Silent History? Speech Impairment in Roman Antiquity

Abstract

Using the model of the 'house of the history of mentalities' as developed by the French historian M. Vovelle, this chapter serves as a possible paradigm for approaching ancient disabilities tout cour . It sources material from the third century BCE of the Roman Republic to late antiquity. Only a handful of people can be identified as stutterers: the authors invariably mention them in broad categories along with slow speakers and clumsy orators. Greek and Latin vocabulary to denote speech impairment is notably vague and includes a wide range of phenomena, from temporary events such as drunkenness and bouts of shyness and embarrassment. Roman laws, which survive in compilations such as the Justinian Digest , emphasized the importance of making oneself clear in court, and hardly mentioned difficult speech per se , except for people categorized as mute, a state which could result from significant speech dysfluency. Keywords:ancient stutterers; Greek vocabulary; Justinian Digest; Latin vocabulary; Roman antiquity; speech dysfluency; speech impairment