593 THE FIGURE OF A BLIND MAN fore it was possible for blind persons to perform manual work and make a living by it 30. * * * To summarize, the proposed characteristics of a blind person in Antiquity — anonymity, passivity and beggary — turned out to be often valid, but not always. In several cases blind people are men- tioned without a name, even in lists of names. Such anonymity can be associated with social exclusion (as was the anonymity of for- eigners) because when a social group knows and uses the name of an individual, it usually means that she or he is more or less inte- grated. When a poor man or a foreigner lost his sight, he became known just as “the blind man”. But the blind who owned property, governed their own house (oıkov), which provided for them and by ® which they continued their business, were known by name in their neighbourhood. We cannot expect to arrive at any knowledge about those blind people who gave up an active attitude towards their lives. Nat- urally, the documents rather concern those who were well-off or who were economically active (yet even some of those are not mentioned by name). Some of them were tax-exempt, but others had to pay taxes, like anybody else. Those who owned consid- erable fortune were able to dispose of it through their servants and some of them could even manage their own house, which was called by their name. The situation of those blind people who were poor was worse, but there was still the possibility for them to per- form simple manual work (maybe with the help of relatives or friends). Definitely it is not true, that every blind man had to be a beggar who sits for a whole day waiting for alms and nobody know his name. The available data about blind persons in Antiquity are scarce and very diverse at the same time. Naturally it is not possible to draw a universal picture of blind person in Antiquity. The aim of As a less significant example we can see the man with weak eyes, who 30 though being exempted from digging is now forced to participate in this work and therefore writes a letter of complaint (P. Mich. XI 618).