POSTPONED: Disability and the Distorted Body on the Ancient Roman Comic Stage

This event has been postponed and will be listed with a new date and time in the coming few weeks. Thank you for your interest, and please email us for more information, or return to this page to learn more by the end of March.

The times when Plautus, the most well-preserved Roman comic playwright, lived and worked, were the times of the biggest war campaign the Roman Republic had undertaken till then. Alongside changeable war luck, the Punic Wars brought huge social turmoil. As a direct result of wars, among other marginal social groups that increased in this period were the disabled people, adding to their number the wounded soldiers, mutilated hostages, tortured enslaved peoples, etc. What was the life of disabled people like in the highly militarized Roman society of the 3rd and 2nd century BCE and how were they represented in their contemporary literature? This talk is a part of a bigger endeavor to reveal the condition of disabled people using the evidence from the Roman comedy of the Middle Republic. Here I will focus on the representation of disfigurations due to obesity and pregnancy in the works of Plautus. This type of disability, even though not necessarily generated by war, was present throughout the comedies as a common comic trope. I will examine to which degree this type of disability was used as a metaphor, as a sort of reinforcement of deviation from social norms that comic characters represented in ancient Greek and Roman societies, and what degree of “othering” was at play when different social groups (women, slaves, the elderly, etc.) were coded by it.

Jelena Todorovic is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia. Jelena is interested in ancient Greek and Roman drama and performance, reception studies, and disability theatre studies. Her doctoral research is focused on the interpretation and study of the representation of disability on the ancient Roman comic stage. Her other research projects include the study of the reception of classical poetry and performance in Modern Serbia. Jelena is a UBC Public Scholar and works as the Graduate Student Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Excellence Cluster (UBC).

Fig. 1 Comic Actor, terracotta, 1st century BCE-1st century CE, Musée du Louvre

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