On First Reading Oedipus Rex
When I read Oedipus Rex in high school, my teacher stated that exposure of infants was standard Greek practice. Unwanted babies, whether born with a disability or for some other reason that rendered them disposable, would be placed on hillsides to die of exposure. This struck me then as now as so extraordinarily cruel, that it is amazing I later went on to become a classicist focusing on the Greeks. I relegated this barbarity to the realm of myth. Something in a legend like Oedipus, one of the world’s most offensive myths anyway, but not something that real mothers and fathers ever engaged in.
Exposure of Infants is a Myth
I’m glad to report my instincts were correct. A fine classics scholar, Debbie Sneed, dug into this slander against the Greeks and found it unfounded. I heard her lecture on the subject, and she makes a highly persuasive case. I think we can banish this to the sloppy history pile. Plutarch reported the practice among Spartans and generations assumed for no good reason that this was standard Greek practice. (The 18th century painting by Saint-Ours up top imagines this Spartan practice of inspecting the infants.) It wasn’t even true of the Spartans. Anyone who’s read Plutarch should have been suspicious. He’s not exactly the most reliable of sources. There were other bits and pieces that led historians to spout this assumption, but Sneed puts them to rest. She also discusses multiple signs of ancient Greek care for disabled infants and youths. She presents ceramic feeding bottles and skeletal remains, among other archaeological and written evidence.
Read All About It
If you can access the journal Hesperia via JSTOR, here’s Debbie Sneed’s clear and convincing article, Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece. There’s also a widely accessible, shorter discussion in Science “Ancient Greeks didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues.”
Here is the abstract of Sneed’s Hesperia article:
This article confronts the widespread assumption that disability, in any broad and undefined sense, constituted valid grounds for infanticide in ancient Greece. When situated within their appropriate contexts, the oft-cited passages from Plutarch, Aristotle, and Plato contribute little to our understanding of the reality of ancient Greek practice in this regard. Other literary, material, and bioarchaeological evidence, however, demonstrates that ancient Greek parents, midwives, and physicians often took active and extraordinary measures to assist and accommodate infants born with a variety of congenital physical impairments. It was neither legally mandated nor typical in ancient Greece to kill or expose disabled infants, and uncritical (and unfounded) statements to the contrary are both dangerous and harmful.
Sneed, Debby. “Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 90, no. 4 (2021): 747–72.
Here for a post with a list of 50 Best Mythology books.