Not necessarily a tard baby (well, sort of) but something someone said like 100 pages ago stuck out to me, about how historical books tend to talk about potentially disabled people from long ago.
So after Alexander the Great died there was a huge hubub over who would be the next king and inherit the empire, and after a lot of drama between the army and the generals (which involved an attempted coup and the near lynching of a senior officer) they decided to form a regency and have two kings on the throne- Alexander's baby son, and his adult half-brother Philip, who was retarded. That is literally the term that history book use, right up to the 2010s. The kinder ones will say that he was 'mentally deficient' or osme variant thereof, but most will just straight up call him a tard or a moron. Classics/histpry books have a very long shelf-life and it's not unusual to use books that are 40-50 years old, so outdated terminology is normal.
Anyway I'm quite fascinated by poor 'tarded Philip. While he was king he was basically surrounded by wranglers at all times the foremost of which was his extremely intelligent and forceful wife Eurydice (who was also his niece). He was apparently normal-looking and prone to emotional meltdowns, so he was probably autistic. It's quite amazing that he was able to make it to adulthood, althoughy I suppose his brother never really considered him a threat. When Alexander died there was initially no suggestion of making Philip king, but after the army started making a fuss they relented. The Macedonians wanted a member of the royal family on the throne regardless of who it was (as long as it wasn't a woman). I wish we knew more about his life, but ancient authors barely talk about him and modern authors tend to dismiss him on account of his retardation. It's a shame though, I feel like the fact that he was allowed to live and even held a certain status tells us a lot about how ancient peoples treated their disabled family members. The Macedonian royals were always murdering one another so the fact that Philip lived to adulthood is very interesting. He was apparently competant enough to be told what to say and address the army under the watch of his wranglers, but he was incapable of making any proper decisions.
He was eventually tortured and murdered by his stepmother Olympias, and tbh I feel quite sad when I think about it because he seems to have been an innocent tard who wasn't doing anyone any harm, and he was forced into a dangerous position by the people around him.
