ABSTRACT
Few periods in history, if indeed any, have been so fascinated with various figures of the blind, and have so deeply and vividly experienced the complexity and intricacy of blindness, as antiquity. The testimonies that have come down to us from the ancient world-texts and images, records of performances, rituals, stories-clearly suggest that blindness struck people both as a disaster and as an uncanny condition shrouded in mystery. Many explanations, sometimes contradictory, were offered to account for a mythological figure's loss of sight. Though living blind people hesitatingly groping their way
must have been a common sight in everyday life in Greece and Rome, the explanations recorded in classical literature seem only to have deepened the sense of mystery that surrounded the sightless.
