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Abstract: “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens

Jasmine Sahu-Hough 
PhD candidate, Yale University

 “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens

 The dokimasia held annually to assess the eligibility of Athenian citizens for the so-called ‘disability pension’ would seem, in many ways, to be a classic example of the public display of disabled bodies. In requiring the recipients of the pension to submit to examination, the ancient Athenian democracy appears to prefigure modern states, which often subject those claiming disability benefits to intrusive surveillance – a process which, as Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker (2014) have argued, demotes disabled citizens to the status of “dependents”. Matthew Dillion (2017), however, has demonstrated that the dokimasia was simply a standard feature of democratic fiscal oversight; not only the pension beneficiaries (the adunatoi), but also magistrates who spent state money were similarly scrutinised. Given this effort to distance the process from the spectacularisation of disabled bodies, therefore, it is striking that the speaker in Lysias 24 - the key rhetorical source for the disability pension – repeatedly foregrounds the visibility of his impairment. As I hope to show, a close reading of this speech reveals that the speaker utilises the display of his person to refocus the debate onto his impairment and away from financial questions. His rhetorical strategy meanwhile should be understood alongside other displays of bodies in civic spaces which mobilise affective responses, such as the presentation of the war orphans during the city Dionysia. The use of physical display in Lysias 24, however, demonstrates the true complexity of the technique, since the speech simultaneously positions the speaker’s disabled body as an integral part of the civic collective. The move elicits empathy, rather than sympathy, framing the speaker as an unfortunate everyman, rather than a pitiable ‘other’. By looking at the disability pension through the eyes of a beneficiary, therefore, this paper hopes to show that bodily display could be a democratising tool which foregrounded the inclusion of disabled bodies in the civic collective not their exclusion.

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