CLASSICAL CORNER
220: NO LAUGHING MATTER
I have frequently read distressing reports on the increase in British attacks verbal and physical on disabled people. It’s in a long miserable tradition, alas, retreating back through history, from the ‘Elephant Man’ to the gentry tormenting Bedlam inmates to the mocking of ‘mad’ Malvolio in Shakespeare until we reach antiquity. For which, see the exemplary account of Robert Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Græco
Roman World (1995), supplemented by Lisa Trentin, ‘Deformity in the Roman Imperial Court,’ Greece & Rome 58 (2011), 195-207, and Victoria Brignell’s article in the New Statesman (7 April 2008).
Many adult Roman skeletons have been found with spinal deformities and signs of osteoarthritis. Fewer afflicted babies would have survived than nowadays. Julius Obsequens’s Book of Prodigies (culled from Livy) contains many cases of babies born with grotesque deformities, such as this one in chapter 40: “A boy was born with exposed intestines and at the back no opening; it gave a cry and died.”
Striking that this obscure minor writer has produced what must be one of the most affecting sentences in classical literature, worthy to be juxtaposed with this mini-short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.
Greek nastiness is as old as Homer, whose Iliad (bk2 vv265-70) has Odysseus beat the squaddy Thersites on his hump as the onlookers jeered. Hunchbacks have always been (un)fair game – think Richard III and Quasimodo. Grotesque Roman pedigree here. One of Nero’s entourage, Vatinius, is thus vilpipended by Tacitus ( Annals, bk15 ch34: “The foulest monstrosity of that court. Brought up in a shoemaker’s shop, he was physically deformed and had the wit of a buffoon, taken as the butt of ridicule.” Martial and Juvenal also mentionVatinian glassware as popular at Roman tables, shaped to resemble his odd long nose – or penis?
Commodus went the furthest, serving at a banquet two hunchbacks on a silver platter, smeared with mustard ( Augustan
History, ch11 para1). It’s – mercifully – not clear if these unfortunates were dead to be eaten or alive for mockery.
This (for once) makes the pranks of teenaged emperor Elagabalus look relatively innocuous. Himself possessing a huge collection of deformed people, his idea of fun ( HA, ch29 para3) was to hold special banquets for octets of men respectively bald, one-eyed, or fat, where they were figures of fun.
Spectators at the Athenian theatre split their sides laughing at Aristophanes’s gibes in his Clouds at the appearance of Socrates (reputedly the ugliest man in town), while down south in Sparta they were exposing any newborn babies suspected of malformation, and across the wine-dark sea Romulus, after his Boko Haram-style abduction of the Sabine women, had decreed the slaughter of all disabled infants under three.
Cicero (quoted by Quintilian, bk6 ch8) crystallised the attitude: “In deformity and bodily disfiguration, there is good material for making jokes”. On this and the broader issues raised, cf. Mary Beard’s superlative Roman Laughter (2014).
The name Cicero suggests ‘chickpea’. Other Roman cognomina hint at ‘humorous’ physical traits, e.g. Flaccus (‘big-eared’ – a trait shared with Dumbo, Mr Spock, and Baldwinius), Naso (‘bignose’ – shades of Jimmy Durante), Strabo (‘squint-eyed’).
“The Greeks had a word for it.” Apparently not for ‘disabled’, their term being teras, followed by Latin monstrum, both indicating something weirdly repulsive. Hence (e.g.) Juvenal ( Satires 4. 115) dubs a sightless informer “a great and notorious monstrum”.
Romans had a morbid Felliniesque passion for viewing human menageries. Quintilian (bk2 ch5 para11) says many paid more for deformed slaves than normal ones, whilst Plutarch ( Moralia, para520C) mentions a popular ‘monster market’. To maintain a constant supply, Longinus ( On the Sublime, ch44 para5) says slaves were (like battery hens) kept in cages to stunt their growth. Ludwig Friedlaender ( Roman Life
& Manners, vol4 pp6-8, 1913) provides a depressingly long and meticulously documented list of freak shows, ancestor of the (I hope) discredited funfair exhibits of World’s Hairiest Woman, Child With Two Heads, and suchlike, which I (guiltily) remember paying to see.
Augustus, himself abhorring physical deformities, gave granddaughter Julia a dwarf, Conopas, supposedly the tiniest man alive. It was rumoured, as is often the case, that she wanted him for sex: compare Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, “The midget interested him because she had a perfectly normal cunt.” One happier-ending anecdote (Pliny,
Natural History, bk34 ch3 paras11-12). A wealthy woman, Gegania, bought an expensive silver chandelier. The auctioneer – don’t see this happening at Sotheby’s – threw in a “hideous hunchback” called Clessipus, whom she would parade naked for her guests to mock. But she “conceived an abominable passion for him,” he became her lover and heir, and ended up with her vast fortune.
Moving forward in time, two more pleasant stories. Matthew Buckinger (1674-1740, pictured above) had no arms or legs (Grose’s Classical Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue, 1796), but could draw with remarkable neatness, was famed for calligraphy, and married “a tall handsome woman”. Other sources credit him with playing a dozen musical instruments, dexterous juggling, expert pistol marksmanship, while finding time to acquire four wives and father 11 children.
Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh (1831-1889) had only rudimentary arms and legs, but was variously credited with equestrian skill, fishing and shooting, artworks, seducing countless girls plus sojourn in an Eastern harem, a seven-child marriage, high public offices, and finally election as MP – being placed in his seat by a manservant. Whether a proof of charming innocence or puckish humour, Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes (2007, p182) reports: “Arriving at the station, he said, ‘It is extraordinary. I have not been here for ten years, and yet the stationmaster still recognised me.’”