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 3

Western Antiquity:
The Fear of the Gods

Praxis

Deformity Put Aside, Weakness under Care

The West draws on two sources: Judaism and classical antiquity. It is
not my purpose to distinguish their relative shares of influence, even if
that were possible. But to what extent does the Jewish system based
on the Bible that was outlined in chapter 2 resemble or differ from
Greco-Roman antiquity?
If we are to believe Marie Delcourt,1 the practice established for
deformed infants consisted of exposure, in Athens as well as in Sparta,
and in early Rome. This applied only to deformities that were close to
monstrosity, the terata. But malformations that are benign in our eyes,
such as clubfoot, webbed hands, fused fingers, supernumerary digits,
were considered deformities. What counts is the aberrant character in
relation to the species and not the medical or adaptive seriousness of
the abnormality. As soon as we face a birth that lacks the integrity
recognized for the human race, we are in the sphere of teratology.
This is sharply distinct from debility or illness. The conception of
disability is very precise and does not cover the entire field of what
today goes under this term.
The exposure of deformed infants means taking them outside the
settlement to an unknown location and letting them expire in a hole in
the ground or drown in a course of water. If the consequence is indeed
death, the signification of exposure is not as an execution of these in-
fants. Exposing them is only returning them to the gods. They are not
killed; they are sacrificed to the gods. Although there is an expiatory

39

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 40 A History of Disability

character to this praxis, it cannot be referred to ritual sacrifice.2 But

there is a very pronounced religious sense in this: these births signal the
possibility of misfortunes and are explained by the anger of the gods.
Deformed infants are exposed because they are harmful, maleficent.
They implicate the group. This is why they are exposed only by the
decision of a council of wise men; it is not usually the parents who are in
charge of such a matter, but the social body, the state. 3 In the case of
Sparta, Delcourt writes: “If they were exposed, it is because they
caused fear: they were the sign of the gods’ anger and they were also the
reason for it. This is symptomized by a concomitance where the un-
trained mind distinguishes poorly between cause and effect” (39). Pre-
cautions have to be taken, this is the essential concept, for “the pre-
eminent sign sent by the gods to guilty men is the abnormal newborn, a
sign that always arouses anxiety” (47).
Only much later does there appear a rationalization that justifies
exposure on the grounds of eugenics or the impossibility of mixing
good blood with bad.4 At the root of this is a religious phobia, at times
associated with sterility or in any case of the same order: the divine
curse. Abnormal births are expiated, by public order. Monstrosities
are linked to the fear of collective sterility, to a fear of the extinction of
the species or of its departure from the norm. But this possible insecu-
rity is not only biological, it is insecurity in face of the divine, linked to
the wrongdoing of men and anger from above. This is why the act is
not primarily a killing but a return to the hands of the gods. In this, the
biological abnormality—for it is indeed an abnormality of the body,
identified and designated—is projected onto the social level. In other
words, aberrancy within the species not only threatens the future and
the continuation of this species, but also announces, threatens, signi-
fies a condemnation by the gods: a condemnation of the group. The
biological and social levels are mingled, or rather create an iso-
morphism: an aberrancy within the corporeal order is an aberrancy in
the social order (as in the moral order). This cannot be a private
matter; it is not a medical matter. Nor is it a question for psychology.
The differing body is socialized.5
Here it is exclusively a question of differing bodies, and not of
weakened bodies. Antiquity quite clearly distinguished among malfor-

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 Western Antiquity 41

mation, mental retardation, and illness. Atonement through exposure

is relevant only to that which threatens the norms of the human social
species and not to a simple diminution, which can be accommodated.
Thus the blind, the deaf, and the feeble-minded are not categorized
among the deformed.6 Cicero will later say to what extent blindness
and deafness can be rewarding special characteristics. It is possible not
only to compensate for them, but there are also “pleasures of the dark
and of silence” that cannot be enjoyed by those who see and hear. 7
This demonstrates, in any case, that in antiquity sensory disruption
was not connected with physical malformation. It might be congenital
or adventitious but did not signify deviance within the species. It did
not jeopardize conformity, did not point to a curse. Sensory disruption
was a weakness, an illness.
To be sure, the distinction between malformation and deficiency
is not always perfectly clear. Aulus Gellius, toward the end of the
classical period, bears witness to this vacillation. He begins, however,
with an opposition between illness, in which he includes, for example,
both consumption and blindness, and defect, where he classifies stut-
tering along with malformation. He questions whether one should
make distinctions based on the definitive or on the transitory nature of
the affliction. He cites a civil law tract in which the madman and the
mute are designated “ill,” thus blurring the categories.8 But this text,
even if it testifies to some indecision, also establishes the difference
between deficiency and defect. It would seem that for Greco-Roman
antiquity the most acute problem was congenital malformation, the
sole source of religious terror and the reason for fatal exclusion.
The practice of exposure, as distinct from statements on defi-
ciency, is indicative of the classification of disabilities—and, more-
over, of the mental universe underlying these divisions—in Western
antiquity. Medical literature confirms these cultural data. Although I
have chosen to begin by commenting on classical antiquity without
going farther back in time, it is of some interest to look briefly else-
where. 9 In Mesopotamian culture illness—and physical malformation
as well—are linked to sin, to wrongdoing, which has its seat in hu-
man beings: adultery, incest, pollution. An individual may have com-
mitted a sin unknowingly. The sick person has been rejected by God

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 42 A History of Disability

and, in certain cases, should be rejected by the human community.

Diseases come from the gods as a punishment, 10 or at least as a sign
of their disapproval. As a consequence, recovery consisted in the first
hand of seeking out the original wrong, even back through several
generations, because a sick person could atone for earlier wrongdo-
ing. The medicine that derives from this conception is psycho-moral
in nature, not organic.
To continue with Marcel Sendrail, the mental universe changes
completely among the Egyptians. Here we confront a magical universe.
It is no longer an instance of punishment for sin but of metaphysical
drama. Far beyond our human conduct there is the hostility of uncon-
trollable forces. Behind our transgressions, there is a rupture, both
cosmic and divine. Misfortune and suffering are only the consequences
of a previous breakdown. In this philosophical environment, illness and
disability are better distinguished, while in Babylon and Sumer, every-
thing was mixed together in expiation for sin. Here, in the valley of the
Nile, which has left us important iconographical testimony on physical
deformation, certain disabled persons play a social role. We see
dwarves receiving honors or being carried on altars. The disabilities are
not primarily pathogenic; the pathology of disease is consigned to a rite,
to charms, in short, to something shamanistic.
This is a natural consequence of the more metaphysical than ethi-
cal mode of representation in ancient Egypt. It is less a question of
atonement than of deflection, less inquiry than conciliation. “The pun-
ishment of a sin, known or unknown, for the Babylonians, the transpo-
sition to the human scale of a cosmic drama for the Egyptians, disease
becomes both trial and sacrifice for the Hebrews. Moral disorder
among the first-named, magical phenomenon among the second, dis-
play of the sacred among the third” (73). In what camp were the
Greeks?
Before, and also coincidentally with, the appearance of more ra-
tional, technical, even clinical thought that is associated with Hippo-
crates, Greece was permeated by a current of the tragic. Above all, it
was a matter of destiny. Beside a medicine where the objectives and
the exercise of empirical knowledge were dawning, Greek thought
saw in disease a sign of the ill will of the gods. This opposition between

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 Western Antiquity 43

the Greek medicine of Hippocrates and the tragic is not absolute. The
Greek world is more ambiguous, more mixed. Hellenic rationality
does not stand opposite the irrationality of life. Not only is it a rational-
ity that has been won from perception of the disorder and ruses of the
world, it is a rationality always crossed by the tragic. Greek thought is
a mixture of the tragic and the rational. Even if Plato is not always
most representative of the common mentality, he illustrates the am-
bivalent status of illness when he proposes an itinerary of purification,
from the logic of a perspective in which the soul is superior to the
body, and matter is under the control of the spirit.
It should be noted, however, that in the two currents, Hippo-
cratic and tragic, a common idea is formulated: we are under the
regimen of necessity (anankè), under the control of the Nature of
things. Even if there is a physical purification to be carried out, dis-
ease is chiefly to be referred to this natural order, either to point up
the gap between the two or to signify the Necessity from which even
the gods themselves cannot escape. The first hypothesis—disease as
natural disorder—opens the way to empirical, scientific research on
physical and biological rationality that has been disrupted. We witness
the birth of Hippocratic medicine and the appearance of what will be
the main stream of Western medicine. The second hypothesis—
disease as a superior destiny—brings us back to physical deviance. We
are dealing with a different order, that of the gods or at least one in
which the gods are more proximate. Disorder, as represented by a
certain number of morbidities, refers to a menace that actually belongs
to a different order.
Thus, I believe that Delcourt was right when she claimed that
exposure is a means of returning to the gods. At the same time, it is
evident that on the basis of a collective cultural idea of necessity and
thus of a notion of order, the division set out earlier remains valid: the
Greek world makes a clear distinction between illness as weakness and
illness as defect, although some words such as nosos have both mean-
ings. These first illnesses belong to the sphere of technical medicine,
the second to philosophical and social reflection. Delcourt somewhat
overemphasizes, perhaps, the human fault that could be confused with
individual fault. The sign of misfortune, of the divine curse, if you will.

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 44 A History of Disability

Expiation up to a certain point, that is, submission to an Order that is

unknown, terrifying, other, but not a sacrifice for a fault that has been
committed, in the same sense as in Babylon. At the heart of the matter
is the tragic flaw. And is not the tragic precisely the conflict between
orders? Indeed, some pathologies make us fear for our own order—
and society defends itself against them. But do they not refer, in terms
of priority, to an order that threatens to crush our own?
Before entering this debate, the privileged venue of which will
be the mythological corpus, it will be rewarding, by way of counter-
point, to examine aberrations that run parallel to those which interest
us here.
What was the status of mental retardation, of mental affliction, of
“madness”? In The Laws11 Plato says that “the insane should not ap-
pear in the city, but each of them shall be kept in the home by those
close to him.” Then Plato gives as a reason for this recommendation
the disruption, aggression, and danger that the madman provokes by
his threatening or obscene words. And we know that in Athens the
mentally ill were shunned: people threw stones at them or spit on
them.12 Besides terror, the insane also inspired respect everywhere,
for common belief, drawing on very ancient ideas, saw in madness the
intervention of the supernatural. Mental disorder is synonymous with
possession, in the literal sense of the word.
On this basis Plato elaborated a conception of insanity that he
called prophetic, in addition to ritual madness, poetic madness, and
erotic madness.13 These forms of insanity, especially the prophetic
one, which is at work in oracles, for example, are very clearly distin-
guished from common madness. “When grievous maladies and afflic-
tions have beset certain families by reason of some ancient sin, mad-
ness has appeared among them, and breaking out into prophecy has
secured relief by finding the means thereto, namely by recourse to
prayer and worship, and in consequence thereof rites and means of
purification were established” (Plato, Phaedrus, 22).
Ordinary madness is associated with some wrongdoing for which
compensation must be paid. The inspired, prophetic madmen break
this cycle. I will not detail Plato’s full thought on such delirium,
which has a philosophical and purgative function; it reveals a science

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 Western Antiquity 45

and an intention under the appearance of chaos (Dodds, Les Grecs et

l’irrationnel, 82). Conventional insanity does not have this scope.14
In both cases, as in that of physical aberrancy, we are dealing with
the divine, even supra-divine, order. But the madman is not ex-
posed; he is simply avoided. Why this difference? Doubtless because
it is possible, if we follow Plato’s thought, to integrate madness into a
kind of revelation: it is one more means of access. Moreover, it can
be warded off by the superior forms of madness. Physical aberrancy
is crude, without a way out, in the final analysis more threatening.
Without anticipating remarks to come, I should call attention to the
obvious contrast with present-day culture, which maintains a much
more problematic relationship with mental disorder than with physi-
cal deformity. This is because the relationship of reason/unreason,
rational/irrational is not the same. The Greeks, although avid for the
intelligible and for intellectual clarity, did not fail to recognize the
supernatural interference on the one hand, the seductive obscurity of
unreason on the other. 15
The attitude toward congenital deformity and that toward insan-
ity are not the only areas in which antiquity speaks to us of disability.
We encounter many well-known malformations: club feet, Pott’s dis-
ease, atrophy, poliomyelitis, etc. We see physicians attending to all
the traditional illnesses: dermatosis, tuberculosis, nephritis, hepatitis,
and so on, even though blindness and certain epidemics are of major
concern. We also meet those wounded in war and the victims of
accidents: “if the large Greek cities had state-paid physicians to care
for the wounded without charge from the time of the wars against the
Medes, the smaller cities were also prepared to make substantial
sacrifices for the relief of their war wounded.”16 All kinds of inscrip-
tions, stelae, and scattered texts attest to the existence of military
medicine and, thus, of wounded veterans who were taken under pub-
lic care. With a degree of randomness that we need not explore at
present. We can see from a plea by Lysias, “For the Cripple” (from
between 400 and 360 b.c.e.), 17 that disabled people of few means
were to receive a pension determined annually by the Council of
Athens. Candidates for this subsidy appeared before the Council,
which reviewed their claim on the public purse, passed judgment,

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 46 A History of Disability

and supported or rejected the claim. Lysias is defending a disabled

small merchant who found his right to a pension challenged by an-
other citizen. This text is not very far-ranging, but it does witness to
public aid instituted on behalf of citizens who were denied a living by
disability, and to the allocation of appropriate public resources. Lysias
clears his client of the various indictments: yes, he is misshapen, you
have only to look; he can ride a horse, but the horse is borrowed; he is
without extensive resources, because he is not of the well-to-do stra-
tum of citizens. But this text does not tell us what the disability was,
no more than it gives information on the general social condition of
the impaired. The only thing that this speech confirms for us is that
the city concerned itself with making available a minimum of re-
sources to its impaired and impoverished veterans, in the form of an
annual grant that might or might not be renewed. This was the situa-
tion in the Greek cities of the classical period.
This is, however, indicative of the classification of the impaired. On
one side, congenital deformity is exposed; on another, mental illness is
hidden but is not a cause for exclusion, with the possibility that it may
bear a message for our world; on a third side, illness and adventitious
disability are treated and cared for. We are very far from the kinds of
classification that will later be made, and from those of the present day
in particular. To avoid giving the impression that this classification is too
rigid, it should be noted that physical disability, such as blindness, may
also be the medium of a message. Tiresias is a seer.
Up to this point I have been concerned with what social praxis
tells us on the one hand, and with the conception of illness on the
other. But the most important topic remains to be explored: this soci-
ety’s discourse on the subject of aberrancy. I believe, in fact, that
whatever its effective, empirical conduct, a society reveals just as
much about itself by the way it speaks of a phenomenon. The imagin-
ings of society—social imagination in its broadest sense—are a con-
stituent of a society just as much as its praxis. We must break the habit
of referring everything back to praxis. The gap between praxis and the
collective “imaginary” may be large, and be due to quite other reasons
than ideology in the Marxist sense of the word. The social imagination
is also social reality.

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 Western Antiquity 47

The Myths

In order not to get off course in an overly long discussion of the

definition of myth, I shall use this term for the literary corpus on
which the classical mentality drew as a common source. This will
include the Iliad, the Odyssey, as well as a large portion of Greek
theater. This universe gives rise to certain very characteristic myths,
such as that of Oedipus extended by Sophocles into the truly tragic. As
we shall see, I give preferential status to Sophocles’ version, because it
occupies a more important place than others in discussions about
Greece.
The accounts and stories of the gods are populated by disabilities
that are there to play a structural role (and a structuralist one as well),
and not as simple folkloristic details. The principals here are Oedipus
and a number of figures close to him, the god Hephaestus, Philoctetes,
even Hermaphrodite, to name only the major ones. The fundamental
discourse of the Greeks and other ancient peoples includes malforma-
tion and anomalies. It would be very surprising if they were present for
no other reason than as ornamentation.

Oedipus: The Operation of Difference

The myth of Oedipus is without qualification one of the major found-
ing myths in antiquity as well as in the West; from Sophocles to Freud
and Lévi-Strauss it has not ceased to be taken up again, reinterpreted
and reworked.18 And here, at the very outset of this myth, so essential
to our culture and the inspiration of so much symbolism, is situated
the problem of disability: Oedipus, variously lame, with swollen or
pierced feet, is an exposed infant.19 Is it because of his disability? Or is
his disability adventitious, the result of his unlucky birth, due, for
example, to the crime of homosexual rape committed by an ancestor?
In actual fact, in ancient Greece exposure was not always motivated by
deformity. If the disability of Oedipus could legitimately be seen to
play the principal role in his exposure and thus in his fate, then one of
the heroes most charged with significance would carry the stigmata of
deficiency as a basic constituent and not as an accessory. Such a state-
ment may appear shocking, but may it not be for reasons other than

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 48 A History of Disability

the elements of the myth that we hesitate to entertain just this reading
among others? What causes horror and fear, is it not that the other-
ness, even the monstrousness, should be original? The legend of
Oedipus itself reveals this dread. It is true that people will not permit
their heroes—even the tragic ones—to be the bearers of defects. At
least, this is how Delcourt accounts for the transfer of the defect
burdening the grandson to the grandfather (Labdabos, the lame),20
since for her there is a transfer, even though a whole race or line of
descent (genos in Greek) is involved, that is the object of divine con-
demnation and that is implicated in the problem of power. We find
here again the characteristic ambiguity of the Greeks. Into the heart of
the myth itself, a game of hide-and-seek has been introduced, one that
shows the impossibility of separating opposed elements, contrary de-
sires, irreconcilable thoughts.
That disability, aberration, anomaly and abnormality, malforma-
tion—like the affective relationship with kin, the relationship with the
gods, the relationship to truth—are part of the fundamental problems
of the human condition and of our culture is a conception perhaps not
foreign to Greek thought. Claude Lévi-Strauss sees this clearly since he
makes physical disability one of the four oppositional elements that
structure myth. 21 We know that Lévi-Strauss identifies four columns,
opposed two by two, in which all the components of myth are situated:
one column where he inscribes all the “overvalued” kinship relations,
another where all the “undervalued” kinship relations are located.
These two columns constitute the first opposition. Then follow two
other series: elements that mark a passage beyond the human condition
and disabilities that recall the earthly tie: the second opposition. The
two major oppositions themselves correspond to one another and can be
expressed in the form of an equation.
Lévi-Strauss interprets this double opposition as a statement of
the general problem of the same and the other. There is the superhu-
man and the ordinarily human, just as there is the incestuous relation-
ship (identity, identicalness) and the relationship to the woman who is
not the mother (alterity). In the same fashion, starting with the ques-
tion of incest and the superhuman, there is the problem of our origin:
are we born of two different beings or of one? The myth of Oedipus

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 Western Antiquity 49

constitutes an accumulation of oppositions, each of which refers to a

principal interrogation of humanity, and all of which refer one to an-
other. Vast combinatorics, prodigious play of mirrors.
In the analysis of Lévi-Strauss physical malformation signifies two
things. It is interpreted as the notice of our terrestrial affiliation, heavy
and entangling. But it also enters into the opposition between terres-
trial and divine, itself interpreted as posing the following question: do
humanity’s origins lie with the divine, and thus with that which is
identical to itself, or with the earth, site of diversity and multiplicity?
Does recognizing with Lévi-Strauss that disability occupies a
major place in the myth of Oedipus oblige us to follow him in his
reading of the myth and in the methodology that he employs? In this
account, is Oedipus a deformed infant and exposed because of it?
Delcourt’s elucidation, infinitely cautious, still seems convincing to
me. At the outset of her book she states: “In an earlier book I tried to
show that Oedipus is one of the unlucky newborns that ancient com-
munities rid themselves of because their deformity was proof of di-
vine anger.” 22 To highlight the special case of Oedipus, the author
reviews most of the legendary figures who have been the object of
exposure and whose fate was significant. But here it is a question of
children who were tested and not of abnormal children who were
saved. “The idea that an infant should be sacrificed because, if it
lived, it would bring misfortune is found, to the best of my knowl-
edge, in only three legends: those of Oedipus, Paris, and Cyp-
selus.”23 This feature is still not proof of the congenital deformity of
Oedipus. But we already note that the mother of Cypselus was
named Labda, that is, ‘the lame,’ and the condemnation of which the
infant was the object resembles a sentence of exposure. All this is
despite the embellishment of the story and the rescue that Herodo-
tus describes in his text devoted to Cypselus. This parallel with
Oedipus prompts Delcourt to write: “The legend of Oedipus, like
that of Cypselus, is, I believe, transcribed from the habit of exposing
deformed newborns at birth. . . . The unlucky deformity is then at-
tributed to an ancestor, the grandfather, the mother, simple person-
ifications of the illness which is at the very origin of the creation of
the legend.”24 After summarizing the elements that are particular to

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 50 A History of Disability

Oedipus, she continues: “I believe that in face of such a complex of

facts and signifying names, it is difficult not to see in the Oedipus
legend a mythic transcription of apothesis. ” Apothesis was the term
reserved for the exposure of infants born deformed, as distinct from
ekthesis, which referred to fatal exclusion for other reasons as deter-
mined by the male head of the family.
This linguistic distinction invites a clarification. If it is true that
the exposure of deformed infants cannot be separated from the overall
practice of exposure, we should still not forget its specific nature. Here
I would cite an article by Nicole Belmont.25 Starting with the exposure
of malformed and thus unlucky infants, she extends her view to in-
clude the very widespread rite of putting a newborn on the ground, a
practice intended to give proof that the newly born belongs to human-
ity but which also introduces all the problems of socialization of the
child, a problem that is different from that of its biological birth.
Proceeding in this way, Belmont sees the clear distinction, which is
also found in the practice of wet-nursing, between biological birth (and
kinship) and social birth (and kinship). The rite of exposure to the
earth is also a means to effect recognition by the father, and not only
by the mother who gives birth. In short, the rite of deposition on the
ground is polysemic, and, in the case where it extends to exposure/
expulsion, it can be interpreted as a means for parents to avoid the
threat that every infant poses for earlier generations, and thus prevent
any hostile impulses toward the infant. All this seems to me as stimulat-
ing as it is oblivious of the radical nature of the exposure of deformed
infants, which constitutes a radical form of exclusion. Moreover, the
case of the abnormal must be associated with those who were excom-
municated by virtue of their status as expiators, scapegoats. In both
cases, we again find fear in the face of the anger of mysterious forces,
anxiety over the unknown wrong, cause of the misfortune, and finally
the desire to assign fault to a being who can be excluded. Where is the
fault? Not immediately in the deformity, but it indicates that a lineage
or a group is flawed. Oedipus, at his birth, seems to carry a counter-
sign pointing to the particular and cursed destiny of his line. The
different modalities of the exposure of Oedipus seem to confirm this
interpretation.

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 Western Antiquity 51

The difficulty that attends a reading of ancient and legendary

texts, and the contradictory elements of which they are composed, will
permit only theses that edge into hypotheses. But studies such as the
one that I have drawn on do, however, add considerable weight to an
interpretation of the defect that Oedipus bears in terms of physical
abnormality.
The harm-bringing infants that were exposed to the gods, but not
killed, could be saved by these same gods to whom they were sacri-
ficed. Such a rescue would be the equivalent of a consecration. Oedi-
pus is in this category. Cursed and the bringer of misfortune, but
untouchable and sacred.26 This is the cultural message of the birth of
Oedipus. The story begins there. Where does it end? With Sophocles
and his Oedipus at Colonus. We could say that the end of the myth is
death: the disappearance of Oedipus in a kind of divine aura. The
aberrant infant, the sign of alterity, has become almost divine, as if
marvelously carried off. Misfortune and marvel are united.
We come into the world poorly, but the exit is glorious. We are
threatened, but there is salvation: Oedipus’ lack is finally made good.
From terrifying alterity (the deformity) to appeasing alterity (the dis-
appearance of Oedipus), human life is not assured of its identity and
stability, and society does not grant them. We are always other than
what society made us and believes us to be. Society and social iden-
tity are relative. The disabled Oedipus undergoes trials that are in-
tended to reveal the other side of society and of the individual. Tragi-
cally, Oedipus—Swollen-Foot—plays a role that will be assumed in a
buffoon mode by the disabled in the entourage of medieval princes.
Vulnerability, derision, nonreconciliation. Why? Because people can-
not stand difference, otherness: one likes only one’s like. Oedipus
stands for difference rejected. He is doomed to incest (the love of the
same) and to the violence that is its consequence: the execution of
the father, the suicide of the wife-mother, the rifts and misfortunes
among the children of incest. Difference on earth is not viable, is
cursed, and it is rejected. But even while rejecting it, society is no
less under the effects of antagonism, war, and blood. If society re-
solved the difference that malformation represents, it would make a
decisive advance. Society would no longer live in the register of the

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 52 A History of Disability

same, between two exterior alterities, but would integrate the differ-
ence into its interior.
We can establish another correlation in the myth of Oedipus: be-
tween the two disabilities, that of birth (the pedal oedema) and that,
inflicted, of blindness. Oedipus follows a trajectory between a mal-
formation and a weakness, between a defect and a quasi-illness. Oedi-
pus the king ends in this kind of blindness. From head to foot Oedipus is
transpierced with disability. From one end of his life to the other, the
law of difference and of lack weigh on him—to the precise extent that
the law of the identical makes him suffer fatally. Like a sheet of paper,
like a sign, Oedipus has two sides: intolerable difference and implacable
mimesis.27 Oedipus is the acme of anomaly; he is also the sharpest
reflection of our normality. Our normality is our love of the same, and
this normality is risk filled. The abnormality is Oedipus exposed at the
beginning and exiled at the end. But over this course he discovers that
desire for the same is destructive and that difference leads to a kind of
paradise. Oedipus inverts society’s functioning, just as he does that of
kinship. He, the differing one, is victim of the identical, because the
identical wishes to regulate the differing. The correlations between the
two termini of the story are not everything. At the center of the account
we find a kind of deformity, of abnormality: the Sphinx, who is pre-
sented as a monster. This winged woman-lion imposes a test, since a
riddle must be solved. This test, which will qualify Oedipus to reign in
Thebes, implicates his unlucky birth. Oedipus does not guess, he
knows, as Delcourt rightly remarks, which oracle is about him! The
riddle and his test implicate once again his difference, his aberration.
The monstrousness of the Sphinx, who in certain texts of the Oedipus
myth is his kinswoman (and who has been confused with Jocasta), also
plays the same role: a bird of ill omen for the earth, a resistance that
must be overcome, she also has an aspect that is almost divine. She, too,
represents difference overcome, but signals the approaching drama of
mimesis.
My analysis is consonant with that of René Girard,28 with several
important differences. As with Lévi-Strauss and in my own exposi-
tion, Girard places this question of the Other and the Same at the
center of the tragic myth. In his eyes, Oedipus is the prototype for

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 Western Antiquity 53

difference negated. Difference represented by the father, who is not

and cannot be the son, whom Oedipus kills and replaces in the bed
of Jocasta, his mother. Like many critics, Girard attaches only an
allegorical value to the crooked walk. A kind of redundancy of the
oedipal destiny, which does not proceed according to established
rules, according to fundamental prohibitions (notably that against
incest). I shall return to this. Girard sees in Oedipus a figure of illu-
sory and impossible difference. He did not respect the difference
between father and son, because difference is not the human lot.
The human lot is mimesis, the desire for the same, the desire for the
same desire as everyone else. In point of fact, Oedipus wishes to
reign over Thebes, like his father, and loves the same woman as his
father. The tragedy of Oedipus is “the production of the identical on
the basis of evanescent differences.” The fact that there may be
seeking, even questing, for fruitful differences does not prevent us
from being doomed to this reproduction, this imitation, this assimila-
tion. We are as if summoned to difference and to its acceptance, the
Other is a kind of horizon, but we cannot break the cycle of this
repetition of the identical, this fusion into the same. We cannot really
be son, brother, father, mother, without wanting to abolish these
differences. Up to this point Girard is fairly faithful to Freud and
shares in the pessimism over the setbacks that psychoanalysis has
suffered. But he supplements Freud. In fact, in his eyes the oedipal
tragedy is ultimately centered, not on incest, the slaying of the fa-
ther, the misfortune of Oedipus, but on rivalry, fratricidal rivalry.
Everyone wants to be similar. And in point of fact, fratricidal killings
are very present in the myth. This is the indicator of the “mimetic
crisis” that interests Girard. We all want to have the same desires.
The outcome is violence, violence resolved by the expulsion of the
expiatory victim. And here, too, it is true that Oedipus is punished,
by his own hand, in becoming blind, and he leaves Thebes to be-
come a wanderer. Oedipus plays the role of the scapegoat on whom
falls the social misfortune of the forced departure. Thebes emerges
from its crisis by ejecting this guilty party, 29 who is also just anyone at
all. Reconciliation does not occur, however, because Oedipus re-
mains a victim who is ignorant of his status as such, a status that the

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 54 A History of Disability

myth conceals. The function as expiatory victim remains the un-

thought part of the myth. This will no longer be the case in the New
Testament, where Jesus will understand, will denounce the violent
origins of society and in so doing will disassemble its mechanism.
The Freudian and Girardian interpretations, even though I am
not discussing them here in terms of the fruits they have borne, seem
to me to suffer from excessive disregard of these repeated disabilities.
Before carrying my argument through to its conclusion, I would em-
phasize that I do not at all claim to have exhausted the significance of
the oedipal myth. The tragic myth is and will remain the site of mul-
tiple readings. I am not in the least campaigning against the wonderful
literature on Oedipus, but am advancing a bit to the side, to display
yet another reading.
That the fate of this being, Oedipus, so vastly different from
others, should be imprisonment in the identical, so much is assured.
But that the story should “function entirely in terms of the identical” I
do not believe. Like Lévi-Strauss, for whom Girard’s analysis served
only as an illustration of method, I shall leave this matter in the status
of a question asked, but I must admit to thinking that difference is
dealt with in real terms, and not simply through the mechanism of the
mimetic crisis and the sacrifice of the emissary victim.
As I said at the beginning, the Greek myth of Oedipus does not
end until Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus does not end as a victim but as
a near-god. This has not been sufficiently noted. The wandering ceases
and the exclusion of the victim is to a venerable repose. The mecha-
nism of emissary is particularly truncated and the exclusion itself is not
so victimizing as may seem. It is as much exclusion of the different that
too greatly wished to resemble, as it is ritual sacrifice. In fact, the
ritual aspect is hardly present. In the same way as the exposure of
deformed infants is hard to associate with ritual sacrifice, the expulsion
of Oedipus has only the appearance of a real sacrifice.
A more modest approach, it seems to me, but one just as signifi-
cant, is to stay with the intolerable character of the difference, starting
with the aberrant character of Oedipus. It is the impingement of the
different on the identical that is not bearable. This different that tried
to ape the identical. It is possible to read the myth in a fashion inverse

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 Western Antiquity 55

to that of Girard: the incestuous quest, the imitation of the father (the
Other) are thwarted by the one who represents alterity. Mimesis is
denounced. The destiny of Oedipus is not so much to show that hu-
manity is doomed to mimesis as it is to show its illusion. Oedipus
figures the Other, even more than he does the Father. This figure is
engaged by the myth in the mimetic quest in order to demonstrate
its pathology just as much as to underline its inevitable character.
Having fled, Oedipus returns to alterity, but as one glorified. Instead
of saying with Girard that the tragic myth of Oedipus “introduces an
illusory difference into the heart of the identical,” I would say that it
introduces an effective difference into the process of the identical. It is
the identical that is illusory and that fails. As always, this kind of
reversal of perspective is inaccurate to a certain degree, because iden-
tity and difference are always entangled in the Greek world. I wish to
insist on the fact, however, that the Hellenic world is far from being
under the sway of mimesis, and that difference obsesses it just as
much. In the myth there is a denunciation of mimesis and of the agony
to which it gives rise at the very heart of implacable fate. It is a light,
not on the possibility of getting off without risk but on the operation of
difference. Of course, difference is rejected and the influence of mime-
sis is impressively powerful. But the myth of Oedipus is also a protest
against this imprisonment, a kind of cry for liberty. Oedipus remains
different, having been so since birth, and his mimetic itinerary is the
long account of the denial of this difference, by himself and by a
society that is incapable of doing it justice. At the end of Oedipus at
Colonus Oedipus pronounces terrible curses against his son Polynices,
who reassumes the mimetic position in wishing at all cost to rule over
Thebes in opposition to his brother, the usurper. Here we clearly
seem to have returned to behavior directed by rivalry and a desire for
the same. The curses of Oedipus can be interpreted as the designation
of a victim: Polynices will be rejected. But, like the famous curses of
Jesus against the victimizing violence of religion as represented by the
Pharisees,30 we can see a trace of clairvoyance concerning mimesis as a
generator of violence. In this, Oedipus truly knows the ills that gnaw
at humanity. Here he sets himself at the greatest distance from what
was his own life.

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 56 A History of Disability

We see the blind man leading others to the place of his disappear-
ance, confiding to Theseus a secret not otherwise revealed. We know
that the place and the name of his tomb are forbidden and hidden.
And Theseus says, “As long as I observe this law, he [Oedipus] has
assured me that misfortune will spare my country.” Peace resides in
the alterity of Oedipus, in his secret.
If we then agree to follow Sophocles to the end that he gives the
myth of Oedipus in the Greek world, customary views of Oedipus may
be modified. I insist on this finale because in my eyes, accustomed as
they are to the structure of narrative texts, it is the correlative of the
beginning of the myth. Oedipus is a being who signifies, in his disabil-
ity, a very radical elsewhere and otherness. The trials and discursive
agendas of Oedipus can be analyzed in many ways. I am making this
analysis on my own, without forgetting the beginning and the end,
that is, following the trajectory of a difference that is recognized only
in the final act, but which is at work throughout the account.
Several remarks are necessary, before pursuing our inquiry
through the literature of antiquity. I have tried to read the myth of
Oedipus through the prism of the problem of the hero’s deformity (and
that of certain of his kin) and of the meeting with monstrosity.
I wanted to establish that we may read the myth by this path of
access and that it would lend coherence.31 I have omitted calling
attention to many commentaries on this myth and many literary re-
workings: in French, from Corneille to Robbe-Grillet, passing by Vol-
taire, Cocteau, Durand, and others. My interest here is not the myth
of Oedipus as such but the problem of disability, addressed through it.
I have tried to establish that for the Greeks physical deformity posed
the very problem of their own human condition, a condition that seeks
to seal the cracks of alterity, enveloped as it is in the desire for the
same. But this is a condition that recognizes the question and casts a
deeply suspicious eye on its desire for the identical, a tragic cry of
protest. Greek culture was condemned to forget difference, but it was
also aware of this. Thus, it knew that this difference would be its
salvation. In point of fact, it sought to escape from this difference, but
the wound was there, always raw.
One article in particular attests to the multiplicity of the readings

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 Western Antiquity 57

of this myth, and adds to the store of questions raised by the literature
on Oedipus.32 Jean-Pierre Vernant takes as point of departure what
Lévi-Strauss wrote in his most recent remarks on Oedipus: There is an
intimate tie between lameness, which runs through the entire Greek
mythic corpus, and the blocking of social communication on all levels
(sexual, kin related, political). The author then attempts to juxtapose
two texts: that of the legend of Oedipus and the historical one written
by Herodotus about the tyrants of Corinth, the Cypselids, descended
from Labda (Labdabos) the Lame. This is a successful juxtaposition. It
does not interest me here as such, unless it is to add to the list of the
malformed that we meet among the Greeks. Vernant comes to the
conclusion that deformities, which lead to exposure or elimination,
also give access to political power in the form of tyranny, that is, in the
form of social disaggregation. The “lame” dynasties, like those of the
Labdacids in Thebes or the Cypselids in Corinth, end in failure, be-
cause they “reject all the rules that in Greek eyes were at the founda-
tion of communal life” (254). The tyrant removes himself from social
interaction, like the original malformation that destabilizes power,
sexuality, the succession of generations, and communication among
kin. “The tyrant, both the equal of a god and a ferocious brute, incar-
nates in his ambivalence the mythic figure of the lame one, with his
two opposing aspects: he goes beyond the human course because,
rolling, moving swiftly and agilely, in all directions at once, he trans-
gresses the limitations to which the one who ‘walks straight’ is subject.
But his advance is also inferior to the normal mode of locomotion
because, mutilated, off-balance, tottering, he proceeds by limping in
his own particular way only to fall more completely at the end” (255).
Given the vast learning we know Vernant to possess, this conclusion is
inescapable by the end of his article and I shall not summarize it.
This study again underlines the importance, symbolic and real, of
deformity and malformation. But, beyond that, the author recognizes
that the problem is one of difference. A difference that fails, because it
associates itself with a political form that operates outside the rules.
The conclusions I have reached concerning Oedipus can be further
shaded, because Oedipus, as I have said, ends well, even if it is in
another world, and he hurls abuse at the fate of the Labdacids. It

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 58 A History of Disability

remains true that the descendants of Oedipus are failures and this is
not insignificant when one recognizes the importance of lineage. But
the question of Oedipus is no less that of aberration and difference:
“How can a man participate in similitude . . . while three times be-
coming different in the course of his existence? How can the perma-
nence of an order be sustained among creatures that are subject at
each age of their lives to a complete change of status? How can the
titles of king, father, husband, ancestor, son remain intact, unchange-
able when other people successively assume them and when one and
the same person is to be all of son, father, spouse, grandfather, young
prince, and old king in turn?” (243). This is the problem, the enigma of
Oedipus, well posed. It calls into question stability, permanence, the
identical, and identity. Disability defies order, and order is prey to
disorder, which has a primordial and radical character. 33
To conclude this discussion of the oedipal myth I shall quote
Vernant. In answer to the question of what the tragic in Sophocles’
play consists, he replies that the duality of Oedipus’ being is at the
heart of the tragic. I hope that I may be allowed a rather lengthy
quotation, which goes to the heart of our subject. Why say less well
what another has already expressed perfectly?

Even the very name of Oedipus contributes to these effects of

reversal. Ambiguous as it is, it carries within itself the same
enigmatic character that marks the entire tragedy. Oedipus is
the man with the swollen foot (oı̂dos), a disability that recalls the
cursed child, rejected by its parents, exposed to die in the wilder-
ness. But Oedipus is also the man who knows (oı̂da) the riddle of
the foot, who succeeds in solving, without getting it backwards,
the ‘oracle’ of the sinister prophetess, the Sphinx of the dark
song. And this knowledge makes ironic the presence of the for-
eign hero in Thebes, establishes him on the throne in place of the
legitimate kings. The double meaning of Oidipous is found at the
center of the name itself in the contrast between the two first
syllables and the third. Oida, I know, one of the principal words
in the mouth of the triumphant Oedipus, of Oedipus the tyrant.
Pous, the foot, the mark imposed from birth on him whose fate is
to end as he began, in exclusion, resembling the wild animal that

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 Western Antiquity 59

his footstep causes to flee, the one whose foot isolates him from
humans in the vain hope of escaping from the oracles, pursued by
the curse of the terrifying foot because he infringed the laws
sacred to the elevated foot, and henceforth incapable of getting
his foot out of the misfortunes into which he precipitated himself
by raising himself to the summit of power. The whole tragedy of
Oedipus is as if contained in the wordplay to which the riddle of
his name lends itself.

And a bit later in the same text: “The exposed infant may be a discard
that society wants to be rid of, a deformed monster or a base slave. But
he may also be a hero with an exceptional destiny. Saved from death,
triumphant in the test that is imposed on him from birth, the exile is
revealed as the elect, invested with supernatural power” (38).

Hephaestus . . . and Others

Oedipus is not the only famous deformed person in classical literature.
Disability reaches the gods themselves in the person of Hephaestus. 34
As with Oedipus, we do not know exactly what his disability was, nor
how it occurred. Crippled in both legs from birth? Twisted foot? Dwarf
and bow-legged? There is no certainty. Born of a woman without the
intervention of a father? Son of Zeus and Hera? Fathered by a giant
who raped his mother Hera? We are not sure. But that he is disabled
and that his birth was special, there is no doubt. He suffered the fate of
unlucky infants: he was expelled and thrown from Olympus by Zeus,
but in this case not at birth. His expulsion is always connected with his
disability. In addition, Delcourt very judiciously distinguishes be-
tween his disability, which is from birth, and his deformity, which is
the result of the fall. “The disability and deformity of Hephaestus have
differing origins. The former is the price paid by the magician to
acquire his art; the latter is both the symbol of the most awesome
powers and the most efficacious means to hold them at bay should they
become aggressive.” In this magical world, everything is done back-
wards (feet the wrong way around!) and this “corresponds to the belief
that sees in the monstrous and terrifying object a power capable both
of calling up the most dangerous forces and of checking them” (131). It

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 60 A History of Disability

is from his birth and his accident that Hephaestus draws his magic
power. He is primarily a magician, manipulating the arts and talismans
in the fashion of a shaman. Many magician-gods, beyond Greece, are
mutilated: Varuna is crippled, Tyr has lost a hand, Odin is one-eyed.
Rejected because of his anomaly, Hephaestus then harnesses ex-
traordinary abilities. We find here the same two faces of deformity:
ostensibly eliminated, it may return equipped with supernatural
forces. This dimension of magician, which is undeniable, does not,
however, determine the identity of Hephaestus. In the Iliad he is
found as cup-bearer, then as master of metals and magical objects,
finally as the Lord of Fire. It would seem that one could synthesize his
activities and role in the mastery of the bond. He intervenes to
enchain or to unfetter. The god of tying and untying, he has also
become the artisan god, the patron of those who transform. In short,
along with his deformity, and doubtless because of it, Hephaestus can
lay claim to the occult, artistic power of the craftsman. He is not
associated with power as understood in the sociopolitical sense, but he
is powerful. His inherent weakness opens for him the domain of myste-
rious efficacy. The disability excludes him from a public role, from the
structure of power (let us not forget the failure of Oedipus). But disabil-
ity is in collusion with the whole underside of appearances and of the
established; it allows his participation in another, secret face of things.
Disability is not admitted to everyday organization; it is not integrated
in that sense. But it opens the door to the arcane. The deformed being
could play only an exceptional and not a current role, but he does play
a role. The disabled god is left to his alterity; usually it is destabilizing
and terrifying, but he has been given a function that is indicative,
disruptive, subversive, prestigious, theurgical. His fate is not in the
least trivialized and, as an individual, he suffers most atrociously at
times, but his alterity tears a certain veil that masks our ordinary
arrangements. In the final analysis, the disabled person is never con-
sidered an individual who ought to be able to live among others; he is
always considered a sign, a collective one, “good to think about,” as
Lévi-Strauss would say, “good to worry about,” I would add.
Hephaestus has been made a kinsman of Philoctetes, another aber-
rant figure. Solidarity in marginality. Philoctetes is not disabled from

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 Western Antiquity 61

birth. As owner of the bow and arrows of Hercules, he makes his way to
Troy. Stopped at Chryse, he is bitten on the foot by a serpent. His
wound gives off an intolerable odor of rotting. The heads of the army
that he is accompanying abandon him alone on the island of Lemnos
where he lives in terrible, solitary exile. Since Ulysses lacks Philoctetes’
skill and the power of his arrows, he tries to get his weapons by a trick
while leaving Philoctetes to his misery. In the end the good conscience
of Ulysses’ envoy causes the trap to fail and, on the recommendation of
Hercules himself, Philoctetes embarks to join the battle, assured of a
cure and of victory. Such is the content of the play by Sophocles.
Here it is a question of abandoning the sick person, the wounded
warrior, the accidentally disabled man. It is a drama of solitude
and rejection because the hero has been rendered powerless. But
akin to Hephaestus, Philoctetes possesses a kind of secret weapon
from Hercules.
Disability and other powers are again linked. Philotectes, re-
jected by the organization and the sociopolitical enterprise personified
in Ulysses, finds himself endowed with a strength and efficacy that
come from a god. The same relationship between nonintegration and
superior role is again seen. Philotectes is a new representative of the
Other, excluded but advanced, rejected but exalted. Myth always
works on two levels: the political and social level, where there is no
room for aberration, and the magical and collective level, where there
exists an eminent function for aberration in the service of the human
community.
As for the aberrancy of Hermaphrodite, although it poses a whole
series of questions that will not be treated here, it seems to offer new
but consonant proof of what I have just said. The figure with double
sex, with a body both masculine and feminine, is fairly common in the
pantheons of various cultures. For the Greco-Roman world it should
first be stated that sexual ambivalence was considered an anomaly, the
most dangerous of all and the most monstrous. “When an infant was
born with the real or apparent signs of hermaphroditism, the entire
community judged itself threatened by the anger of the gods.”35 These
newborns were exposed, like those I have already written about.
Many children were exposed (or drowned or burned) because their sex

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 62 A History of Disability

was uncertain. And yet we find that Hermaphrodite (Hermes plus

Aphrodite) was the object of a very widespread cult. Even if the origin
of the cult of Hermaphrodite is correlated with a reduction in the
practice of exposure, the central question remains when we consider
Greek culture as a whole. Moreover, the elimination of infants of
doubtful sex persisted until the end of antiquity: Plutarch testifies to
this. How does it happen that we find at the same time a rejection of
bisexuality in perceived maleficent deformations and the cult of a
bisexual divinity? No doubt for the same reason that we find a god,
Hephaestus, both misshapen and magician. Hermaphrodite protects
sexual unions and births. He/she is the figure of the impossible: an-
drogyny. And androgyny is itself the figure of what is no longer differ-
ent, of what fuses. There is no longer man and woman; man and
woman are the same, are identical.36 Hermaphrodite wields a power
over sexuality because she/he is not sexually normal. While on the
concrete level of the everyday, the biological, the social, sexual anom-
aly is expelled and sent back to the gods, on the religious and mythic
level (which is also the collective level), the difference is sacralized and
becomes the site of a power that has influence over love affairs. But
this difference, as I have just said, figures the identical. We find again
the same obvious riddle as with Oedipus. Hermaphrodite signifies to
us that love is implacably doomed to the search for the same, for
mimesis, for fusion.
As concerns the Greek world, I must reiterate my rather abrupt
statement. For Plato, particularly in his dialogue The Symposium, love
can also recognize differences and is played out in a plural fashion,
man and man, man and woman, woman and woman. The desire for a
unity that goes beyond oppositions and differences, however, along
with the myth of the androgyne, dominates discourse. Moreover, Her-
maphrodite, at the same time as he/she illustrates the tendency of love
to merge, denounces this fusion and mimesis by protecting love affairs
from a similar move to common identity, just as he/she watches over
unlucky bisexual births.37 Like Oedipus, she/he shows to just what
degree our desire for the same—and our aversion to the different
(sexual in this instance)38 —extends, but she/he casts an uneasy, critical
glance on it; he/she checks it. Moreover, as Delcourt points out, there

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 Western Antiquity 63

is a latent androgynism in Greek art, a constant ambivalence about

bodies: Hermaphrodite carries this to the limit. This reveals the typi-
cal character that Hermaphrodite assumes in the classical mentality.
The highest values are attributed to Hermaphrodite, but he/she stig-
matizes characteristics that are not tolerable in empirical everyday
life. Delcourt is aware of this when she writes that “an idea may be
translated by symbols, provided that these symbols do not become so
precise as to coincide with concrete reality” (77). Social order no more
permits hermaphroditism than it tolerates lameness or a webbed
hand. Social order recognizes the challenge of alterity yet cannot ac-
cept it.
To accept my analysis one would have to distance oneself some-
what from the development that Greek and Roman thought would
undergo, particularly among the philosophers. This is quite evident in
the case of the myth of the androgyne. In fact, the symbol of the
androgyne is almost always speculatively interpreted only in the regis-
ter of the dream of unity, a preexistent unity that the world has left
behind or a unity to be remade, beyond separation. In this kind of
reflection there is hardly any room for the fertile paradox that I am
trying to identify. Hermaphrodite is a projection of what is most desir-
able, even what is most complete. But if we are directed in our think-
ing by the contrast between social practice and the oppositional reli-
gious figure of Hermaphrodite (as well as by that of Oedipus or
Hephaestus), then we would have to take this contrast into account. It
seems to me that the path that opens is the one I have marked out:
difference is intolerable in the here and now, but it remains the object
of a nostalgia that destabilizes the received and inevitable order, which
in turn experiences its derision and arbitrariness. Just as the Greek
world is characterized not only by reason and clarity, but also by
irrationality and the duping of reason, so on the level that interests me
it is not characterized by a unilateral search for identity and mimesis,
but by the other and by separation as well.
To conclude with a schematic presentation similar to those that I
have proposed at the end of other chapters, I summarize what seem to
me the major organizing oppositions in classical thought on the prob-
lem of disability.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability.

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 64 A History of Disability

Sociobiological level (or isotopy)

differing/identical

CONFORMITY

EXCLUSION (cannot be situated)

threatening/exalting

Religious level (or isotopy)

We see the contrast with the biblical system: for the latter it is
primarily a question of biological integrity, which the ethical-religious
point of view can situate but not necessarily integrate or treat. Here it
seems to me that the emphasis is as much on the social problem as on
the biological one. It is conformity that is the interrogator. The reli-
gious level (and not the ethical) does not situate nonconformity: able
only to fear it or give it extraordinary status, it is obliged to exclude it,
in the most radical way possible.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability.

E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11575987. Accessed 1 Nov 2020.
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