The Story of Different Minds  ·  Ancient Greece and Rome  ·  circa 800 BCE onwards

Sparta, Rome and the Rejection of Imperfection

Some ancient societies openly accepted the killing or abandonment of disabled infants.

Some of the civilisations we admire also built cruelty into their idea of strength.

Simple version

In parts of the ancient world, visibly disabled or unwanted infants could be abandoned or killed. Sparta is the most famous example, but the idea was not unique to Sparta.

Ancient Greek and Roman thought often valued strength, order, usefulness and civic duty. Those who did not fit that ideal could be treated as burdens rather than people.

The brutal logic

The dangerous idea was that a person's worth could be measured by usefulness to the state, family or social order.

That logic did not disappear. It returns throughout history in different forms: institutionalisation, eugenics, forced sterilisation and policies that treat disabled people as costs before humans.

Awareverse lens

This is why language like burden, drain, defective or unfit matters. Words are often the first step in deciding who society protects and who society sacrifices.

Awareverse says the opposite: see the human first.

Deep dive topics from this chapter