Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care

Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, Jenni Kuuliala, Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, Jenni Kuuliala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472438348
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317116943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume discusses infirmitas ('infirmity' or 'weakness') in ancient and medieval societies. It concentrates on the cultural, social and domestic aspects of physical and mental illness, impairment and health, and also examines frailty as a more abstract, cultural construct. It seeks to widen our understanding of how physical and mental well-being and weakness were understood and constructed in the longue durée from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The chapters are written by experts from a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history and philology, and pay particular attention to the differences of experience due to gender, age and social status. The book opens with chapters on the more theoretical aspects of pre-modern infirmity and disability, moving on to discuss different types of mental and cultural infirmities, including those with positive connotations, such as medieval stigmata. The last section of the book discusses infirmity in everyday life from the perspective of healing, medicine and care.

PART I
Defining Infirmity and Disability

Chapter 1
Age, Agency and Disability: Suetonius and the Emperors of the First Century CE

Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence

Introduction

The emperors of the first century AD appear in our sources as far from perfect, but some of them seem to have been less than perfect rulers, not due to any physical disability, but due to the simple fact that they may have been too old or too young to have performed the role effectively. This observation allows us to consider how age may have been seen to prevent the effective agency of a Roman emperor. This study of age and agency is played out with reference to the emperor Claudius, whose disability affected how he was treated by other members of the imperial family. We will argue that age caused emperors to become unable to act, and if too old to be at risk of being deposed. This is a quite different conception of disability than those previously published in the study of Antiquity.¹

Disability and the Life Course

Today, we recognize disability as both a mental and/or physical condition. The 2011 World Report on Disability suggests that up to 15 per cent of the human population are disabled with some 50 per cent of the population of the USA experiencing some form of mental disorder at some point in their lifetime.² Interestingly, most disabilities are only recognized in adulthood (80 per cent), while less than 10 per cent are recognized prior to the age of one year (9 per cent). This latter statistic is important, when we consider that in Antiquity, a reason for exposing infants was their disability.³ If most disabilities cannot be recognized prior to the age of one year today, this would suggest that the disabled not only survived and were present in Antiquity but can be found, if we look harder, in classical literature. The emperor Claudius was not exposed at birth perhaps because his disability was not apparent since it was his movement and speech that was impaired, and his twitch or nervous tick developed later. Portraits of Claudius have been studied and identify asymmetry of eye-sockets, neck-muscle and other features as indications of disability.⁴ For about 100 years, it has been suggested that Claudius suffered from a form of cerebral palsy – a condition that becomes more apparent six to nine months after birth.⁵ Thus, we should not see the disabled as absent from the Roman world, nor consider the examples we know of to be exceptional, assuming others were exposed at birth.

However, as others have suggested, the Roman concept of disability might be quite different to our own and subject to some variation over time.⁶ For example, the attitude towards hermaphrodites and bodies that might have been described as ‘different’ or ‘other’ changed from the middle Republic when they were seen as prodigies, to becoming objects of curiosity under the empire.⁷ The emperor Galba, who inherited spinal characteristics perhaps similar to those of the English king Richard III, undressed in front of his future wife to ensure she was aware of his crooked spine.⁸ This did not cause him to be seen as particularly disabled, since he engaged with public life, commanded soldiers and so on. What caused him to be seen as incapacitated was his age, which created a sense of his own vulnerability to the agency of soldiers in civil war.⁹ Interestingly, Galba’s father’s spinal impairment was visible and was the source of jokes by the emperor Augustus.¹⁰ This chimes well with the correspondence between Augustus and Livia presented by Suetonius in relation to Claudius’ appearance in public and a desire to prevent the young man from being mocked; and with Seneca’s satirical criticism of his speech and his body after his death.¹¹ Here we can identify a discourse that maps onto a modern conception of disability as a ‘social category that contributes to the exclusion of and prejudice against people with bodily or cognitive variations’.¹² The exclusion of Claudius occurred because he was categorized as different and, to a certain extent, moulded through exclusion as different. Yet, in our source material the category of his disability is unstated or undefined and a heavy emphasis is placed on the agency of others to influence him, notably his wives and freed slaves.¹³ The roles of wives and freedmen is not unique to the reign of Claudius, but can be found articulated in Tacitus’ Agricola in statements about freedmen in the court of Domitian (41) and his comment that a wife is more than half-responsible for a good or bad marriage (6). The issue at stake is the agency of the emperor in relation to the agency of others, perhaps, most clearly articulated by Plutarch in his lives of Galba and Otho,¹⁴ but also applicable to the biographies of Suetonius: the impact of vice and extravagance on the young Nero, for example, which results in the emperor being powerless to act in the face of Vindex’s rebellion.¹⁵ Tacitus takes this idea a stage further in his account of Claudius’ principate by creating a narrative in which Claudius’ role or even presence is eclipsed by that of Agrippina in order to present a critique of a ‘harmless and insignificant’ Claudius, whose lack of control provides the context for the emergence of a dangerous evil stepmother and female dux.¹⁶ Indeed, Tacitus has been shown to use comic techniques to invert power relations in his characterization of Claudius’ reign in Annals books XI and XII.¹⁷ This makes freedmen and wives the main protagonists with Claudius in a subservient, unknowing or forgetful role. Little of this comic genre crosses into Suetonius’ Claudius,¹⁸ and creates a need to understand his biography within the wider context of writings on age and agency in Antiquity and, specifically, Suetonius’ deployment of age categories in his biographies of the early emperors. The absence of agency on the part of the ruler of the Roman Empire is, for us, a means to understand how ‘disability’ was perceived in the Roman Empire; and underpinning most conceptions of this absence of agency was the age of the person in question. However, in the case of Claudius, appearance was an important signifier of his character due to his gait and speech. The description of an emperor’s appearance at the end of each of Suetonius’ lives appears to provide a further proof of their character as described in the earlier accounts of their deeds and sayings. Interestingly, ageing created similar signifiers of the loss of virility and power: Karen Cokayne suggests that the ageing Roman became disabled through failing sight or the presence of baldness. This would suggest that the Roman concept of disability was rather wider than our own and could include elements that were introduced through the ageing process, including physical processes as innocuous as the loss of hair.¹⁹

Conceptions of the Stages of the Human Lifespan

In Antiquity the concept that the human lifespan was split up into a number of quite distinct stages was well-developed, comprising numerous mathematical divisions. Tim Parkin has examined all of the schemes and sees them as having little basis in or on actual biological and human experience, but served instead as a powerful literary topos (see Table 1.1).²⁰ This idea can be extended further and, we might suggest, the articulation was a means to identify the strengths and weaknesses associated with the age of others, which could have a practical value for the writing of rhetorical speeches. The schemes and their divisions that articulated perceptions of the qualities and weaknesses of each stage of life are set out as Table 1.1. Of course, there were exceptional individuals who demonstrated that they could both contribute to public life and live well – whilst facing up to the negative connotations of old age. One very clear example was Appius Claudius Caecus, who was both old and blind but appears as a key character Cicero’s De Senectute.²¹ The view of the stages of the human lifespan point to a concept by which man (these do not apply to women) gained in ability or the capacity to understand and to act wisely. This process reached a tipping point at some stage in adulthood, after which deterioration into old age was an expectation. It is in middle-age that we find the greatest capacity to act. In the discussion of systems of age with a focus on multiples of seven, this results in the age of 42 – incidentally the age at which Trajan was said to have become emperor: an ideal age. This point, in a man’s early 40s, can be seen as either a transition moment to a new stage in the lifespan (cf. Solon’s and Ptolemy’s categorizations) or is found at the end of the phase associated with terms such as iuventus or iuvenis. In such schemes, 42 was seen as a conclusion to the maturation of the individual and the transition into the later stages of life. If those at the age of about 42 had the greatest capacity to act, then those at an earlier age or a later age were seen to have less of a capacity to take action.

Although Parkin argues that these schemes that divide the lifespan into phases were literary devices or topoi, there is similarity if not congruence with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction Infirmitas in Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• PART I DEFINING INFIRMITY AND DISABILITY
• PART II SOCIETAL AND CULTURAL INFIRMITAS
• PART III INFIRMITY, HEALING AND COMMUNITY
• Bibliography
• Index