Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World

Reviewed by: Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History by Christian Laes Jane Draycott Christian Laes. Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xii + 238 pp. $99.99 (978-1-107-16290-7). The subject of impairment and disability in antiquity has seen an explosion of interest over the last two decades, and Christian Laes has long been one of the subject's most prominent and prolific ambassadors.1 His latest monograph, an English translation and updated version of a monograph originally released in Dutch, is the first in-depth study of impairment and disability in the Roman world.2 [End Page 135] In a lengthy and detailed introductory chapter, Laes discusses the issues that one encounters when attempting to study impairment and disability in antiquity, starting with the question of which terminology it is appropriate (or not appropriate) to use, pondering the degree to which the very idea of impairment and disability in antiquity is anachronistic, and surveying the various different types of evidence that can be utilized in such a study, albeit with plenty of caveats in place. He suggests that rather than attempting to group different types of impairments together and study disability in antiquity as akin to disability in the contemporary world, that each type of impairment should be dealt with separately and examined on its own terms, and this informs what follows. The first chapter deals with infancy and engages with the contentious issue of the extent to which impaired babies would have been subjected to systematic infanticide. Laes situates his analysis of congenital impairments within the broader landscape of the ancient world's massive infant mortality, but cautions against drawing broad conclusions and making assumptions that all obviously congenitally impaired infants would have been exterminated. As he states at the close of the chapter, "without ... survivors, a large portion of this book would not have been written" (p. 36). The second chapter approaches mental and intellectual disabilities, and Laes notes the considerable difficulty in attempting to pin down mental difficulties in comparison to physical ones, even in the works of ancient medical literature that deal with them extensively, and it is clear that a thorough contextualization of the evidence is particularly important here. The next three chapters deal with sensory deficits: blindness; deafness, muteness, and deaf-muteness; and speech defects respectively. While blindness is a condition that receives a considerable amount of attention from ancient authors, the same cannot be said for the rest of these conditions in antiquity, and Laes observes that there is considerable confusion over these conditions and the vocabulary used to refer to them. The sixth chapter tackles what is perhaps the broadest category of impairments, those that affected an individual's physical mobility. Laes concludes by proposing future directions for the study of impairment and disability in antiquity, emphasizing the importance of comparative research and collaboration between scholars of different academic disciplines. Throughout the monograph, Laes makes very clear the difficulties in attempting to understand what we today would refer to as "impairment" and "disability" in antiquity. As he reiterates, there is certainly a considerable amount of evidence for individuals with both impairments and disabilities, but this evidence is problematic, mainly comprising brief snippets that do not provide all the information we want and so make a complete understanding difficult. Thus he focuses on the longue durée, covering a period of around seven hundred years, and integrating Greek, Roman, and Byzantine material while taking care to maintain an awareness of the importance of context for interpreting all of it. Contemporary comparative evidence is utilized sparingly, and with appropriate caution, but consistently throughout. As a result, Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History is a comprehensive, detailed, and thoughtful piece of work that [End Page 136] supersedes all previous scholarship on the subject, including Laes' own considerable contributions. Jane Draycott University of Glasgow Footnotes 1. Christian Laes, Disability in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2017); Christian Laes, Chris Goodey, and M. Lynn Rose, Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies A Capite ad Calcem (Leiden: Brill, 2013), numerous book

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