ABSTRACT
The perfect theoretical body imagined and created by Hellenic sculptors or painters was certainly not the one Greeks saw in their everyday life. About 10 per cent of the skeletons found in the Greek world (Grmek 1994: 93) show at least one fracture in vitam, so that it may be said that a large part of the population suffered from a visible disability (see Graham in this volume). But, as it has been shown elsewhere (Garland 1995; Rose 2003; Samama 2010), the Greeks did not consider disabled persons as different, as long as they could, in one way or another, play a part in socio-economic life. It is interesting to notice that the Greek vocabulary echoes this situation. Obliterating the omnipresent picture of all the persons suffering from any disability, the terms are mostly vague in designating them (for most of the Latin equivalents, see Turner 2013). This can be explained as a logical consequence of their interwoven position inside the society, or of a lack of specific medical vocabulary. The fact that the words are quite numerous proves the widespread existence of disabled people, and it is worth examining what terms the Greek chose to qualify those suffering from any disablement. For this Hesychius of Alexandria, a Greek grammarian and lexicographer from the 5th century ce, is of considerable importance. In his Collection of All Words, he lists many words that are not found in surviving texts of the Greek literature; they are called hapax legomena, and in this chapter abbreviated as h.leg. (for other abbreviations, see the list at the end of the chapter).
