Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

102 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
respect theirs, instead of despising everyone older than themselves,
beginning with their own fathers?” (3.5.15). According to Herodotos
(2.80), it was a characteristic of Spartan youths to stand aside for
their elders when they passed them in the street and to rise when
they entered the room. No such customs are recorded for Athens, a
much more youth-oriented culture.
Medical Neglect of the Elderly
Greek physicians do not seem to have been much concerned with
the welfare of the elderly. There is little discussion of the ailments
of the elderly in medical treatises, still less about how to treat them.
Given the absence of effective painkillers, many old people must
have ended their days in extreme discomfort. A Hippocratic treatise
entitled Aphorisms catalogues the ills to which old age is subject:
Difficulty in breathing, catarrh accompanied by coughing, problems of the
urinary tract, arthritis, nephritis, dizzy spells, apoplexy, cachexia, itching
of the whole body, insomnia, watery discharge from the bowels, eyes and
nostrils, dullness of vision, glaucoma, and deafness. (3.31)
It is unlikely, however, that many elderly persons would have
sought to take their own lives in order to end their misery, in view
of the fact that suicides were thought to constitute an unhappy
category of the dead. Only among the Stoic philosophers was it
regarded as a point of honor for the very aged to terminate their
existence before entering upon their dotage.
THE DISABLED
The Prevalence of Disability
Probably most Greeks became at least partially disabled by the
time they had reached middle, let alone old, age due to the demands
and stresses of life in the ancient world. The price of survival to
what we would identify as middle age for the average man or
woman was an unpalatable assortment of rotting and rotten teeth,
failing eyesight, increasing deafness, constant back pains, creaky
joints, failing hips and knees, vicious stomach ulcers, and unpredictable
bowel movements. Injuries to the foot and leg were very
common, as we know from the fact that these generated the largest
number of votive offerings in healing sanctuaries. Because there
were only very limited means of alleviating any disability whether