The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (review)

“Deformity is in the eye of the beholder,” begins the introduction to Robert Garland’s book: “Who is deformed, who is not—that to some extent has always been a matter of opinion” (p. 1). This opening declaration, combined with the book’s title, primes us for a study in perceptual relativity; we expect to learn how ancient views of what constituted deformity and disability may have diverged from our own.

Garland does, to be fair, immediately cite one major divergence between ancient and modern perceptions: namely, the notorious Aristotelian idea of females as representing the first step along the road to monstrosity (Generation of Animals 4.767b). Maddeningly, though, he then proceeds throughout the rest of the book to talk as if it were perfectly obvious who the deformed and the disabled were—as if deformity and disability were natural, transhistorical categories. He speaks, too, as if these categories had crisp borders—as if blindness, cretinism, emaciation, and obesity (all of which he discusses under “Types of Deformity”) were conditions one either suffered from or did not. This is a study singularly lacking in nuance.

The writing, as well, is sometimes blissfully insensitive. “In societies where marriage is the only career-option available for girls,” Garland remarks, “good looks constitute a financial asset, whereas ugliness, let alone deformity, spells out financial ruin” (p. 42). At other times, the sloppiness of expression is simply ludicrous. The majority of ancient women, we are told on p. 21, “went into labour shortly after the onset of menstruation.”

Structurally, The Eye of the Beholder is a very loosely organized work, skipping nonchalantly and rather indiscriminately between subjects, sources, and examples from widely different eras, places, and genres. Its ten chapters sound interesting enough: 1. The Survival of the Weakest; 2. Half-Lives; 3. The Roman Emperor in His Monstrous World; 4. The Deformed and the Divine; 5. Deriding the Disabled; 6. The Physiognomic Consciousness; 7. Images of the Deformed; 8. Medical Diagnosis and Treatment; 9. Towards a Teratology; 10. Racial Deformity. But each chapter represents little more than a collage of cursory remarks on assorted subtopics. “Half-Lives,” for example, includes subsections on disdain for the disabled; their exclusion from public office; Athens’ social security net; beggars; the Spartan king Agesilaos; the Roman emperor Claudius; and how to marry off ugly girls. Except for the discussion of Athenian social security (which gets three and a half pages), each subject is disposed of in about a page. Though some of the anecdotes recounted are interesting, neither the individual chapters nor the book as a whole offer much by way of systematic, sustained argument. The “Conclusions” at the end summarize blandly: “Whatever does not conform to the norms of the dominant group tends to be treated either with suspicion, terror and contempt, or alternatively with an unhealthy blend of amusement, fascination and embarrassment. It is such today and it was so throughout antiquity” (p. 178).

Actually, this assertion of the identity of past and present represents more the frame assumption of the book than its conclusion. Again and again, Garland, lacking any ancient evidence about many of the subjects that he wishes to address, blithely speculates about what must have been the case in Greece and Rome by appealing to what we know of other societies in later times—London in the 1920s, say, or eighteenth-century Paris. Not once does he try to justify such comparisons, or pause to ponder whether they make any sense—or whether they are even relevant. Does Garland give us new insight into ancient tales of obesity when he suggests their resemblance to stories about the overweight Elvis Presley (p. 136)? There is room for doubt.