You're Dead to Me - Disability in the Ancient World

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by comedian Rosie Jones and historian Dr Jane Draycott to discuss stories of disability from over a thousand years of history, including people with disabilities excelling on the battlefield and others with very well-dressed guide dogs.Research: Kierri Price Script: Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Project manager: Siefe Miyo Edit producer: Cornelius Mendez

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the funny kids TV show, Horrible Histories. And today we are adventuring back thousands of years, well, about 2,000 years, give or take, to learn all about disability in the ancient world. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's a lecturer in classics at the University of Glasgow and is an expert in disability in antiquity, as well as the history and archaeology of medicine, science and technology. More importantly, she's writing a fascinating new book called Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome. It's Dr Jane Dracott. Hello, Jane. Welcome to the show. Hello, everyone. And in Comedy Corner, we are very excited. She is a comedian, a writer, a TV presenter and actor. You may have seen her hilarious stand-up shows

or caught her on many, many panel shows. Maybe you've read her children's book, The Amazing Edie Eckhart, about a young girl with cerebral palsy. She co-hosts the podcast Daddy Look At Me and she presents the Channel 4 series Trip Hazard, My Great British Adventure. Plus she reported from the Paralympics for the last leg. What a CV. It's Rosie Jones. Welcome, Rosie. Hello, Greg. Oh my God, I can't tell you how happy I am to be here because I am such a fan of the podcast. Oh, I bet you say that to all the boys. I do, but this time I actually mean it. Rosie, we know you're brainy, but do you like history? Did you enjoy it at school? Yeah, I really did, annoyed to me because we only studied modern

history. Like, I spent two years learning about bloody Hitler and bloody Stalin and you know what it was

like. Can we stop banging on And you know what it was like? Can we stop banging on about morons with mustaches? They'll be into the thousands of years that went before those pair of idiots. Well, hopefully by the end of this, you'll be very much enjoying the ancient world. And we've got a brilliant professor to teach you. Did you ever do any disability history, any history of disabled people? Has there ever been something you've read about in your free time? Oh, you know what? No, I haven't. And I think that's because I think I'm the only disabled person worth knowing about I am

leader of the disabled self appointed but you don't want the needs to be a leader

and it was Stephen Hawking but he's dead now so now it's the reign of the great Rosie Jones. So, what do you know? Yeah. So, what do you know? Lovely. Well, that leads us on to the first segment of the pod.

This is the So What Do You Know, where I guess what listeners at home might know about today's subject. And you're all familiar with disability, of course. There are at least 14 million people in the UK living with one or more disabilities. And you'll probably know a bunch of historical people who had disabilities, such as the genius physicist Stephen Hawking, who had ALS, diagnosed in his 20s, or the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used mobility aids after childhood polio. Then, of course, there's the famous artist Frida Kahlo, who had polio as well, and then a very serious accident that nearly cost her her life. And then, of course, there's arguably the greatest of all the composers, Beethoven, with his progressive hearing loss.

And you'll have almost certainly heard of the disability rights activist, Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind. And then, of course, there's Harriet Tubman and Lord Byron, both of whom have featured on our episodes, Byron with the clubfoot and Tubman with the chronic seizures. So lots of different people from history, but what about disability in the ancient world? Well, thanks to films like 300, you probably think that the ancient world had no space for disabled people. They weren't welcomed. But was

that the case? Let's find out, shall we? So Jane, this is a huge topic we're talking about. So what do we mean by ancient world? And do we know how prevalent or how common disability was in the ancient world? Well, for me personally, I work on classical antiquity. So that is ancient Greece, that is the ancient Roman Republic and empire and the neighbouring ancient civilisations such as Egypt. But when you work on ancient disability, you can find that there are lots of very interesting comparisons that you can make with other ancient civilizations and peoples in places such as India, China, and even Central and South America. disabled, whether a condition that they were born with or a condition that they developed during life, perhaps the result of malnutrition, trauma, disease, or even just years of very hard physical labour. So if you were a disabled person in classical antiquity, you would have just been

one among many and you would have been perceived as such. You wouldn't necessarily have been considered special or out of the ordinary or different. Rosie, does that surprise you? Yeah, I quite like the majority of people who are disabled. Most of my life, I'm in spaces where I'm the only disabled person and when I went to the Paralympics Everyone was disabled and it was really awful. I mean, the queue for the disabled toilet. It was a bloody nightmare. So disability in the ancient world, if we say Rome, Greece, maybe Egypt,

we're saying it's common, it's prevalent, it's ordinary. Of course, there are invisible disabilities. I think today we're going to focus more on the ones we can know about, which we have written about or can be seen in the records, and more on the visible disabilities, I think, today. The other question I wanted to ask, Jane is, was there a concept of disability? Not as we would recognise it today. There wasn't an official category with badges or benefits or any kind of umbrella term that incorporates many different types of impairments. Although we do

hear about some communities of people who had very particular impairments living together in isolation such as physically disfigured military veterans who didn't want to return home or people with infectious conditions such as lepers. For our purposes today it would actually be more appropriate to follow the World Health Organization's differentiation between the terms impairment and disability, where impairment designates the condition and disability designates the consequences for the individual, assuming that there actually were any. Someone in classical antiquity might well have had an impairment, but depending on their situation in life and what was expected of them, they weren't necessarily disabled by that impairment. As you

might imagine, there were very different expectations placed on men and women, for example, or rich and poor, and so on. Right, so it's slightly contingent on who you are in society. So we've got a really good example from Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and he writes about a young man named Quintus Pedius who was a member of a senatorial family with very close ties to the imperial family and he was expected to embark on a political and military career but he was born without speech and he may well have also been deaf so he couldn't have a traditional senatorial career which relied upon public speaking, persuasion, that kind of thing. So a family friend, the famous orator Messala Corvinus,

suggested that he might be taught to paint instead. And since this wasn't normally an acceptable career for somebody from that level of society, the Emperor Augustus had to give his special permission for this. And apparently Quintus Pedius showed a lot of society, the Emperor Augustus had to give his special permission for this. And apparently, Quintus Pedius showed a lot of promise, although unfortunately, he died while he was still quite young, so he didn't get to realise his full potential. By contrast, a member of a peasant family who was expected to be a manual labourer, born without speech or hard of hearing, wouldn't have struggled in the same way. For them, a physical impairment such as a damaged or lost limb would have been much more disabling a farmer who couldn't hear us speak

it's actually a bloody good farmer because you can crack on with the work without going, hello, Bob, how's your sheep today? It's like, stop doing the yabbering and do some bloody farming. We have example there of Quintus Pedius, who explored a new career at painting. I suppose for a senator back then, a painter is not a proper job. It's a servant's job almost. And the farmer in question, do we have actual examples? Do we know names? In some cases, yes.

So there's an epigram that tells of a farmer named Mindon who was cutting down an olive tree on his property when he was bitten on the foot by a spider lurking in the undergrowth. And the bite turned gangrenous and his leg had to be amputated. And so he turned the wood from the tree into a prosthetic leg. That's cool. Yeah, well, I think you have to bear in mind that since ancient doctors didn't like to try and attempt to treat chronic or incurable health problems because it was bad for their reputations and their businesses, people who had those were left to take care of themselves. He lost his leg in a tree accident and he turned the tree into the leg. There's a poetic irony there the ultimate revenge really how many legs did he make with the tree because

if i was him i would make seven wooden legs and i myself will become the spider. Spider-Man would be a very different movie, wouldn't it? We've already touched on wealth and status. The senator has money, the farmer doesn't. And if I'm reading my notes right, I now have to honk my problematic enslavement klaxon. Jane, in the ancient world, enslavement is the phrase we like to use now. It is part of the economics. It is part of daily life. So although I'm honking my enslavement klaxon, can you talk us through how it was part of this story?

So we know the most about the ancient Greek and Roman social elite. And we know that they were virtually never alone, or what we would consider to be in any way self-sufficient, whether they were disabled or not. Given that we're mostly talking about cultures that were built on enslavement, if a wealthy person had a disability impacting upon their physical capabilities, this would be offset to some degree by enslaved people carrying out tasks for them under normal circumstances enslaved people read and wrote for their enslavers they bathed and dressed and groomed them they carried them around in litters and sedan chairs they served

them their food and drink but it's for the rich regardless if they were people of disabilities or not i suppose yes absolutely so so that's happening all the time with everybody anyway. And then we do have some very specific, quite interesting examples of disabled people as well. So we hear about one wealthy man named Gnaeus Domitius Tullus. He was bedridden with gout and he complained to his friends about having to lick his slaves' fingers when they fed him. There was another wealthy man who lost both of his feet to frostbite, and then he needed his slaves to carry him around from place to place. And a young man called Atticus Bradua, who was the son of the famous philosopher and orator Herodes Atticus, he had trouble learning to read. So his father, super rich, purchased enough slaves to give them each a name beginning with a different letter of the alphabet so he could associate the slaves with the letters and thus find it easier to memorise the alphabet.

I mean, what a dickhead. I am honking my klaxon. But we also, of course, have volunteer carers, people who love family members, friends. There is generosity. There is kindness. There is community, as there is today, of course. So let's get on to mobility aids, assistive technology. Rosie, what do you think the Romans and Greeks and Egyptians had to help them get around? So are we moving away from slavery? Because actually, if you're going to use them as an alphabet, you might as well use them to write on as well. There's a series of stories about a visually impaired man and a physically impaired man and the visually impaired man gave the physically impaired man a piggyback so he could

direct him where they needed to go so the pair of them worked together one set of eyes and one set of legs. That is a bloody disaster. It's like my friend Martin is visually impaired and one time he acted from my arm. Not a good idea. Not a good idea. I tripped over and he fell into a door. Talk about the blind deleting the cerebral palsy is even worse. Health and safety nightmare. All right. OK.

Jane, do we have any other assistive technology that exists 2,000 years ago. We've got lots of literary evidence and depictions in art of crutches, walking sticks, staffs, and actually some skeletal remains have been excavated that show wear on the bones from regular crutch use. We've got corrective footwear for congenital conditions such as clubfoot. Shoes have been excavated from the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall that show evidence of gate correction as well and we even have accessible architecture. So recently Dr Debbie Sneed has made a compelling argument that ancient healing sanctuaries like the Temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus had ramps to make the buildings more accessible to people with mobility impairments. When I go out in 2021 on a Friday night and I can't get into my local nightclub, it's like, what are you bloody doing? They had it sorted in great times. They probably had a lovely ramp into the nature of,

a lovely ramp into the kebab shop. Like, I wish I lived in ancient Greek times. I think I would have had a more accessible Friday night out. As long as you were spending it at the temple, yeah. I might have liked to drink alcohol and eat a kebab at the temple. Absolutely. You have to if you're going to have an incubation ritual and commune with the God.

Great. I would eat a kebab with the God any day of the week. Sticking with mobility technologies, I'm aware, Jane, of ancient wheelchairs or wheeled mobility devices in the very late period, what we'd call late antiquity, about 1500 years ago. Is that fair or am I slightly misremembering my history? I found literary references and artistic depictions of children using wheeled walking frames so a little bit like our modern Zimmer frame but no evidence of adults doing likewise at that time. I mean perhaps it wasn't considered appropriate if these were particularly associated with children. Perhaps they didn't need to if they had physical assistance

that we we've already discussed and we have decided to sort of honk and move away from. So no wheelchairs in ancient Greece and Rome, but maybe later periods of history. We also don't have the wheelbarrow in classical antiquity for the same reason that it's just not necessary when you've got labour. Rosie, when you went to the Paralympics, I was watching The Last Leg and you discovered lovely Maureen. I wanted to ask and I love that feeling and I walk all around but I can get everywhere. I probably get more tired than able-bodied people and a lot of times I'm in pain with my back. so the back pain could also be like part palsy, part big titties. And just always watch because as a child, child, a lot of doctors said to me, oh do you want a chair or a stick or a walker? And as something that would make me more disabled. And now in adulthood, I recognise Paralympics, we were walking around so much. My producer said to me, how would you feel about getting a wheelchair?

about getting a wheelchair. And I thought, actually, it's boiling up. We're working 15 hours a day. I bloody love a sit-down. Go on, then. And I got an electric scooter and I loved it. And I called her morning. I didn't want my colleagues to say, oh, shall we get your check? It sounded quirky and fun to go,

shall we get Maureen? Because Maureen could easily just be a hot woman and shagging at the moment. So yeah, for three weeks I sat down and I And it just allowed me to do my job better. I wasn't tired. I wasn't in pain. And it just made me realise that walking aids are not the enemy. If anything, they can make me more independent and more able to be myself.

So I left Maureen in Tokyo, but I am brought back to the UK, a love and a wanting to fully embrace walking aids. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that story. And I love the name Maureen. My aunt is called Maureen and she's lovely. And she's single. She is.

I can introduce you. Pop me up. Right. Okay. Let's talk about other types of assistance. Ancient very good boys. Can we talk about guide dogs? in one cemetery recently discovered in Egypt. We know that lots of beggars had dogs for companions and we also hear about a lot of visually impaired beggars as well. So there is a fresco from the house of Julia Felix at Pompeii that could show a man with a guide dog.

Rosie, we're going to show you the fresco from Pompeii. It's actually quite hard to make out. So here is the fresco. I can't see a lot. It's very brown and yellow. I think I can make out a lovely little person. little person that can see a little belly. So it's either a pregnant and a lovely little dog. So that's the original fresco. It's quite hard to see, it may count. And we do have actually a more reconstructed image.

Yes, this is a reconstruction that my friend, Dr. Richard Marshall, drew for me. Lovely. All right, let's have a look at it and let's see if Rosie was on the money with her guess. See, I told you, it's exactly what I described. It's a gentleman rather than a lady, but yeah, you were spot on with the cane, with the dog. Do you know what I mean about the ballet? It's just terrible ancient styling. Yeah, I think it's a cloak or a bag, maybe. No, Greg, it's absolutely a little Tom Tom.

He's been out with the kebabs. He's been to the temple. He's been out with you on a Friday night. Oh, yeah. So this is a possible depiction of a visually impaired person with a guide dog, but we're not sure. Rosie, any other animals that you think would be fun assistance animals? I would love a guide elephant.

Nice. How great would that be like you go to the co-op and the guard says sorry no

elephants in here and you go actually mate it's my guide elephant. And then he can't say anything. You go in the car walk with your elephant, you get your favourite yoghurt and off you go. Okay, let's talk now about communication.

And Jane, was there such a thing as ancient sign language? Yes, we've got references to hand signals being used by soldiers on campaign and some people using physical gestures to make themselves understood. But there certainly wasn't a universal sign language taught to all deaf people. So what probably happened was that every deaf individual and their family and friends figured out their own personalised version, and then it's probable that two deaf people from different places would have struggled to communicate. People who lost their ability to hear or speak later in life, if they were literate, then they could make good use of

wax tablets and they could probably work out a fair bit of lip reading as well. You're a specialist on prosthesis, on prosthetics. And here we move away from the maybes and possibles and perhaps. When it comes to the archaeology of prosthesis, we have some prosthesis. We have actual stuff we can look at and measure and examine. Well, we've got lots of literary and documentary evidence for people using prostheses. To date, I've found 107 references spread across all genres of ancient literature, and I'm sure there are more just waiting to be uncovered. The earliest ancient literary reference to a prosthesis isn't actually from ancient Greece or Rome, it's actually from ancient India and this is from an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns called the

Rig Veda that dates to around 1500-1200 BCE and this reference is to a female warrior called Vishpala who had an iron leg. She sounds hot. Like so many things I'm hearing. Warrior iron leg. Like you want her on your side definitely big fan of her yeah absolutely so that's Vish Parla is that a literary reference or a historical reference is she a fictional character or is she a woman who's alleged to have lived that I think we could say is in the realm of myth.

Sorry, Rosie. She's not on Tinder. Certainly a story that may have come from somewhere, but we're talking three and a half thousand years ago in ancient India, so hard to prove this stuff. But in Greek literature, in Greek myth, there are other obvious characters. There's Pelops with the ivory shoulder. That is right, yes. He was killed and cut up and cooked in a stew. This stew was offered to the gods, the goddess Demeter, because she was distracted because her daughter had recently been abducted.

She ate the shoulder portion. And so when the gods found out what had happened and they resurrected Pelops, his shoulder was missing and they had to provide him with an ivory prosthesis. Wow. That is probably also mythical. Probably, probably. Probably. Wait a minute.

So he still had an arm? He just didn't have a shoulder you know what I'm putting myself out on the limit I heard

a joke and I am gonna say I don't think that's true. You cynic, Rosie. Well, you probably have the same problem with Pythagoras then because he apparently had a thigh that was gold, but the rest of his leg seems to have been human leg.

Pythagoras, carry on with your theorem, that's great, but why are you absolutely lying about your size? You know what is a bullshit? We can pinpoint our first historical person. Herodotus' histories, he tells us of Hegesistratus of Elis, who was a Spartan prisoner, and he actually cut off part of his own foot to get his leg out of irons and escape from captivity. Then once his foot was healed, he started using a wooden prosthetic foot to get his leg out of irons and escape from captivity. Then once his foot was healed, he started using a wooden prosthetic foot to get around so that he could continue to be a thorn in the Spartan side. That's hardcore. Cut your own foot off so you can escape and then go back to

war. Blimey. That's like the guy who got trapped in the mountain. What's that movie? Gets trapped in the mountain. 127 hours. Is that what it is? 127 hours. Thank you. And we also have other prosthesis that are even older. I mean, we've been talking here almost late Stone Age, Jane, but we have eyes. We do have a surprising amount of archaeology for prosthesis dating from the very earliest human history. So there are prosthetic eyes from Spain and Iran dating back 7,000 and 5,000 years each. But we also have Egyptian prosthetic feet made from wood and cartonnage, Etruscan golden dental appliances and teeth, Roman prosthetic legs, and even elaborate hairpieces and wigs.

And are these bespoke crafted for the individual? Are they made in a factory in one size fits all? spoke crafted for the individual? Are they made in a factory in one size fits all? They seem to range from very rudimentary peg legs that you could carve yourself with a minimal knowledge of carpentry from a piece of wood that you found lying around through to very elaborate technologically advanced combinations of metal and wood and leather that would have required a number of skilled artisans to be working together. And they very much reflected the wearer's situation, their social status, their wealth, their personality. They were bespoke. They were very personal. They were specially designed and commissioned and manufactured for people who had that need.

You never hear about disabled people in history and i know it's my job to be a comedian but if i'm gonna be serious i think a lot of that rings true nowadays in that even now if you're disabled, Your life can be made easier, whereas probably if you're not that wealthy, you get left behind a lot more. So it's really sad to know that happened then and it still happens now. Yeah, absolutely. At the beginning of the programme, Jane, you pointed out that there are lots of things that could influence how someone's disability was caused.

One of the most obvious, I suppose, in the ancient world would be warfare, impairment caused in battle or serious injury caused in a working accident. In terms of ancient civilisations, the one that stands out quite often as being the most fascistically obsessed with warfare and also supposedly the most cruel to anyone with disabilities would be the Spartans. Is that reputation unfair or what they really are just a bunch of bastards? The sources for Sparta are quite problematic because they are written by observers often at quite a distance in time and location and people were fetishising Sparta in antiquity just as they fetishise them now. So we do have some accounts of infanticide and exposure of babies which presented with congenital conditions. The most famous of these is probably Plutarch, but he was writing centuries after the Spartan heyday in the classical period.

So we should be quite cautious in this. And we do also have independent historical evidence that King Aegiselaus was born with an impaired leg, and that did not stop him from becoming one of the Spartan kings. It does suggest that actually Spartan society found a place for people with disabilities, perhaps. There are some scholars who have suggested that Emperor Claudius, the Roman emperor, was perhaps someone who had been born with cerebral palsy. So we know that Claudius had physical impairments. Various different ancient authors

talk about this. So Suetonius in his life of Claudius, in his life of the Caesars, Suetonius in his life of Claudius, in his life of the Caesars, Tastus' Annals, Seneca the Younger's Apocalypse and Tosis, which is a comedy play after Claudius' death. He tries to ascend into the heavens and join the gods, and they are less than pleased to have him. So his impairments are a matter of historical record, but how we interpret the descriptions that these ancient writers give of him that's open to theorizing but whatever the impairments that he had and that may well have been cerebral palsy it certainly didn't stop him becoming emperor conquering britain and adding britain to the Empire. Absolutely. Rosie? I am so excited because I know that cerebral palsy is the best I'm very happy that in Team Cerebral Palsy, we have a Roman emperor. So, welcome to the club, Claudius, baby!

I mean, I'm now thinking, what kind of emperor would you have been, Rosie? On the one hand, you seem very nice. On the other hand, I can imagine a ruthless tyrant. Is that even a question? I will be the greatest

emperor of all time. But if anybody the emperor of all time but if anybody ever caught me I will kill them by that

I don't mean I will get one of my guards to kill them oh Oh no! I will go round with my own

little dagger just stabbing the shit out of him. You would have fit in very well at the Imperial court in ancient Rome You sound like several Roman emperors

but I'm not sure we should give you that power because it's gone to your head very quickly Greg you made me a Roman emperor for about 40 seconds and I've already killed about 5,000 people with a little dagger.

You're so smiley and yet you're actually stabbing the air as you speak. It's such an incongruous image. Better the dagger than the the assistant elephant, you know? Yeah, exactly. Oh no, that's the one that gets really angry. Slight digression, but Claudius did actually have an elephant that he brought to Britain with him when he invaded. Oh my God! oh my god i'm honestly tell me honestly okay um jane let's get away from emperors. Let's talk about ordinary people again, because I know this is an area of your research. Gaius Gemellus Horigenes from Kuranes in Fium, which is a wonderful sentence. Do you want to tell us who this is and what makes him interesting? connections to the Roman army and Roman citizenship, living in Roman Egypt in the late second century CE. And we know that he lost one eye and then he subsequently developed a cataract

in his remaining eye. And this left him, as you can imagine, with a very serious visual impairment. So documents from his family's archives have survived on papyrus that have been excavated from Egypt. And so we know quite a lot about his life and his business dealings. We know that several of his neighbours, two brothers named Julius and Sotas and one of their wives, came onto his land, stole his crops and cast spells on him to prevent him from intervening to stop them. and cast spells on him to prevent him from intervening to stop them. And he specifically states that the reason that they did this was because they held him in contempt because of his visual impairment. Absolute pricks. There's no other word for it. They're just horrible, horrible people.

What did he do about it? Can he turn somewhere and say, help? Yes. Well, the entire reason that we know about this ordinary man's ordinary life and these unpleasant experiences is because he exercised his legal rights as a Roman citizen and he campaigned for redress. He petitioned the prefect of Egypt at the time, Quintus Aemilia Saturninus, and other members of the Roman imperial administration in Egypt as well, asking them to intervene on his behalf. He tells us that he was subsequently mistreated and victimised

by the local tax collector, who was called Castor, who broke down the doors of his house with an axe. And he tells us how frightened he was that he couldn't protect his elderly and vulnerable mother. It tells us that disabled people had legal protections in ancient Roman society, and they weren't automatically marginalised or excluded. Because, after all, why would he take the time

to write all of these petitions to all of these officials if he didn't expect them to actually take his side and sort the situation out? Before I did the tech episode, I was so excited, but part of me was like, oh bloody hell, is it just going to be a series of depressing stories about how disabled people were mistreated because of their ability or their impairment. But, yeah, what we need to focus on

is that he was like, absolutely not, I'm not going to let the pricks get away with it. And it's why disabled people, even today, are standing up when we're abused or mistreated and we just have to go, you know what, you can't get away with that. Be better. Treat others as equal people.

The other has equal people. He absolutely sounds like a bloody babe. So legal redress is available to people with disabilities. I wondered, Jane, is there a benefit system? Well, there seems to have been something like that in classical Athens. There was a pension for individuals with disabilities. And we know about this because we have a speech recorded by the orator Lysias in which a man who had a disability, he used two sticks for walking. He was challenged on whether he was actually disabled enough to receive this pension. So he was arguing that actually, yes, I am disabled enough to receive this pension. So he was arguing that actually, yes,

I am disabled enough to receive this pension. This idea of having to justify yourself to other people is not too dissimilar to the Department of Work and Pensions and their infamous fitness assessments today. As far as benefits are concerned, it seems that people with disabilities more often were exempted from impositions like taxes or community service, rather than they were given benefits by the state. than our current government. So take me back to those times. We'll pop you in the time machine and we'll get you a kebab on the way. You'll be great. Give me a kebab and an elephant and I'll be ready.

People of Rome, your new emperor. Jane, so far we've talked mostly about men. Is there a natural bias in the sources towards blokes because of warfare and heavy manual labour? Or do we know a fair bit about disability in terms of women's lives? We know less about women with disabilities than men because in the main it is men who are doing the writing. But when women are mentioned it seems that attention is paid to facial difference, hair loss, tooth loss, their physical

appearances and thus their sexual attractiveness to men but this could be bias in the sources it's true but at the same time it is supported by the archaeological evidence of prosthetic hair and teeth which generally come from women's graves and tombs and it's also something to bear in mind is that infertility was considered a disability and the blame fell on women for that. Rosie, you're shaking your head and covering your eyes with despair. I'm actually this bloody fuming, Greg. The fact that being disabled for a woman was about looking good for men gave me a bloody break. Like, what is wrong with people. I mean, I am proud to be disabled and a lady and also a gay lady. So actually, Straight or gay, don't care what men bloody think of themselves.

You're absolutely fuming, Greg. We need more stories of brilliant disabled women and actually that is why I do what I do in the media to go hello we're here and we're not bloody going away. So I know why we don't have any like documentation of disabled women They were out there, they were living, they were boxing their own lives. So let me pick up all the disabled women in history that we should know about, but unfortunately we don't. Beautifully said. Thank you. The Nuance Window! It's time for The Nuance Window. This is the section where we allow our expert, Dr Jane,

to tell us something that we need to know about the subjects. And Rosie and I have a little break. Jane, what are you going to be talking about today? I am going to be talking about the connection between disability and the arts in classical antiquity. Oh, marvellous. Without much further ado, the nuance window, please. There seems to have been a strong connection between impairment and technology and technology and impairment in the minds of the Greeks and Romans. The Greek god of metalwork Hephaestus is the only Olympian with a physical impairment. This affects his legs and feet and he's not actually the only example of a god of craft who is physically impaired in world mythology. In Norse mythology for example the blacksmiths

Broca and Eitri also known as Sindri are are people with dwarfism, while another, Welland, has impaired mobility. However, it's possible that Hephaestus was depicted as impaired because impaired individuals actually did have a tendency to undertake trades. According to the ancient Greek medical writer Hippocrates, the Amazons deliberately dislocated the joints of their male offspring and set them to work as artisans, forcing them into sedentary lifestyles and supportive roles and thus ensuring the continuation of Amazonian female superiority. And this was a course of action that was of course abhorrent to the ancient Greeks. It was believed that those who undertook trades like smithing, carpentry, shoemaking, pottery, etc. would become impaired as the combination of the sedentary nature of the occupation and the repetitive physical activity it required would change the body and this would certainly lead to disproportionate muscle development and build-up of callus that would look very different from a

body that had been honed in the gymnasium such as the elites had. Additionally due to the dangerous conditions found in ancient workshops it's likely that individuals who worked in them were frequently scarred and may also have been poisoned due to high concentrations of arsenic in the metal being smelted and worked. Whether impaired individuals were likely to undertake trades or those undertaking trades were likely to become impaired, we do need to consider the possibility that physically impaired artisans utilize their experiences of being physically impaired to help inspire and inform their work, whether in relation to the creation of pieces of assistive technology for themselves or for others. Likewise, a lot of individuals with congenital impairments, such as people with dwarfism, spinal curvatures, visual impairments, worked as entertainers,

such as poets, bards, musicians, dancers and acrobats. And this continues to this day with comedians like Rosie. Thank you, Jane. Rosie, what do you think to that nuance window? Really good. And yeah, I think it's so important to recognise the whole range of disabilities and this whole episode has brought me so much joy because we got to recognise that it was hard for disabled people, but we still have stories of disabled people

succeeding and thriving as they do in 2021. So what do you know now? This is the quiz for our comedian, Rosie, to see how much she can remember. Oh, my God. Are you feeling confident? You know what? I love quizzes.

But I get so competitive that actually I'm really nervous. Oh, don't be nervous. Okay, come on, Greg. Hit me. Okay, question one. How common was disability in the ancient world? Really common. Yeah. Everybody had something. Correct. Question two.

In Greek mythology, Pelops had a shoulder made from what? Ivory. It was. But arguably, he didn't. Question three. Vishpala, a female warrior with an iron leg, is the earliest literary reference to a prosthesis. From which part of the world was she from?

India. It was India. Question four. Quintus Pedius was born probably mute and deaf. And instead of going into the family business of being a senator, do you remember what career he studied instead? He was a painter, but we don't know how good he was. I like to think he did it, he enjoyed it.

I don't think he did it. He enjoyed it. But in reality, he was a little bit shit. Okay, question five. Dating to around 7,000 years ago from a grave in Spain, which body part is the earliest surviving prosthetic? Was it the eye? It was, yes. Very well remembered. Question six. King Agassileus was born with an impaired leg and commanded which famously hardcore army in ancient Greece? Sparta.

It is Sparta. Question seven. Gaius Gemellus Horigenes was a visually impaired Roman Egyptian. What did he do when his horrible neighbours abused him in his fields? We complained about the pricks and that's how we know about the legend. Absolutely. Question eight. A fresco at the ancient Roman site of Pompeii might show what type of animal friend? Oh, it's a little donkey.

Absolutely. Question nine. Ancient Greek healing temples dedicated to the god Asclepius had which accessibility feature at their front door? It had a little ramp. It's a lovely little ramp, absolutely. And this for a perfect score, Rosie. According to some historians, which Roman emperor may have had cerebral palsy?

Can I have one or two answers? You sure? Because I would argue that Emperor Rosie is now a valid answer. So either Emperor Rosie or Emperor Claudius. Ten out of ten. Very well done, Rosie Jones. Greg, you have no idea how many episodes of L's Have Listened To hoping that you would invite me on the show

but then getting so nervous that in the quiz I wouldn't get 10 out of 10. So this is an absolute dream. I am so happy. We're delighted to have had you on. All hail Emperor Rosie. Listeners, of course, if you want to learn more about the history of healthcare, you can check out our episode on ancient Greek and Roman medicine. All hail Emperor Rosie. Listeners, of course, if you want to learn more about the history of healthcare,

you can check out our episode on ancient Greek and Roman medicine. And of course, you can also listen to our episode on the ancient Greek Olympics. And remember, if you've had a laugh, if you've learned some stuff, please do share this podcast with your friends, leave a review online, and make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. All that's left really for me is to say a huge thank you to our guests. We've had in History Corner the magnificent Dr Jane Dracott from the University of Glasgow. Thank you, Jane.

Thank you for having me. Goodbye, everybody. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the incomparable and frankly imperial Rosie Jones. Thank you, Rosie. Thank you so much. Bring me my elephant. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we pal around

through the past with a brand new pair of clever, funny people. But for now, I'm off to go and petition Hollywood to make Iron Woman the Vishpala story. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Kieri Price, the script was by Emma Neguse and me,

the project manager was Saifah Mio and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendes. We hope you enjoyed You're Dead to Me. How about something a little scarier? But be warned, those of a nervous disposition should consider turning off now for the rest of you. Put on your headphones, close your eyes and meet yourself in the Deadhouse. Deadhouse. An audio experience by Darkfield and BBC Radio 4. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.