Korneel Van Lommel

In the span of just a few centuries, Rome grew from a small settlement to a large empire that extended from Scotland to Mauretania and from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caspian Sea. The Roman army was a crucial factor in establishing the empire. This may give the impression that the Romans were a warlike society, where every Roman was willing to put his life on the line. However, this ideal wrongly characterizes Roman civilization. Various sources refer to young men that did not want to join the army and instead deliberately mutilated themselves to be rejected from the military on medical grounds. In this article, these testimonies are set in the right time and context. I will elaborate on the refusal of military service, the young men’s motives for self-mutilation and the legal repercussions to this act of desertion.

This paper will focus on physically impaired and disfigured soldiers and their perception in Roman antiquity from the late Republic until the early Imperial era (third century BC until third century AD). Based on case studies from literary sources, this paper aims to explore the integration of impaired and disfigured veterans into Roman civil society. The first part outlines the ambiguous attitudes shown towards these veterans, who were both praised and ridiculed, and seeks explanations. The second part argues that few impairments and disfigurements precluded veterans from holding political or religious office.

Reeds in de oudheid was Sparta een geliefkoosd onderwerp van opmerkelijke en exotische verhalen. Dit kan gekaderd worden vanuit de concurrentie die deze Laconische1 stad voornamelijk van Athene ondervond en de conflicten die hieruit voortvloeiden. Atheners wilden zich onderscheiden van de Spartanen, wat ze onder meer deden door hun vijanden als excentriekelingen af te schilderen. Hierbij werd fantasie zelden geschuwd. Bovendien is het bronnenmateriaal uitsluitend geschreven door mannen, die een eenzijdig mannelijk beeld van de Spartaanse vrouwen ophingen. Aangezien vrouwen geen tegenstem konden laten horen, kregen overdrijvingen en mythevorming vrij spel bij de antieke auteurs. Zo zouden volgens Aristoteles de vrouwen de plak hebben gevoerd in het oude Sparta, omdat de mannen vaak op militaire campagne en dus ver van huis waren. In de twintigste eeuw wekte dat soort beweringen de interesse van de voorvechtsters van het feminisme, die in het antieke Sparta de ultieme vorm van vrouwenemancipatie verwezenlijkt zagen. Vrouwen werden daar immers met evenveel respect als mannen behandeld.

This article concerns the Roman awareness of mentally impaired soldiers. A discussion of juristic writings shows that jurists distinguished various mental difficulties a soldier suffered. They even took soldiers’ mental problems into consideration when they determined the sentence for misconduct in the military. Roman literary authors also give proof of a clear insight into the soldiers’ minds and the mental toll military service took on them. With the support of archaeological evidence, several passages of Roman literature will be discussed taking methodological problems into account. In conclusion, Roman society was aware of the mental toll military life could take. Moreover, the many references in the ancient sources suggest mentally impaired soldiers were a familiar presence in the Roman world.