life. So I think that's when we have to turn to the material evidence to get the sense of what it's like for your your average person. You can you know, divine this very personalized health experience of elite writers through reading their text on which they mention themselves or their text in which they write about other people, but the health of the lower classes as an individual experience seems much less important. It's more important as a kind of social issue, which again we see throughout history the idea of like the degeneration of the working classes. That's that kind of perspective to bring it back to the horrors, Yeah, back and stray too far. And then again obviously I'm very hyping up this this new generation of plastical scholarship or disability, but with so much of it being now being done by disabled people, that's where that's absolutely crucial, I think, to recovering the lived experiences because you're just thinking about thoughts are curgy based on your own experience, and you go, oh, maybe this happened that it just wouldn't occur to someone who didn't have those experiences, like, for example, I don't have chronic pain. I don't know about navigating life with chronic pain, so certain things just wouldn't occur to me in reading, in reading the sources. So and that's again so important, just because so much of scholarship as people looking and go, oh, this reminds me of something I saw or something I experienced, Thus I will I will pursue it. And the things that don't the ideas that don't get sparked because certain people aren't being put in a position to write scholarship means that all this work is just being being left out. So I mean, and there's been a lot of work on I mean, on material objects in museums. In the UK, we have something called like the Curating for Change Fellowship, and people have done really useful things in making displays on ancient disability and having like other disabled people come in and go, oh, this is similar to my experience because blah, maybe it was like this, and these these are just sparking new ideas, new new areas of investigation. Maybe you know, obviously not everything's going to be be similar. Maybe some investigations come to nothing. But it's about this producing of curiosity. M h yeah.
Important it is, though, And like I mean, I know what you're talking about, even just from my own work, Like you have funny timing, because I just recently finished my you know, usually did like toisy, I do a Q and a episode or a couple of them, and I love them because people give me their specific insights via their questions that then allows me to think about the topics in completely different ways than I would have naturally because exactly, Yeah, you need these different minds in order to reach certain places. And when it comes to studying classics, like you know, for the last couple of hundred years, it's been so heavily dominated by like wealthy white men that that like they're not thinking about that stuff, or if they are, it's a fluke, Like it's not it's not necessarily going to generate the same ideas as somebody from all of these like or just people, rather from all of these different backgrounds and life experiences and everything. Like, you know, we're going to get so much more out of the ancient world. We're gonna get so much more of the ancient texts and stuff. So yeah, I mean, you've got such great examples on the studying disability so specifically, but I think that applies to so much in this field in the best possible way, you know. I mean, it applies to studying women in the field, studying gender diversity, and like just queer studies, all of that, Right, it's just all coming out more because we have all of these different minds getting curious and looking for answers, and it's yeah, it's cool.
It's the only way that the study of ancient history is going to be able to accurately so far as any history you can don't accurately reflect the complexity of the ancient world, of everything that was that was going on, that which is you know, just just complex as it is now and can't and can't be simplified simplified down. So you need an even broadest way to people who are thinking about it and having ideas.
Yeah, I mean it's why like now, you know, we're slowly breaking down the idea that like you know, every Athenian man with some like brilliant like like generator of Western civilization. Yeah, you know, it's and even just you know, I think about it a lot in terms of how Christianity affected the study of classics and like what things have been skewed for so long based on like the Christian notions that went along with studying it in the West, and you know, like the way that just belief in God affects studying mythology. You know, it's like obviously there are ways for it not to I don't want to suggest that, but like but especially in the Victorian period, like, nah, you're believing in God and it is implicating in every single thing that you are studying. You are like a rich white man. That's the only way you can be in this field. You believe in God, you believe the women are lesser, and like that's going to affect everything that you study. And so now, yeah, like the more open we all become as a society, like the more we're going to be able to understand the ancient world because yeah, spoilers, like they didn't have Christianity well in ancient Greece, and they didn't have you know, like they didn't have this these modern notions of whiteness of Western civilization, like everything that now informs the way we learn, like didn't fucking exist back then, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what I think then is is interesting in that how it can have this then flipped effect. So, oh, my experience in the modern day informs how I think about the ancient world and how I generate questions about the ancient world that I then investigate. But then my investigations of the ancient world, you know, thinking about how in this case, disability relates to economic label or relates to ideas of individuality or the family. That then gets me thinking about, Okay, what kind of changes can we then make in the modern day, which might move us further away or closer to these dynamics. Being able to think out side the box of the modern day is spurred by asking interesting questions about something about societies that are very, very different from our own.
Mm hmm, And I mean remembering their different, remember different, why they're so fast.
That's one of the reasons that's fascinating.
Like, that's why I say I love ancient Greece, because what I love is just all of the things I get to learn and like the just everything you know. But it's not because I like idolize them. It's just because it's like fucking interesting and so different and remembering how different it was, and like the more you learn, like the more wonderful it is.
I think part of studying, it's not part of the joys of studying the ancient world, is having to put yourself in a position and try and think in all these thoughts structures that are so alien to you. It produces not the kind of empathy that is approving, but a kind of empathy that gets you used to thinking in very different ways and becoming hopefully fingers crossed, more more open minded, to alternative ways ways of thinking, and you know, you might you might investigate this one alternative way of thinking and go, Okay, actually, I think that this is morally bad and should not be should not be adapted. But I think that's what we we sometimes lose when we or what has been lost in the study of the ancient world when they just wanted to assimilate how similar it is to blah, how similar it is to us, because I mean, in terms of British Empire, how similar we are to the Roman Empire because we're also such a great conquering body.
Some funny to me, like just the Romans conquered Britain, Like why do they just go then turn around and be like, well, we're going to do it boat worse, Like this's as wow, it's so so so tied up in the myth of Western civilization, right because it is so hard for so many people in the West to separate themselves from that notion, and that notion is so so like I mean, I'm having trouble finding the right word, but like it creates such a bias in the studying of the ancient world, is to believe inherently that they are the origins of Western civilization. Like if you go into it with that, you're going to have so many preconceived ideas, like it's so yeah, just so wrapped up in these issues. I mean you've also studied the far right, so like you know, like it's so that's where they all that all of that stems from. Is this idea that Greece and Rome invented the West, that they like were this little bubble that was like never surrounded by brown people. Like you know, it's just it's such a dark idea and when you go into it like that with that, that's when you get like all of the horror, but stepping out and being like wait, you know, like let's look at some historical reality and revisit what we might be looking at in the ancient world.
And that also completely structures what we think of as the ancient world. I just more work recently on like Islam and the ancient world and how Islam isn't considered something that's classical, even though there's huge overlapse between Islamic regions and the classical world, loads of interaction, but it's not considered part of the classical because because of the way like in modernity, Islam is considered outside of the West, even though obviously there are loads of there are multiple European Islamic countries, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like, who then is included in the ancient world? And how does that get us thinking about separation and differences and interactions between between different cultures, where we draw the line between these different cultures.
Yeah, it reminds me of certain something that's happening right now in the world.
Yeah.
I don't know, it's not related.
Yeah. Yeah, just another another you know, master sabling event going on in the world.
Yeah, all due to the West.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean this is this is one of the reasons why I love talking about ancient disability, because if you approach it in a political way, it really does tie into almost every question we have about history, obviously every question we have about the classics. One thing that I really object to in schottiship about disability is how it's load into being this niche that never relates to anything else. They're like, oh, okay, you know, we're going to study this this disabled person, but we're going to take them, you know, kind of always out of the context that they they exist in and it feels so almost patronizing in a sense people could only be studied about their disability and not as kind of an actor and a part of part of a social ecosystem. I gonna say part of that is that I think right now, disability scholarship, apart from this, this new wave that I think is coming, suffers from edited volume disease, in which most people kind of like write one chapter on disability and they never really think about it again in a scholarship, And you're like, oh, okay, you know, actually we need people who are really thinking about this for deeply for a number of years. Yeah, but hopefully now that's happening.
Yeah, Well it reminds me of like women studies ten years ago, you know, so you think, like it seems I mean, at least in that case, it's probably gotten better. I think. I don't know, I did my degree ten years ago. They're not like the easiest to compare, But like my understanding is it's gotten better where we're just kind of we're getting closer to the idea that just oh, women were people in the ancient world, and weird, they don't have to be siloed into this one specific topic because they were half of the population. And it's the same thing with disability, you know, like hopefully we are getting to that point where it's like, well, they existed in the ancient world, and thus they are this Studying disability in the ancient world is just as valid a studying anything else in the ancient world, because it was a thing that existed in.
The Yeah, it's not something that's a sideline or unimportant to the big conversations that are happening. Yeah, I mean, I think most kind of studies of new ideas on minority groups probably go through that phase where it's super siloed and you're just like, yes, at least we get to study women or the same people a little bit, and then it kind of broadens out to being accepted as this central part of the social ecosystem, so big this cost.
Yeah, that's always so funny to me because like I just think I don't understand how everyone doesn't exist in my brain, and I think it's because I have undiagnosed autism. But like many times, yeah, I was thinking about it earlier when you were talking about forget even how but it was just made me every whatever you were saying made me think of like the autism tests they give people, and how like a lot of people who are you know, dealing with this later in life like fail the test because they misunderstand the questions because they've developed all these ways to like get around what the question is getting at. And it's like, we don't have that problem because of this, this and this and this that I've been doing for twenty years.
Yeah, that's a problem because of my elaborate coping mechanisms. But this problem, what are you talking? Yeah, yeah, it's not here. Yeah, I just noticed Michailo's me. Uh, you know, it's it's yeah. Where where was I going with that? Brains?
Yeah?
About like diagnosis or discovering disability later in life just gets me thinking again about how much potential future potential there is and studying disability because we're so we're learning about it, and knowledge about disability is evolving so fast in the modern day.
Yeah. Yeah, well, and and this is what my point was because it came back, So thank you for saying that, because my point is just that, like I think it's so fucking interesting to learn about these groups of people, you know, be they you know, disabled, people in the ancient world. Women enslave people in the ancient world, like any Like I don't know why I link those two together, but I just mean, like, you know, on the margins of society type people like I want to learn everything about them, Like I am not particularly interested in the men of ancient Greece unless they're Euripides. But the reason I'm interested is because he cared about the other people. So it's like, okay, you know, and and so to me, I'm just like I don't see how anyone cannot well. And it's also unlucky because I get to study whatever the fuck I want in the ancient world, but like, I just want to learn all of it. And so yeah, I'm looking forward to more people being in in the field, but also like more people who you know, as somebody who's thirty six only just in the past few years learned to have ADHD And now I'm like, I'm like ninety eight percent sure I have autism, but I'm just not going to go bother getting the diagnosis. But like every test I've ever taken says she's sure, you know, So like, I think there's so many people like me right now. And also like people in the younger generation who are coming up in a very different world, you know, where this stuff is just like it's just much more broadly like talked about, and that's so great and so yeah, the more people are coming up in this field now, and of the younger generations, like I think, yeah, I mean, the better it's going to be, the more we're going to look at this stuff, especially when the really old and crabby ones start to die off, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, I mean I think I experienced this in teaching. So teach undergrads, and I mainly teach thirdy it, and they're all so wonderful. I get to teach them about really interesting topics. I'll be like, taught a module on Greek and Roman slavery, I taught about gender, taught about classical reception. And what I think is really interesting is the kind of the questions they're asking are very different to ones I would expect to get if I presented similar material in say a seminar in front of like my established colleagues, in which I would you know, sending my paper on the galley, I'd be like, Okay, this is what it means to be transgender. You may have heard with this thing called being transgender, whereas with the kids, you know, I say, in my mid twenties, it just keeps.
Getting worse as better.
Yeah, exactly. They're just there's so much that they already understand and accept just because of the changes, the changing way of the world, and then it leads them to ask me these really interesting questions that because I'm thinking about how I might present this to an established audience, I just didn't even consider.
Yeah, no, I can only imagine that because I mean, even just from my experience, like this just made me think of it, and so I'm gonna like make myself seem really old, but also point out like the way that the world is changing and fast. It's great. Like I did my degree, like I started in two thousand and nine, So the story I've got is probably from like twenty ten eleven, And I just remember I had this professor who went by they then pronouns, and that was like probably the first time I had heard of that, and I was it wasn't so much like like I obviously like knew very well of transgender people, but it was more that using they them and having that be like a new thing I had to learn about and like, you know, it was great and then I had like this great experience of like, you know, adapting to that and understanding. But like, now it's so common that nobody's going into a university classroom and being like, oh, oh really, I'm surprised. Like I just feel like, at least certainly, And maybe it's just the circles I mean now where I'm like, no, everybody's queer like, and you know, it's just it's so interesting seeing those differences. And you know, I'm only thirty six, and I can tell the enormous difference from when that's when I was in university, but like, oh my god, when I was in high school. Like Jesus, like the way things have changed in the last twenty years due to the Internet. You know, for all its flaws, but it really does connect people in this way where everyone you get to learn about other people's experiences in a way that yeah, inherently makes people so much more empathetic and understanding and interested, curious, like you're saying about your students and like, yeah, curious to ask these questions because they have so much more base knowledge.
But just having the baseline stuff done is so is so valuable. Yeah, because then you don't have to constantly be re saying or republishing. In the case of academia, these arguments that you know, okay, this is what everybody that I would speak to, which already and tuitily knows is true, but have to publish it because it hasn't been recognized in the writings of academia. And could this time have been spent doing something more innovative.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, like yeah, I just mean, yeah, think about how I had to get the baseline and it was just because things were so different. And now it's like, you know, everyone just like has that, and it's so it's so refreshing and like encouraging, and I don't know, it makes me feel very old, but in a good way, and like, oh, I'm glad the younger. Yeah, only thirty six. I'm only thirty six. That's fine. Yeah, it's just you know, it's it's all. It's also incredibly interesting. This this conversation has very much gone off the rails in the most enjoyable possible way. I want to pull us back to Rome to kind of sorry, yeah, no, no, no, there's nothing to do with you. There is no need to apologize. And also like, again, I love it. This is my favorite thing about conversations is when.
We can just yeah, it's because disability is a stepping stone to all other social issues that's demonstrated the tanglement of disability. There you go and everything.
Yeah, exactly exactly, So no, like truly this is my favorite part of conversations. But I will also bring it back to wrap up around roalm. So, is there is there anything you know that you haven't shared yet about the way realm handles disabilities that you're like, No, you have to hear this either because it's horrifying or funny or or just like, I don't know, a pet obsession of yours.
Yeah, I mean there are two bits. We'll start off with one that's like it's like MORPHI but also horrifying because there's there's there's no kind of ditinction about that. But this is this is the thing which my underground I do. I have a tattoo. You have a tattoo, so you know, it's all all having together.
I think you have a tattoo is one of the futtle things anyone's never said to me. I know, my like fingers I can't even show a single finger without a tattoo my thumbs. My thumbs are untattooed anyway. Sorry, yes I have, I have a handful.
So there's there's still there's still still progress being made in getting everything tattooed, is what I'm wearying. Yeah, So, I mean when I was talking about disability is being in relation to the other social positions you you occupy. So for free women, especially of a kind of upper class, your social position, the most important thing is being expected to produce legitimate airs, thus infertility incredibly disabling. And this means when it comes to slavery, I argue that there are disabilities that are unique to slavery. Mm hmm. So, and I'll get into the more kind of serious ones after this, But tattooing is really is really interesting. So yeah, I know. So tattooing and let's so le's often branding we're done to as punishments for enslaved people. So and they then they were viewed then in the same way as facial differences as or deformities views and they and in their consequence, they were significantly physically disabled without causing any actual impairment. Like it's not the same as as chopping off someone's foot for example. In this case, tattoos sometimes be across the forehead, but they'd be in a visible face. Yeah, they were essentially like a manifestation, physical manifestation of the enslaved person's histories and their crimes in you know, in quotation marks. They're often done as punishment for attempting to run away, so that this permanent mark on the body of criminality and rebellion, similar to you'd get say, marks of the marks of the whip from from other physical punishment. It's like, why whether it's his white tattooing is so it's actually important in the Roman context, is this idea of the free male subjects in his his corporal integrity, the impenetrable body. You know, if you're a Roman, you're a Roman man. You won't get penetrations you do, you do the penetration, you don't get your I'm sorry, I want and you don't get your skin penetrations traces either. That's like the ultimate side that you've lost your you know, mastery over your embodiment, having this firm mark on you. It's a sign of humiliation. And there's one this is actually a grief example, but it's so striking that I always always mentioned it. And it's recorded by this guy called Doulgatis in this third century a d. He writes about the lives of the eminent philosophers. And then there's this man called Bion of Boristhnes, probably butchered that Greek pronunciation, who whose father was a freedman, and he had a tattoo as a as a punishment. Bion described his father as having no face, but only writing on his face, like oh wow, okay, So it's incredibly and I mean, these these kind of visible markings would obviously influence their their future treatment. It would impair their mobility. They'd be constantly being watched, so it's a sign of watch me or made hyper visible. It's harder to potentially change production because you're a lot harder to sell to a new enslaver because your mark is troublesome, so you're unable to escape this person who's who's disfigured you, or you're then sold into kind of even like even more dangerous or kind of lower labor, like like the minds, which just you know, there are a death factory. And even in their cases where people who have been tattooed as slaves were freed. There was another law called the lex Alia Centennia, and that's in four BC. It assigned a lesser status to freedman who've been physically marked when they were slaves. So it continues then to have this this social consequence, this disabling consequence, yeah, into into then this is again it's very changed social status. And I think it's so interesting to think about the ways in which disability is and is not connected to practical in a sense impairments, because in a lot of ways that would be more disabling for someone than say, missing some fingers.
Yeah, yeah, because it's just that, yeah, that's socializing, but that's social disability, Like yeah, like the thing that's just inflicted on you. I mean, I know, like that that's the concept generally, is that society that inflicts. But that's like that's so specifically something inflicted, you know, like.
Oh yeah, it's so it just these dynamics so bare. Yeah, and especially so I mean, my last bit is the last section of this paper that I've I've loved writing, and it's about what disabilities were considered most disabling in terms of enslaved people and we've talked about how physical disabilities could be disabling depending on their impact. You know, the person with the joined fingers who can still make use of the hand, et cetera. But what really comes up in contracts for slave sales, I think it comes up in the law is wandering and flight. So they were considered the desire to do it, the action it was considered a disability. And I mean this, this has been taken up in It was taken up a New World slavery and there was a term called drape to Mania, which was this obviously super racist theory that oh, black people had this urge to run away from slavery even though it was what was best for them. And actually, yeah, it was considered like a mental disability. The horror, Oh my god. Yeah, so the horrors persist, amusing.
They were dehumanized, maybe just a little bit, Oh my god.
Yeah.
I just I react with sarcasm because.
It's yeah yeah. And again it's another another example of how the classical slavery and classic class ues towards disability have this kind of long local, raging, long ranging impact. So when they're talking about impairments and disabilities in law and in contracts for slave people. They always mentioned whether the enslaved person has has wandered, which is like being persistently kind of absent and not telling anyone where they're going, or whether they've tried to flee and they have to be It then considered the same as epilepsy in that they have to be declared. But then what gets even more interesting is how they define wandering and fleeing, because you don't actually have to go through with taking the action, it's more the intention to do it. So I can't remember the phrase. So someone who has hidden here it is Proculus, who's another jurist. He's talking about the case of an enslaved person who's hidden in his master's house to find an opportunity to escape, and the cause though he could not be regarded as already in flight being still in the house, correct, he was nonetheless a fugitive because it was his intention to flee.
See this is just why I think the Romans are shittier. I mean, I'm sure the Greeks did this stuff, but we don't have a written down. But like like the level of depravity there, there's this.
Very technical level of thinking about the horror human being yeah, which I think is is yeah, once it's committed to words and law in these ways is very very stark. But then there was this legitimate way of running away. So it's all right if you don't have to just the person slave person and run away if they've run away to a place that the quote is frequented by those who declare themselves for sales. So there were places where you could go to escape that specific enslaver but still be in the social condition of slavery.
Wow, so that's all that was like an established thing.
Yeah, I mean it kind of you could. You can see the logic from the perspective of the enslavers, you know, have have this the safety valve, so you're not constantly getting murdered by by your enslave people. So again, it's so much about intention and whether your intention is to escape a specific person or whether it's to escape the institution of slavery. Right, and again it's talked about in the same context with the same language as other mental disorders in Roman law. And it's just so interesting how things that obviously we wouldn't consider wanting to run away from being enslaved to be a disability, but how things that are undesirable from an elite perspective to their social inferiors are are like perceived or constructed as being a disability as a way to make it this very negative thing that's rooted in the body and the mind of the enslaved person rather than being like a social consequence.
Also, it's like a fucking human reaction, like I'm sorry, Emperor, Like, let's turn the tables and see how you feel. Like, yeah, it just I mean, it's this, It's just I mean, it's the same obviously as like all of the imperial portion of the last couple of thousand years, Like this idea that you know, once you have the power, like you you no longer kind of I don't even like, I don't even know how to describe it, because it's just so fucking unhinged, I suppose, is what is?
Like Yeah, and I just think it's another aspect of disability. Like obviously it's so important to study the lived experiences of disabled people with say sort of disabilities to to your own or or chronic pain or disability, but it's also really important to study what has been constructed as a disability in certain periods that wouldn't be considered a disability now.
So like hysteria, you know, yeah, yeah, like we no longer.
Diagnose women with hysteria for the the mental illness of hating being locked in an abusive marriage. You know, what is considered a disability? So reflective of these social conditions, and once you start thinking about it like that, this whole other world of looking at society and social relations just kind of opens up to you and hopefully it leads due to radical and liberatory conclusions.
But yeah, we shall see. Well, if you're listening to my show, you're close. I hope otherwise you're not paying attention. Well, I mean I feel like that's a perfect line to wrap it up on. Thank you so much for doing this. This was fascinating. I love that we just had like a full blown chat about capitalism and everything. Just I mean, I'm here for all of it. Thank you so much. Is there anything I want to share with my listeners but where they can learn more, read more, anything like that? Yeah?
Oh my god. So for disability theory, this is just a it's not an academic but a normal book. I would recommend Mike Oliver and Colin Barnes The new Politics of Disablement that sets out the very classic kind of social model relationship to capitalism, a bit of disability history. And then one thing that Olivia you might also like is a new book that's come out recently. It's on my shell. That's because I got it out because I knew that you would think about it, Empire of Normality, which talks about neurodiversity, neurodiversity and capitalism.
Which you know gives I'm slightly interested.
In that, yeah, you know, giving the demographic of listeners, I feel like may may appeal to some people. And that's by Robert Schapman. And in terms of disability in the ancient world, I'm pretty certain Debbie Sneed's article on ramps and one on debunking this mystive and fanticide there are written up in open access or popular occasions. Those are a fascinating Yeah.
Yeah, she's a great resource for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, these studies.
And Alexander Morris has just had an academic monograph out on disability and in Egypt. But really it's a lot of a lot of the exciting work is going on in museums, and unfortunately a lot of the excited work is still to come. It's in the publishing pipeline, so yeah, I mean, stay tuned, but hopefully some really exciting stuff coming out. And I think this is an area where it shouldn't just stay confined to academic journals. So it's so it's so important that you know, it's made public and also that people show people ask these questions about disability and make it clear to you know, the powers that be that this is a topic that is interesting to people and valued. M Yeah, yeah, you know, if you're if any listener is an editor of the magazine publication commission disabled people to ride by disability, it'll be good.
Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's important. You'd think it could be obvious, and yet I'm the yeah, yeah, here we are. Well, thank you so much again, this was really so much fun. I really appreciate it.
Thank you. Yeah, I've had a great time.
Ugh Nerds, thank you all so much for listening. That was such a fun conversation. I, as I said, have minimal bring capacity right now, so we'll jump right into let's talk about MIT's Baby is written and produced by me Live Albert Mikayla pangu Wish is the hermes to my Olympians. The producer select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the iHeart podcast Network. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We have a new newsletter. I'm still figuring it out. We sent one out but it needs some work. Anyway, get in on the next one. Missmabe dot com slash newsletter. I am live and Ugh. I love this shed very much