ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that arete establishes a moral grammar of ableism that underpins the invalidation of disability in the classical world. Arete organises the moral economy. The binary of disability and non-disability, impropriety and virtue, is drawn as a line in the sand between periphery and centre, barbarian and Roman. The medicalisation of disability in Greece combined reason, folklore and religion, in, for example, the ‘mix and match’ understanding and treatment of epilepsy including Hippocratic and Asclepian temple medicine. The repertoires of disability invalidation that recommended the anthropoemic disposal of impairment, were evident in classical society in the fields of politics, medicine, law, leisure, military and religious life. Political order in Greece and Rome depended on slave economics. Disability, ethical and ontological deficit, negative judgement of the heavens offered up by the good denizens of the ancient world would restore balance to besieged communities.
