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Re-evaluating the Spartan stereotype: A change in the way we see disability through history

My project will be geared towards presenting a 20 minute research paper at the St Andrews Undergraduate History Conference, focusing on changing perceptions of how disability was treated in the ancient Greek world. Traditionally, the mention of disability within ancient Greece conjures images of the Spartans’ exposure of their weak and disabled children, disposed for not meeting the ideals of the Spartan society. This rather black and white portrait of the Spartans has come to equate in our minds to the handling of disability throughout the entirety of ancient Greece. Yet this is a brutal oversimplification of a complex social construct,, which would have affected a vast proportion of the ancient Greek population throughout their lives, not just at birth. This paper will therefore strive to show the wider landscape of disability within ancient Greece and the danger of an overreliance on a single source of evidence within historical method, in this case, Sparta. I will show for example, that the same Spartan society who did indeed expose disabled infants, also believed that their battle disfigurements made them a more formidable opponent in battle and that such a disability did not therefore exclude you from Spartan life. Disability in ancient Greece clearly did not therefore begin and end with the exposure of those with congenital defects, but was instead an inherent fact of daily life with both positive and negative connotations. With low levels of sanitation, constant war efforts, hazardous working conditions and an influx of plague and epidemic, the ancient world must have been a catalyst for disability. My paper will therefore reassess how the Greeks really would have approached the daily realities of disability.

Annie Sharples

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