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ABSTRACT: Recent scholarship has been divided over the question of whether a categorization of the disabled existed in antiquity. Close readings of Lysias, Plutarch, and other ancient Greek authors strongly suggest that some Greeks did construct a social category of disability. The ... were banned from military, political, and religious roles in Athens and elsewhere. The Spartans, on the other hand, chastised those who did not fight, even those with disabling impairments, while lauding those who "overcame" their disabilities. Disability thus provides a new framework within which to gauge inter-Greek ethnic identity.
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I. Introduction
In his groundbreaking work on disability studies, Lennard Davis argued that "disability per se" did not exist prior to the eighteenth century.1 Following Davis's assertion, Rose further argues that models of "pity, charity, and categorization" were not imposed onto ancient persons with disabilities but are now anachronistically applied to analyses of the disabled in Greek antiquity.2 Breitweiser, Horstmanshoff, and Weiler collectively argue that disability is difficult to define even in a modern context, and even harder in an ancient one.3 Most recently, Laes, Goodey, and Rose have compared disability to sexuality, arguing that the two phenomena are similar-one cannot assume that either sexuality or disability akin to our modern categories existed in the ancient world, but one must, nevertheless, allow for the possibility of similarities across time.4
Whereas there is no word in ancient Greek that can be translated directly as "homosexual," the Greek term ... could and did mean something akin to "disabled" to the Greeks. In this article, I will argue that even if a model of medicalization of disability comparable to that of the modern era did not exist in ancient Greece, "models of pity, charity, and categorization" were, at least to some extent, present.5 The ancient Athenians, for example, did recognize a category of disability, provided maintenance payments to the disabled, and exempted those who were ... ("disabled") from military service. In the same vein, the Roman-era Boeotian Greek author Plutarch argued that the ... should be excluded not only from warfare but also from politics. There was a social construct of disability in ancient Athens and other parts of Greece, even though such a categorization is harder to...