How did ancient Greeks and Romans understand physical disability? A new book looks at the artistic depiction of individuals with kyphosis. Those with this condition are often derogatorily called a ‘hunchback.’ Can the modern study of this ancient art reflect how we too marginalize or manipulate the disabled body in society?
Beyond citing Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, most people today are hard-pressed to cite either fiction or art that addresses the spinal curvature known as kyphosis. The word comes from the Greek word for curved or hunched. In antiquity, individuals with kyphotic spines were often called by Greeks a ’κυρτών.’
The study of disabled bodies and identity in the ancient world is a field that has expanded greatly in the last two decades. However, A recent book on The Hunchback in Hellenistic and Roman Art by art historian Lisa Trentin, a professor at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, is now the first comprehensive study of the visualization of this physical disability in antiquity.
Over fifty artistic representations of hunchbacks survive in Greek and Roman art. They come in the form of mosaics, statuettes, ceramics, wall painting and even sculpture. What is clear is that many of these artistic depictions create a parody of the ideal of beauty in the ancient world. The statuettes in particular were perhaps most often used as portable luck figurines, since it appears that both Greeks and Romans believed a hump to be a sign of good fortune. In the Roman biographer Suetonius’ Life of Domitian, it is said that the emperor believed it a good sign for the health of the empire that he had a dream wherein he had a gold hump.
Exaggerated features were a common part of the artistic depiction of these individuals, particularly hyperphallicism (i.e. abnormally large penises). As Trentin examines, this is often seen in classical artistic depictions of those with dwarfism and also in renderings of black Africans in antiquity. Thirty of the surviving depictions of ancient hunchbacks have abnormally large genitalia. Although you cannot tell in the mosaic depiction above (because I cropped it for sensitive readers), the man does indeed have an overly large phallus. We similarly see this in an entrance mosaic of a black African bath attendant from Timgad.
As I have written about before, ancient floor mosaics often carried a number of apotropaic (i.e. protective) devices such as evil eyes in order to protect ancient people from envy. Use of the evil eye as apotropaic device is still common in Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean even today. In a second century CE mosaic from a house in Antioch, there is an intriguing mosaic depicting an evil eye, as wells as a raven, trident, sword, scorpion, dog, serpent, centipede, panther, and a little person with a large phallus.
All of these were protective charms. Like a similar mosaic from Antioch, it too has the words “KAI CY” (“and you” or essentially “the same to you”). Such depictions of hunchbacks or little people then worked together with the Greek inscription to protect the homeowner and from envious gazes. These mosaics were often placed on boundary zones like entrances and exits, which were seen as especially dangerous areas.
A striking portion in Trentin’s book remarks on the use and abuse of those with physical impairment for entertainment purposes. Trentin notes the market for enslaved disabled bodies as sources of humor in antiquity: “These (costly) slaves were prized as entertainers and often put on display to provide amusement.” We might sneer at this usage and proclaim ourselves better people, but we need only to look to the much-criticized use of little people by Miley Cyrus and Kid Rock a few years ago in order to see parallels with today.
A pivotal thing to keep in mind when analyzing the artistic depiction of disability in antiquity is the identity of the viewer and how this shapes the way we understand aesthetics. As Trentin notes, art is interpreted through personal filters that we bring to each piece: “Likewise a viewer’s ‘ability’ combined with factors such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and social status inevitably affected the reception of these representations.” Certainly someone with a physical disability would have likely had a much different experience viewing these statuettes and mosaics than the elites that often paid to have them installed in their houses. But then again, Greeks and Romans were not known for their sensitivity to disability.
What the new and developing corpus of scholarship on disability and the Other in antiquity consistently demonstrates is the ancient manipulation of alternate bodies. Those with disability and those that may have a different skin tone or ethnicity often serve as a stereotypic device for amusement. This use of the alternate body in ancient art can teach us about perceptions of disability in the past, but should also provide us a moment of reflection today. For instance, when considering the depiction of African-Americans in Blackface and within the minstrel shows of the 19th and 20th centuries, or the use of disabled persons in “freak shows” or touring circuses. As is often the case, the ways in which we otherize bodies in art says more about us than it does about those that have been marginalized.
