Idiotes

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Idiotes ( ancient Greek : ἰδιώτης; plural: ἰδιῶται) was a (primarily non-judgmental) term for a private person in ancient Greece , and also for a simple soldier at the time of Hellenism in the military sector.

In Attic democracy, idiotes were used to describe a person who neither held a public office nor took part in political life, but lived and worked primarily for themselves and their own household.

In the military field, the term was also used by Greek historians to refer to people who, as simple soldiers, had no authority. In Ptolemaic Egypt , the term was officially used and appears in army crew lists as a term for ordinary soldiers.

Change of meaning of the word root in recent times

From the concept to the early 19th century, the medical-psychiatric technical term made up of idiocy to designate for (mental) "separate" people or "nerds" (to professional distinction, for example, dementia, and in this sense also in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot used ). After the Greek roots of many specialist terms are no longer familiar to today's people and also because the word idiot was increasingly used and understood as a swear word, substitute terms for this came up in the 20th century, such as nonsense (still in today's German criminal code, § 20 ) and - currently preferred - "intellectual disability".

literature

  • Leonhard Burckhardt : Idiotes. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 5, Metzler, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-476-01475-4 , Sp. 893. ( online at Brill Online )
  • Matthew Landauer: The "Idiōtēs" and the Tyrant: Two Faces of Unaccountability in Democratic Athens . In: Political Theory . tape 42 , no. 2 , 2014, p. 139-166 .
  • Lene Rubinstein: The Athenian Political Perception of the idiotes . In: Paul Cartledge, Paul Millett, Sitta von Reden (Ed.): Kosmos. Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens . Cambridge University press, Cambridge 1998, ISBN 0-521-57081-6 , pp. 125-143 .
  • Marie Simon : Idiot of ἰδιώτης. In: Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf (ed.): The survival of ancient Greek social type terms in the German language. Akademie, Berlin 1981 (=  social type terms in ancient Greece and their survival in the languages ​​of the world. Volume 5), pp. 291–306.