Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond
Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond
Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond
Frontispiece. Coin ofEumenes I showing the head of his uncle Philetairos, the
first Attalid dynast of Pergamum and reportedly a eunuch (3rd century Be).
Photo: British Museum.
EUNUCHS
IN ANTIQUITY AND BEYOND
Editor
Shaun Tougher
Contributors
Ra' anan Abusch, Ruth Bardel, Vern L. Bullough,
Niels Gaul, Shelley Hales, J .L. Lightfoot,
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret Mullett,
Georges Sideris, Walter Stevenson, Shaun Tougher,
Shih-shan Henry Tsai, Richard Witt
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Page
Introduction Shaun Tougher Vll
Acknowledgements lX
v
Contents
Shaun Tougher
Vll
Introduction
the Great, and sensitively immortalised in Mary Renault's The Persian Boy
(1972) ), speaks volumes; whilst Badian argues against Tarn in favour of
the existence of Bagoas, his interest is squarely focused on the question of
sources rather than on the eunuch: the article has after all the sub-heading
'A study in method' Y A breakthrough seemed to come with the classic
work of Keith Hopkins on the court eunuchs of the later Roman empire. 12
Taking a sociological approach, Hopkins investigated the reasons for the
use of eunuchs by later Roman emperors, as well as the nature of the court
eunuchs' power. For once, eunuchs were taken seriously. There followed
Orlando Patterson's own attempt to understand the usefulness of court
eunuchs, 13 as well as Peter Guyot's impressive survey of eunuchs as slaves
and freedmen throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity up until AD 395. 14
The eunuchs of antiquity (notably those of the later Roman period) also
shared in the general upswing of eunuch studies in the 1990s. 15 Despite
this, there still remains a certain tendency to overlook the subject generally.
Especially disturbing is that even two new 'guides' to late antiquity fail to
address eunuchs at all. 16 Thus it is hoped that this volume will assist in
making such omissions unlikely in future.
The conference was intended to be diverse in periods, cultures and
approaches, and the papers in the final volume span from the earliest
recorded instances of castration and eunuchs to the present day. Focuses
of interest vary, and range across politics, religion, music, literature, art,
and of course gender. Specific periods and cultures covered are the Persian
empire under the Achaemenids, classical Greece, Republican and imperial
Rome, the later Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, and in;tperial China.
Other periods and cultures are covered generally by those chapters which
take either a broader or a comparative approach. Specific contributions
on Islamic eunuchs, the medieval west, Skoptsi, hijras and the famous
singing castrati would have been welcome, but these topics are fortunately
well served by other work. 17
The volume commences with a broad introduction by Bullough, before
concentrating mainly on Greek evidence for eunuchs across the Persian,
Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds. Llewellyn-Jones studies the eunuch
in the context of Persian 'harem' society. Bardel considers classical Greek
attitudes to castration, and mutilation generally. Lightfoot and Hales
explore the issue of eunuchs in the cult of mother goddesses (the Syrian
goddess and Cybele respectively), the former through literary evidence,
the latter through visual evidence. Abusch examines the treatment of the
eunuch in the thought of Philo of Alexandria, whilst Stevenson addresses
the question of the existence of eunuchs in early Christianity. Tougher,
investigating the ethnic origin of court eunuchs across a broad chronological
Vlll
Introduction
and cultural spectrum, focuses especially on the later Roman and Byzantine
empires. There follow three further chapters on the Byzantine empire,
Sideris and Mullett foreground positive treatments of eunuchs, whilst
Gaul turns the spotlight on the neglected eunuchs of the later Byzantine
empire. We then end with two chapters which highlight the cross-cultural
approach. In an overview of the history of the Chinese court eunuch, Tsai
emphasizes the hostility of the traditional accounts of Chinese history
towards eunuchs (which provides striking parallels with Greek prejudices),
and asserts the need for a revisionist history, whilst Witt (drawing on
evidence from ancient China to medieval Byzantium) makes the case for
the important role of eunuchs in music beyond the famous example of the
Italian castrati of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
It can be reported that the growth of eunuch studies shows no sign of
abating. Recent conferences have included sessions on eunuchs, 18 whilst
further work has continued to be published from 1999 onwards,l 9 and
more is promised. 20 As for the present volume, it is hoped that it is a
worthy reflection and justification of the burgeoning interest in eunuch
history, and also that it will assist and inspire future work.
Notes
1 The exception is Ruth Bardel's 'Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra,
7 For instance Cheney 1995. See also my remarks on Grayson 1995 inch. 8.
8 There are of course exceptions, such as Millant 1908; Browe 1936. One
thinks especially of Byzantine studies with the work of Dunlap 1924 and Guilland
1943 (and also his subsequent studies).
9 Nock 1925.
10 e.g. Vermaseren 1977.
11 Badian 1958.
14 Guyot 1980.
15 e.g. Boulhol and Cochelin 1992; Schlinkert 1994; Scholten 1995; Stevenson
lX
Introduction
the medieval west see Kuefler 1996. On the Skoptsi see Engelstein 1999. On
the hijras see Nanda 1990 and 1999; Jaffrey 1997. On the castrati see Barbier
1996; Rosselli 1988.
18 e.g. in 2001 there were panels on eunuchs at the 36th International Congress
Byzantine eunuchs.
Bibliography
Ayalon, D.
1999 Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans: A study in power relatiomhips, Jerusalem.
Badian, E.
1958 'The eunuch Bagoas: a study in method', CQ 8, 144-57.
Barbier, P.
1996 The World of the Castrati: The history of an extraordinary operatic
phenomenon, London.
Beard, M.
1994 'The Roman and the foreign: the cult of the "Great Mother" in imperial
Rome', in N. Thomas and C. Humphreys (eds.) Shamanism, History
and the State, Ann Arbor, 164-90. '
Boulhol, P. and Cochelin, I.
1992 'La rehabilitation de 1' eunuque dans l'hagiographie antique (IV•-VI
siecles)', Studi diAntichita Christiana 48,49-76.
Bowersock, G.W, Brown P. and Grabar, 0. (eds.)
1999 Late Antiquity: A guide to the postclassical world, Cambridge, Mass.,
and London.
Browe, P.
1936 Zur Geschichte der Entmannung: Eine religiom- und rechtsgeschichtliche
Studie, Breslau.
Cheney, V.T.
1995 A BriefHistory of Castration, Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
Dunlap, J .E.
1924 'The office of the grand chamberlain in the later Roman and Byzantine
empires', in Two Studies in Later Roman and Byzantine Administration,
New York and London, 161-234. '
Engelstein, L.
1999 Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian folktale, Ithaca and
London.
X
Introduction
Grayson, A.K.
1995 'Eunuchs in power. Their role in the Assyrian bureaucracy', in M. Diet-
rich and 0. Loretz (eds.) Festschrift for Wolfram Freiherrn von Soden
(Alter Orient und Altes Testament 240), Neukirchen, 85-98.
Guilland, R.
1943 'Les eunuques dans I' empire byzantin', REB 1, 197-238.
Guyot, P.
1980 Eunuchen als Sklaven und Freigelassene in der griechisch-romischen Antike,
Stuttgart.
Hopkins, K.
1963 'Eunuchs in politics in the later Roman empire', Proceedings of the
Cambridge Philological Society 189, 62-80.
1978 Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge.
Jaffrey, Z.
1997 The Invisibles: A tale ofthe eunuchs ofIndia, London.
Jay,J.W
1993 'Another side of Chinese eunuch history: castration, marriage, adoption,
and burial', Canadian journal ofHistory 28, 459-78.
Kuefler, M.
1996 'Castration and eunuchism in the Middle Ages', in VL. Bullough and
].A. Brundage (eds.} Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, New York and
London, 279-306.
2001 The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, gender ambiguity and Christian ideology
in Late Antiquity, Chicago and London.
Long, J.
1996 Claudian's In Eutropium. Or, how, when, and why to slander a eunuch,
Chapel Hill and London.
Maas, M.
2000 Readings in Late Antiquity: A sourcebook, London and New York.
Marmon, S.
1995 Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, New York and Oxford.
Millant, R.
1908 Les eunuques atravers les ages, Paris.
Murray,].
1999 'Mystical castration: some reflections on Peter Abelard, Hugh of
Lincoln and sexual control', in J. Murray (ed.) Conflicted Identities
and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, New York and
London, 73-91.
Narida, S.
1990 Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras ofIndia, Belmont.
1999 Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras ofIndia, 2nd edn, Belmont.
Nock,A.D.
1925 'Eunuchs in ancient religion', Archiv for Religionswissenschaft 23,
25-33.
Patterson, 0.
1982 Slavery and Social Death. A comparative study, Cambridge, Mass., and
London.
Xl
Introduction
Peirce, L.P.
1993 The Imperial Harem: Women and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire,
New York and Oxford.
Ringrose, K.M.
1994 'Living in the shadows: eunuchs and gender in Byzantium', in G. Herdt
(ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender. Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and
history, New York, 85-109 and 507-18.
1996 'Eunuchs as cultural mediators', ByzF 23, 75-93.
1999 'Passing the test of sanctity: denial of sexuality and involuntary castra-
tion', in L. James (ed.) Desire and Denial in Byzantium, Aldershot and
Brookfield, 123-137.
Roller, L.E.
1999 In Search of God the Mother: The cult ofAnatolian Cybele, Berkeley.
Rosselli, J.
1988 'The castrati as a professional group and a social phenomenon,
1550-1850', Acta Musicologica 60, 143-79.
Schlinkert, D.
1994 'Der Hofeunuch in der Spatantike: Ein gefahrlicher AuGenseiter?',
Hermes 122, 342-59.
Scholten, H.
1995 Der Eunuch in Kaisernahe. Zur politischen und sozialen Bedeutung des
praepositus sacri cubiculi im 4. und 5. ]ahrhundert n. Chr. (Prismata
V), Frankfurt am Main etc.
Scholz, P. 0.
200 1 Eunuchs and Castrati: A cultural history, Princeton.
Sideris, G.
2000 'La comedie des castrats. Ammien Marcellin et les eunuques, entre
eunucophobie et admiration', Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire 78,
681-717.
Stevenson, W
1995 'The rise of eunuchs in Greco-Roman antiquity', journal ofthe History
ofSexuality 5, 495-511.
Taylor, G.
2000 Castration: An abbreviated history of western manhood, New York and
London.
Tougher, S.
1999a 'Ammianus and the eunuchs', in J.W Drijvers and D. Hunt (eds.) The
Late Roman World and its Historian. Interpreting Ammianus Marcellinus,
London and New York.
1999b 'Images of effeminate men: the case of Byzantine eunuchs', in D.M.
Hadley (ed.) Masculinity in Medieval Europe, London and New York,
89-100.
Tsai, S.-s. H.
1996 The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty, Albany, N.Y.
Vermaseren, M.J.
1977 Cybele and Attis. The myth and the cult, London.
xu
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Xlll
1
Vern L. Bullough
Introduction
The date of the first appearance of eunuchs has been lost to history, but
castration of males whether animal or human is an old practice dating
from the time when humanity began to herd animals. Since most animals
tend to flock together and produce roughly the same number of male and
female offspring, and one male was all that was actually needed to service
dozens of females, castration to early herders served as the ideal solution
to the fighting and competition that resulted from male animals seeking
to mate with as many females as possible. Some individuals even became
specialists at it, and in the early Vedic record oflndia, the term vadhryasva
(literally, 'he who castrated horses') appears.
There are many methods for castrating animals and it is probably safest
to do so shortly after the testicles have descended in the newborn male.
Usually a string or horse-hair is tied tightly around the scrotum which
causes the testicles to turn black and drop off in about three weeks' time.
There are other ways. I remember that as a child when we castrated the
infant lambs, some of the men did so by holding the young lamb up to
their mouth and biting the testicles off. But testicles could also be crushed,
shattered, struck, edged, cut out, methods usually reserved for the larger
and older animals. The mortality rate is higher when adult males are
castrated. I was present at one castration of a horse by the local amateurs
when the horse died from bleeding to death. Some species of animals
were castrated so frequently that they developed special names, such as
gelding or ox. In fact, in parts of the United States, restaurant menus
list something called 'Rocky Mountain Oysters', i.e. testicles from the
castrated cattle.
In humans, originally, the castration process was probably quite brutal.
A slash of a sword could cut off the penis and testicles, but because this
is such a vascular area, the mortality rate of such an action would be
extremely high. Still, such drastic and painful methods could be a symbolic
way of killing an enemy. Some might even have survived to become
1
Vern L. Bullough
2
Eunuchs in history and society
3
Vern L. Bullough
One of the difficulties with simple removal of the testicles was that it did
not always prevent arousal, depending upon the age at castration and the
methods used. If testicles were removed after puberty, the eunuch could
well have an erection since, although he would be sterile, he continued to
receive testosterone through the adrenal glands. If he had been castrated
by crushing the testicles rather than removing them, even at a young age,
it was still possible to have some testosterone from the testicles, depending
on the damage done to them. There might even have been a rare pregnancy
in some such cases, but the semen would have an extremely low sperm
count, making pregnancy extremely unlikely.
The appearance of eunuchs also depended in part upon the age at
castration. If castrated young, they retained the larynx of a boy, but
developed the lungs and chest of a man which gave the voice a rather
unique quality, especially in those who had good singing voices. Most did
not, and Chinese actors playing the roles of eunuchs often spoke in an
artificial, half-crying voice and groan like men in pain. Beardlessness was
another aspect of eunuchism, as was weakened muscular structure and
the fat distribution of a female.
Some have argued that in harems at least, eunuchs were not castrated to
prevent them from having sex with women, but rather to make certain the
pregnancy of the harem woman resulted from the seed of the master rather
than that of the servant or slave. Thus whether an erection was or was not
possible was of little concern, and total castration was unusual.
There were other forms of castration, some which seem to have been
particularly painful and life-threatening. A tortuous form of castration
involving splitting the penis is discussed in the Hindu Arthavaveda. 4
As far as females are concerned, although there is a rather bald-faced
statement by Athenaeus (jl. AD 200) quoting Xanthus, that Adramyttes,
King of the Lydians, castrated women and used female eunuchs, 5 it is
not clear what is meant. The modern English translations of the passage
usually say the women were sterilized. This still implies an ovariectomy
since there was early recognition of the existence of 'female testicles' but
whether surgical knowledge was up to successful performance of such
operations is doubtful to me. This is because one of the earliest mentions
of an ovariectomy in a medical work dates only from the end of the
seventeenth century when allegedly a Dutch sow-gelder had successfully
effected the removal of both ovaries from his own daughter in order
to prevent her from 'gadding' about at night. 6 Whether this is medical
folklore or reality is unclear. It was not until the end 'of the eighteenth
century that the first successful ovariectomy is recorded, by a surgeon,
the American Ephraim McDowell, and this was for the quite different
4
Eunuchs in history and society
purpose of removing a tumour on the ovary? It was not until the twentieth
century that ovariectomy or oophorectomy was done for purposes of
sterilization but even this operation was rare, with tubal ligation being
used as an alternative.
There is an interesting sidebar which could be mentioned here, and that
is the castration and genital mutilation which took place at the end of the
nineteenth century in countries such as the U.S.A. in order to avoid the
dangers of masturbation, something I have written about elsewhere. 8 Most
of it was done in an institutional setting for the mentally handicapped
or mentally ill, but it was also occasionally done to others for 'severe'
masturbatory practices and for homosexual activity.
How frequent or infrequent was the practice of castrating males? We
know that it is recorded in ancient Mesopotamia, 9 as well as China and
India. Ammianus Marcellinus attributed the origin of eunuchism to the
legendary Semiramis who supposedly lived in the eighth century BC. 10
One of the difficulties, however, in identifYing eunuchs is the sources
themselves. A good illustration of this is the Christian Bible. For example,
the Latin vulgate version of the Bible (Genesis 37.6) reports that Potiphar,
the Egyptian official to whom the Midianites had sold Joseph, was
a eunuch. 11 A recent English translation of this calls Potiphar a courtier
of the pharaoh, 12 while the New Revised Standard Version identifies him
simply as an official of the pharaoh. 13 He was perhaps all three of these
things, but the important issues for us are that although he was identified
as a eunuch in some sources other sources obscure this, and thus some
commentators question it. 14 Also, often, in the immediate past, there was
a reluctance to deal with the topic and so euphemisms which might not
be understandable to the current generation of readers were used. We
know, for example, that many male slaves were castrated but it is not
always clear which. 15
5
Vern L. Bullough
lose somewhat of their high spirit and unruliness but are not deprived of their
strength or capacity for work. And in the same way dogs, when castrated,
stop running away from their masters, but are no less useful for watching or
hunting. And men, too, in the same way, become gentler when deprived of
this desire, but not less careful of that which is entrusted to them. 16
Inevitably, many slaves were castrated since a castrated slave was more
expensive, in part because it was believed they were easier to control, and
there was no particular reason for the males not to be castrated unless there
were other tasks, such as fighting in the arena, which gave non-castrated
males more value. Although a high death rate was associated with the
procedure, the added profit was sufficient to make castration a regular
feature of the slave trade. There were dangers in this, however; Herodotos,
for example, tells us that Panionios castrated and traded slaves, and sold
the victims of his knife in Ephesus and Sardis, 'where they were much
esteemed because of their honesty and fidelity in every way' . 17 One of his
victims, Hermotimos, became the chief eunuch of the Persian king Xerxes
(fifth century BC). 18 In that capacity, he exacted his revenge on Panionios
by instigating a family-wide castration in which he and his four sons were
forced to castrate each other.
But castration was also used for punishment, and penises were collected
as trophies. Pharaoh Merneptah in the XIXth dynasty, for example,
memorialized that he collected a total of 6359 uncircumcised penises
after the defeat of the invading Libyan army as well as the penises of the
children of the chief, brothers of the priest, and others. 19 Whether any
of those so castrated survived is unknown, but probably the castration
took place after they had already been killed. The Assyrian' laws provided
castration, or making a person into a eunuch, as suitable punishment for
some crime with sexual overtones. 2° Castration, in fact, 'continued to be
used as punishment for certain sex crimes up to modern times and some
American states still list it as a possibility as do many other countries.
In the United States in recent years there have been several movements
to castrate, either literally or chemically, individuals involved in sex crimes,
particularly those involving adults with children. One of the early advocates
of castration for 'deviant sex acts' was Judge Lawrence Neil Turrentine
in San Diego County who, beginning in 1938, offered probation to
sex offenders who underwent castration. The practice was continued by
some of his successors. A California legislative report found that of sixty
convicted individuals who had been castrated in San Diego County, not
one committed a further sex offence.z' What was defined as a sex crime
in the 1930s and 1940s, however, was not necessarily defined as one in
the 1980s and 1990s, and many of those castrated in those years were
6
Eunuchs in history and society
7
Vern L. Bullough
Eunuchs were also prized for their special qualities. Perhaps the best
example of this is that of the castrati, so important in western musical
tradition from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. 26 But the castrati
singers predated the opera. They first appeared in the church choirs
which, as they became increasingly elaborate in the later Middle Ages,
sought higher voices to create greater harmonies. Since St Paul's statement,
that women were to keep silent in churches, 27 was interpreted by the
misogynistic clergy of the day to forbid women to sing in the choir,
eunuchs became the alternative. The increasingly elaborate choruses relied
on boys, falsettists, and ultimately eunuchs or castrati. 28 Technically, the
Christian church had banned self-castration for religious reasons in the
fourth century, 29 but if others did the castration, there was no ban on
utilizing their services. Poor families whose sons had good voices (or even
did not) turned to castration in the hope that it would bring them sudden
wealth. Though the number of boys castrated in the age of opera seems
exaggerated - for example, Ida Franca's claim that in a single year in the
eighteenth century more than 2000 boys had been castrated in the Papal
States of Europe, and more than 1000 in the city of Naples alone -
the numbers at any rate were large. 30 Unfortunately, castration might
have prevented the male voice from deepening, but it did not guarantee
that everyone castrated had a good singing voice. The practice of using
castrati declined somewhat towards the end of the eighteenth century,
and countries like France never or only occasionally employed them,
nor did the Protestant areas of Europe after the time of Handel. Pope
Leo XIII in 1878 finally issued an edict prohibiting the 4se of castrati.
However the effect was more gradual than immediate, since Dominico
Mustafa, a celebrated male soprano, was director of the Papal music until
his retirement in 1895. '
Still another justification for eunuchs is religionY The Gnostics,
whose growth paralleled that of Christianity, taught that men became
like beasts when they engaged in sexual intercourse. Some of them, such
as the Gnostic leader Julius Cassian, justified eunuchism. 32 Christians in
general were probably ambivalent since the scriptural sources themselves
are ambiguous. For example, when Jesus spoke of forbidding divorce or
remarriage, the disciples wondered whether it might be better simply to
remain unmarried. He said:
All men cannot receive this saying, save them to whom it is given. For there
are some eunuchs, which are born so from their mother's VfOmb, and there
are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men; and there be eunuchs
which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. 33
8
Eunuchs in history and society
9
Vern L. Bullough
ideal, and some even held positions in the Supreme Soviet Council. The
government moved against them in 1929 and imprisoned their leader D.
Lomonsov for opposing socialism and spreading 'religious superstition'.
They continued to survive, however, in Russia and Romania, by going
underground. There were various levels of castration. Those of the 'small
seal' only had their testicles removed; those of the 'great seal', whether male
or female, had all of their sex organs removed. Perhaps the majority, known
as white doves, elected spiritual castration, i.e. total abstinence. 41 Many
survived the Soviet persecution and apparently the sect still exists. 42 Many
of them, before the Soviets came to power, were illiterate, and as one, who
had learned to read, commented at his trial in 1903:
We mutilate ourselves; no one taught us anything ... I followed the word of
the Evangelist and the teaching of our saviour, Matthew 19:12 ... I understood
that I had castrated myself for the kingdom of heaven ... If castration had
not been necessary, Christ would not have spoken. 43
10
Eunuchs in history and society
11
Vern L. Bullough
the United States which had castration laws on their books proceeded to
remove them in the period following World War II, although some still
remain as they do in other areas of the world. Interestingly, deliberate
sterilization through tubal ligation or vasectomies is n·ow widely used
in the United States and elsewhere as a means of contraception. Such
operations, however, did not affect the individual's sexual desires or
hormone production, and in no way could those involved be classed
as eunuchs.
Medical castration, known as orchidectomy, i.e. the removal of the male
testicles, is still utilized in some forms of cancer, such as prostate cancer, but
increasingly chemical castration instead of surgical castration is involved.
For a time also, large numbers of women who had a hysterectomy also had
an ovariectomy which, before the development of chemical hormones,
threw them into the menopause. It was also used by some as a way of
avoiding further pregnancies.
There is one further category of eunuch, which is in the process of
changing. This, for want of a better term, might be called the intersex
children. In the past, when the medical professionals encountered a baby
or child with ambiguous genitalia, they, usually with the support of the
parents and others, tried to intervene surgically, often in the process
creating eunuchs. Perhaps the most extreme example of this was the
case in the early 1960s of the Canadian twin brothers who underwent
circumcision by electric cauterisation when they were a few months old.
Unfortunately, a short in the cauterising gun caused the penis of one to
be burned off. The anxious parents, after consulting speciali~ts, decided to
raise the child as a girl, had the scrotum and testicles surgically removed,
and the child, nearly two years old by this time, changed legally from male
to female. Technically he was a eunuch. The assumption was that nurture
would win out over nature and that the child would develop normally
as a girl. Hormonal intervention would be required in the subteens and
teens, as would surgical remodelling of the labia et al. The case was much
reported in the scientific literature, particularly by John Money. He early
on stated that the child was developing normally as a girl, 5° and after much
early publicity, the case disappeared from sight. The child, however, did
not identifY as a female and in her teens rejected the girlish role assigned to
her by her parents and the medical community. After a series of traumatic
incidents in her late teens, she was finally told what had happened to
her. She then resumed her male persona, and is now regarded as a male, 51
although without a penis or testicles. '
The case, made public in the late 1990s, has become a powerful
instrument for the newly formed Intersex Society of America. The society
12
Eunuchs in history and society
regards its role as not only preventing sex changes to children such as hap-
pened to the Canadian twin, but as opposing drastic surgical intervention
in the case of infants and children who are born with ambiguous genitalia.
With some exceptions, they insist such decisions cannot be made without
the consent of the individual involved, since the result of such surgery is
the creation of a new kind of eunuch. Obviously some corrective surgery
can be done, but if a child has an over-enlarged clitoris or a micro penis,
the recommendation is to leave it alone unless the child or adolescent later
wants some correction. Some of the advocates for the Intersex Society
want to impose a moratorium on any kind of'corrective surgery' involving
genitalia unless and until the medical profession completes comprehensive
look-back studies and finds that the outcomes of past interventions have
been uniformly positive. They also advocate that efforts be made to undo
the effect of past deception by physicians over intersex surgery. 52
The issue is obviously complicated, but the existence of such a society
and its widespread public support, emphasizes that there is a general
unwillingness to create a new eunuch class. More surprisingly, within the
past decade, those who regard themselves as transsexuals or transgendered
persons have expressed a growing reluctance to undergo major genital
surgery (especially among the females-to-males), but instead rely more
heavily on hormones and only simple castration (removal of testes) or
ovariectomy, to bring about the desired transformation. It seems clear
that, although technically there are only two anatomical sexes, male (penis
and testes) and female (vagina, uterus and ovaries), within these two
categories there are large variations in genitalia, even missing segments, as
well as in gender behaviours and in sexual preference or identification. We
have established transsexualism as a legitimate diagnosis, and developed
treatments for individuals who earlier might have chosen to be eunuchs.
They now can change their sex with surgery, hormones and legal papers.
In conclusion, what once required surgery, and was almost overwhelm-
ingly restricted to males, can now be done with hormones, but none of
the new generation have shown an inclination to be called a eunuch. At
the same time, the functions that the eunuch once performed, can be done
as well by others. There is still legal punishment of castration for some
but even this is under attack. Any one who tried to demonstrate his or
her power by cutting off the testicles or penis of a male, or removing
the ovaries of a female or even more radical surgery, would, I think,
be subject to almost universal vilification. In our increasingly sexually
egalitarian society, no one needs to undergo surgery to take on the roles
and tasks which were once limited to one sex or another. We will still have
voluntary sterilization as a means of family planning, but the emphasis is
13
Vern L. Bullough
Notes
1 Stent 1877. See also Matignon 1936.
9 Asher-Greve 1998.
10 Amm. Marc. 16.6.17.
11 On Potiphar and Joseph see also the contribution of Abusch in this volume.
12 Knox 1948.
who were recruited from slaves and whose organization and adhesion, and the
fear of them by other men, might indicate that many of the dominant leaders
were eunuchs. Hitti does not indicate that they were castrated, only that they
had been slaves. Perhaps not all of them were castrated, but the way succession
was carried out and their alliances suggested that most probably had been. This
is, however, debatable.
16 Xen. Cyr. 7.5.62-3, tr. W. Miller, London and New York 1914, vol. 2,
289. For Greek attitudes towards castration see the contribution of Bardel in
this volume.
17 Hdt. 8.105-6.
18 For Achaemenid eunuchs see the contribution of Llewellyn-Jones in this
volume.
19 Breasted 1962, vol. 3, 588, 248.
20 Pritchard 1955, 180-97.
14
Eunuchs in history and society
volume.
27 1 Corinthians 14.34-6.
28 Heriot 1974.
paport 1937 and 1948; Pittard 1934), but see now Engelstein 1999. See also
Tomkins 1962, 156-64. Some of his claims, such as the eunuchism of Georgi M.
Malenkov, premier of the USSR from 1953 to 1955, I am reluctant to accept.
43 This quote is taken from Cheney 1995, 182, who cites V. Soukhomline, Les
proces de la secte mystique des Skoptzy, les proces celebres de la Russie, Paris 1937, as
the source, but I have been unable to locate this book.
44 Suet. Nero 28-9.
45 Tr. Arrowsmith 1987, 4.23, 36. There are many versions of the Satyricon,
many of them censored; Arrowsmith's is one of the better ones.
46 Mitamura 1970, 64 and passim.
47 Bullough and Bullough 1993.
48 For a good overview of this see Gould 1981.
49 Interestingly, vasectomies were originally advocated as a way of increasing
male potency.
50 Money and Erhardt 1972, 46-51; Money 1994 and 1975.
51 Diamond 1997.
52 Kipnis and Diamond 1998.
Bibliography
Arrowsmith, W
1987 Satyricon, New York.
Asher-Greve, J.M.
1998 'The essential body: Mesopotamian conceptions of the gendered body',
15
vern L. Bullough
16
Eunuchs in history and society
Matignon, J.J.
1936 La Chine hermetique: superstition, crime, et misere, Paris.
Mitamura, T.
1970 Chinese Eunuchs, tr. C.A. Pomeroy, Rutland and Tokyo.
Money,J.
1975 'Ablatio penis: normal male infant sex-reassignment as a girl', Archives
ofSex Behavior 4, 65-71.
1994 Sex Errors of the Body and Related Syndromes: A guide to counselling
children, adolescents and their families, 2nd edn, Baltimore, Md.
Money, J. and Ehrhardt, A.A.
1972 Man and Woman/Boy and Girl, Baltimore, Md.
Murray, S.O.
2000 Homosexualities, Chicago.
Nanda, S.
1999 Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras ofIndia, 2nd edn, Belmont.
Osgood, C.
1951 The Koream and their Culture, New York.
Pellat, CH.
1978 'Khasi. I - in central Islamic lands', in The Encyclopedia of Islam, New
Edition, vol. 4, Leiden, 1087-92.
Pittard, E.
1934 La castration chez l'homme et les modifications morphologiques qu'elle
entrafne, Paris.
Pritchard, J .R.
1955 Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Princeton.
Rappaport, I.E
1937 La castration rituelle: l'itat mental des Skoptzy, Ph.D. thesis University
of Paris.
1948 Introduction aIa psychopathologie collective: Ia secte mystique des Skoptzy,
Paris.
Scholz, P.O.
2001 Eunuchs and the Castrati. Translated from the German by J.A. Broadwin
and S.L. Frisch, Princeton N.J.
Steeves, P.D.
1983 'Skoptsy', in J. Wieczynski (ed.) Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and
Soviet History, vol. 35, 171-5.
Stent, G.C.
1877 'Chinese eunuchs' ,journal ofthe North-China Branch ofthe RoyalAsiatic
Society 9, 143-84.
Tomkins, P.
1962 The Eunuch and the Virgin, New York.
17
2
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
In the 1961 Hollywood B-movie Esther and the King, the youthful and
glamorous Joan Collins (an unlikely Jewish heroine), together with a bevy
of nubile beauties, is escorted into a glittering harem, hung with tasselled
drapes and chiffon curtains. The colourful set represents the women's
quarters in the palace of the Persian king at Susa. The crowd of girls are
overawed at the beauty of their new home, and they giggle in wonder at
their good fortune. The noise of female laughter rises to a crescendo when
suddenly an imperious male figure emerges from a curtained entranceway
and calls for silence. He is Hegai (Robert Buchanan), the Overseer of the
Harem, and he holds sway over the court of women. He is dressed like
a peacock in gold, blue, and green robes; a turban is coiled around his
head; his chubby fingers are covered in jewels and his heavy hand clutches
a staff of office. Hegai's face is fat and smooth and his eyes are lined with
black make-up. He commands authority. Beating his staff on the ground,
he calls for silence and views his new charges with the snobbish superiority
of a grammar school headmistress. He immediately begins instructing
the 'gals' in court etiquette. He softly waves his hands and sings out his
commands: 'Bow low. Heads bent. Eyes down ... Hold your prostration.
One. Two. Three. Now rise. Slowly, slowly.' The king enters as the women
sink back onto their knees. They are scrutinized by their royal master,
Ahasuerus, the Great King, the King of Persia (Richard Egan) as Hegai
keeps watch (Fig. 1).
Instructing the women in the manner of a woman, this eunuch of
Hollywood imagination would have been easily recognizable as such to
the likes of such ancient authors and historians as Herodotos, Euripides,
Sophocles, Xenophon, Ktesias and Plutarch who, on the whole, construct
their eunuch characters along a similar line. Hegai lives in a world inhabited
by women; as of an indiscriminate sex, neither entirely man nor woman
but eunuch, he is granted special access to the women belonging to his
19
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
Fig. 1. Still from Esther and the King, 1961. Courtesy of BFI Posters and Stills.
master, the Persian king, whom, the film assures us, he serves with devotion
and unfailing loyalty. Hegai is the perfect product of a harem society.
Expostulating on the perverseness of these un-gendered creatures was
a regular feature of travel writing, dramas, and romantic (or erotic) novels
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writing in the mid-1850s,
for example, the French author Gustave Flaubert set his exotic novel
Salammbo amid the barbarian hordes of mercenaries inhabiting the city of
Carthage at the time of the First Punic War. Flaubert's Carthage is a highly
sexed world of vivid passions, and his story of the priestess Salammbo's
passion for the soldier Matho is punctuated by many colourful depictions
of 'local' life, much of it violent and erotic. Flaubert associates his sex-
kitten priestess with a group of eunuchs; he writes:
All of a sudden lights appeared on the topmost terrace of the palace, the
middle door opened and [Salammbo] ... dressed in black, appeared on the
threshold ... Behind her on each side stood two long lines of pallid men,
wearing white robes with red fringes falling right down to their feet. They
did not have beards, or hair, or eyebrows; in their hands, sparkling with
rings, they carried immense lyres and they were all singing, in shrill voices,
a hymn to the divinity of Carthage. They were the eunuch priests of the
temple ofTanit. 2
20
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 Be)
21
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
22
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 Be)
is thus the royal harem that becomes the battleground of the empire, where
great men rise and fall, manipulated, however, by women and eunuchs.
There is no doubt that the ancient Greeks were intrigued, puzzled, and
fascinated by the notion of eunuchism. In fact, the Greek language had
over two-dozen words for 'eunuch' and even used the figure of the eunuch
in children's riddles and rhymes. 14 However, in regard to their particular
fascination for the court eunuch, Edith Hall explains that:
The palace eunuch of the Greeks' imagination encapsulates their systematic.
feminization of Asia; emotional, wily, subservient, luxurious, and emascu-
lated, he embodies simultaneously all the various threads in the fabric of
their orientalist discourse. 15
The Greek sources are, of course, heavily biased, and the classical Greek
evidence in particular likes to portray the Persian court as a feminized
hotbed of decadence, but in the absence of Persian information proper
these sources are all we have and need t.o be used, albeit with due care
and attention. What follows here is an overview of the role of eunuchs in
the Achaemenid royal harem that combines both Near Eastern (Assyrian,
Persian, Hebrew) evidence with that of the Greek authors.
As long as the student of Achaemenid history takes into consideration
the pitfalls of using the Greek authors, their evidence can be of enormous
value, while comparisons with other ancient societies and their customs
(both near to and further removed from the Achaemenid period) can also
be informative. Therefore, it is possible to use the examples of the gendered
structures of the Hellenistic courts of the Near East, Asia Minor, and
Egypt to support the classical Greek and Persian evidence. The royal courts
of Hellenistic Pontus, Syria and Egypt can be valuable for comparative
evidence, since many of these courts consciously carried on traditions
directly associated with Achaemenid royal practice, or else assimilated the
court practices adopted by Alexander the Great after his conquest of Persia
and his keen adoption of Achaemenid royal protocol. The Hellenistic
royal reliance upon the court practices of the Achaemenid monarchy
is certainly stressed by Inge Nielsen in her study of Hellenistic royal
palaces; she suggests that to a large extent, the early Hellenistic palaces
dotted throughout the Greek world in the third and second centuries BC
(especially those of the Seleucids) were largely based on Achaemenid
models. 16 It might be reasonable to suppose that the organization of the
palace rooms, and the functions and routines carried out within them,
also contained a semblance of Persian court lifestyle.
Of the two subjects encountered in this chapter, 'eunuch' is relatively
easy to define: basically, a eunuch is a castrated man, one often found
23
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
serving at the courts and palaces of kings and nobles and frequently linked
with the safeguarding and serving of women. In the artistic sources, the
Persian eunuchs of the royal ceremonial city ofPersepolis are all depicted as
slim, elegant courtiers, with no hint of the corpulence or physical strength
that is apparent in depictions of court eunuchs in earlier Assyrian art. 17
The bodies of the Persepolis eunuchs are idealized in an 'Egyptianizing'
technique actively adopted by the Persian kings and their artists. For
example, a relief carved onto a door jamb of the palace of Darius I at
Persepolis possibly shows a eunuch standing ready with a towel and
perfume bottle to minister to the needs of his sovereign. He is finely
and elegantly dressed in a long wide-sleeved robe; his hair is twisted into
tight curls and caught into a small chignon at the nape of his neck; a fillet
or metal headband crowns his head. The eunuch's face is smooth, clean-
shaven and youthful; his eyes are wide and alert and his mouth extends
into a serene smile. His presence on the door jamb confirms the idea
that the rooms beyond this doorway were given over for the private uses
of the king and his immediate family. 18 All in all, some six eunuchs are
depicted in the Persepolis reliefs, often (but not always) accompanied by
a bearded official who is no doubt meant to contrast with the eunuchs'
smooth effeminacy. 19 The eunuchs frequently carry towels, ointment jars,
parasols, and fly-whisks, all of which allude to their roles within the close
entourage of the king and, perhaps, the women of the harem. 20
The Near Eastern terminology for eunuch is difficult to determine,
however. The Akkadian term for eunuch is fa ref farri (or simply fa reft),
while the corresponding Hebrew loan word is saris, which s,imply means
'one who [stands] at the head of the king'. Eduard Meyer argued that the
Hebrew word tirshatha specifically designated a palace eunuch, derived
as it was from the New Persian verb tara!, 'to cut' .zr Certainly the term
indicates a personage of high rank, since tirshatha can also be translated as
'the one to be feared or respected', that is, 'Excellency' from the Old Persian
word tarsa. According to the Old Testament, the Jewish eunuch Nehemiah
was appointed as the 'cupbearer' (Hebrew mafqeh) of Artaxerxes J.22 This is
a customary role for eunuchs attested in the Greek sources too: Xenophon
speaks of 'cupbearers' to the Persian kings in his Cyropaedia (1.3.9) and
uses the word oivoxoot. It is possible that the Greek terms oivoxoo~ and
euvoiixo~ were somehow interchangeable.
The word 'harem' is particularly problematic, both in its ancient
terminological usage and in its wider contemporary popular conception.
Influenced by vague notions of the seraglio, we have a tendency to imagine
women as shut away inside palaces, out of the sight of men (but not
necessarily out of harm's way), having as their only link to the world
24
Eunuchs and the royal harem inAchaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
beyond the palace walls the half-men who served them and occasionally
'serviced' them. The image of a Turkish-style harem, a secluded and closely
guarded pleasure-palace filled with scantily dad, nubile concubines idling
away their days in languid preparation for nights of sexual adventure in
a sultan's bed, has become an integral part of the West's fascination with
the mysterious East. 23 This allure finds its most vivid expression in the
decadent nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings oflngres, Gerome, and
Corman, and in popular Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s. 24
Most inappropriately, it is this vision of a haven of Oriental sensuality
and secret sexual delights practised by scheming, if imprisoned, women
and their spooky eunuch companions, which has heavily influenced our
interpretation of the evidence for and against the role of the harem in
many eastern societies, including that of Achaemenid Persia. 25
In dealing with the notion of what the harem is, we must first come to
terms with its definition; we need to realize that while it can be a physical
space, an· identifiable area of a palace or house used by women and eunuchs
and privileged men, a harem can also simply refer to women grouped
together; it does not necessarily need a defining space. More than that,
however, it is a term used in a metaphysical sense to describe something
which is out of bounds. The word 'harem' has at its core the Arabic 'ha'ram'
meaning 'forbidden', or 'taboo'. By implication it means a space into
which general access is forbidden (or limited) and in which the presence
of certain individuals or certain types of behaviour are forbidden. 26 The
fact that the private quarters in a domestic residence, and by extension its
female occupants, are also referred to as a 'harem' comes from the Islamic
practice of restricting access to these quarters, especially to males unrelated
to the resident females. The word 'harem' is therefore a term of respect,
evoking religious purity and personal honour, indeed in Muslim thought,
every man and woman carries with them an inner ha'ram, a self-awareness
of not overstepping personal boundaries.
This is particularly relevant to the Ottoman concept of the harem: while
not divine himself, an Ottoman sultan, 'God's shadow on earth', created
a sacred space around his physical presence, and because the sultan lived
within the harem, the physical space itself took on an added dimension
of inviolability. In many ways an Achaemenid Persian monarch resembled
the Ottoman ruler: he too was the sole representative of God on earth,
the all-powerful Ahuramazda, and, as such, he stressed his removal from
ordinary mortals by physically confining himself within the domestic
areas of his palace, away from the gaze of his subjects except for periods
of formal public audience. Thus I would contend that the term 'harem' is
totally applicable to Achaemenid royal domestic practice.
25
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
I suggest that there was such an institution as the royal harem and
that the concept of an identifiable society of women was fundamental to
both the Persian and the Greek views of court life. It is difficult to know
how the ancient Persians referred to a harem, but Frye suggests that the
Old Persian word tachara means the private quarters of the king and his
family, and his servants. 30 Greek texts suggest that there was a specific
space within the royal palace for the women and their eunuch slaves:
26
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia {559-331 BC)
Herodotos makes it manifestly dear that the male apartments of the palace
(avopEoov, 3.77-8) are separate from those reserved for the women (3.68).
The existence of separate apartments is also made explicit in his history
as he recounts the arrival of the Greek doctor Demokedes at court: he
is escorted by a group of eunuchs into the chambers of the royal ladies
(3.130, 1tapa 1:a~ £oomou yuvatKa~)Y Herodotos also notes that before
the age of five a young prince 'lives with the women and never sees his
father' (1tapa 'tiJ<n yuvm~t, 1.136). He also notes that it was the privilege
of the king's seven councillors to be admitted into the domestic heart of the
palace as long as the king was not sharing the company of his wife (3.84.2;
3.118.2). Plutarch (Them. 26) tries to account for the Persian reluctance
to allow their women to be seen in public, arguing that:
As a rule, the barbarian peoples are excessively jealous of their wives, and the
Persians outdo all others in this respect. Not only their wives, but also the
female slaves and concubines are rigorously watched, and no strange eye is
allowed to see them. They live locked up in their rooms, and if they have to
travel, they do so in carriages hung on all sides with draperies.
The Septuagint version of Esther tells of 'tijv auA,Tjv 'tTJV yuvatKEiav
(2.11; translated in the 1851 English version fittingly as 'the court of
women') and notes, in fact, that there were two such courts (see below); at
the opening of the story, Queen Vashti (or Astin, as she is named by the
Greek author) is holding a feast for the court ladies in her apartments, while
the king and his nobles dine in another area of the palace (1.9). The term
yuvatKOOVtn~ is also used by Plutarch when he tells of the living-quarters of
the concubines of the satrap of Sardis (Them. 31.2), and numerous other
Greek writers use the notion of a court of women to cast aspersions upon
the masculinity of Persian monarchs, brought up as they were surrounded
by females and castrated effeminates. As Plato states (Lg. 695 a-b):
[Cyrus] didn't notice that women and eunuchs had given his sons the
education of a Mede, and that it had been debased by their so-called 'blessed'
status. That is why Cyrus' children turned out as children naturally do when
their teachers have never corrected them. 32
An identifiable society of women and eunuchs is a notion endorsed
by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg in her analysis of Ktesias' observation of
the Persian court. She notes that Ktesias may have had an ulterior motive
for portraying the role of Persian royal women in a particular way, but
in doing so she highlights his recognition that there was an identifiable
society of court women which was served by a staff of eunuchs who often
wielded considerable powers. In effect, Ktesias was studying, recording
and, to some extent, scandalizing the goings on of a harem society. 33
27
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
Lewis goes on to note that, 'It seems unlikely that Greek fascination
with the Queens of Persia is solely due to the fact that they were hidden in
harems.' 35 But the harem is often mistakenly seen by ancient and modern
authors as a woman's world - domestic and private and cut-off from
the outside - and any attempt to influence events beyond its confines is
regarded as 'meddling' in a situation in which women have no right to
participate. Indeed, the idea of 'meddling women' is often put forward as
a genuine reason for the decline of the Persian empire. 36 But we need to
emphasize that an institution like the despotic Achaemenid monarchy was,
essentially, a family affair. This does not mean that this family-orientated
system was non-political; the royal family, self-contained within the inner
domestic quarters of a palace, the 'harem', was in fact the heart of political
decision-making. 37
From later Ottoman sources we know that segregation of the sexes
created for women a society that developed its own hierarchy of authority
and the same was true, no doubt, of Achaemenid Persia. Women of
superior status, the matriarchal elders, held considerable power not
only over other women but also over the younger males within the
family, because the harem was also the setting for the private life of
some men, especially young princes. Furthermore, networking within the
harem provided women with information and sources of power useful to
their male relatives. 38 It is within this context that the eunuchs became
important, because the eunuchs' ability to enter into the private world of
the harem and operate in the outer courts of the public sphere made them
invaluable aids to kings and, more interestingly, to the sometimes powerful
royal women of the inner-court itsel£ They acted as an additional set of
28
Eunuchs and the royal harem inAchaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
eyes and ears and operated outside the confines of the domestic heart of
the palace, relaying official messages to and fro between the inner and
outer courts, while carrying unofficial court gossip, scandals, and secrets
along the same routes.
It would appear that only representatives of the seven leading Persian
families, as well as the king's mother and his principal wife, could appear
before the king without being summoned, while all others had to make
a formal request for an audience. Under fear of the death penalty, no one
except the king, his nearest relatives and his court eunuchs could see the
royal wives and concubines; interestingly, there is not a single female image
to be found among the numerous reliefs at Persepolis, a fact which alerts
us to the idea that the female figure, certainly that of a royal female, was not
for public view. This may well be a facet ofNear Eastern art in general, since
women are notoriously absent from Assyrian palace reliefs too. 39 Egyptian
royal iconography, on the other hand, frequently promotes the image of
the royal wife, mother, sister or daughter as central to the ideology of
divine kingship. Despite the fact that the Achaemenids routinely borrowed
many Egyptian art-techniques and themes for their own iconographic
propagandistic purposes, the prominent representation of women in public
sculpture or relief was not copied. 40 It appears that there was something
fundamental to the Persian psyche that required women to be invisible,
particularly in the public and/ or artistic sphere. The official Achaemenid
iconography of conquest and ceremony has no place for women. Plutarch
tells (Them. 26) that a wild jealousy was characteristic of the Persians,
not only in respect to their wives but also in regard to their concubines
and female slaves. Widely known is the biblical tale of the demotion of
Vashti, the Persian queen, who refused to appear in public before her royal
husband, King Ahasuerus, or Xerxes, since his commands contradicted the
law which stated that women should never appear before strangers (LXX
Esther 1.11-12). 41 The required separation of royal women from public
life is a theme taken up by Chariton in his Hellenistic novel Callirhoe:
Stateira, the wife of Artaxerxes II, is driven mad with jealousy because of
her husband's new Greek concubine, the heroine of the story. She resolves
to hold a beauty contest (a familiar literary topos in Greek writings on the
Persian court) 42 to decide who is the most beautiful woman in Asia, and
offers herself as a candidate. It is only then that she is reminded that, as the
king's wife, she cannot appear in public or show herself to others, and so
she chooses a noblewoman named Rhodogune to stand in for her in the
battle against the Greek beauty (5.3-4).
Maria Brosius has proved that Achaemenid royal women moved around
the empire with unrestricted freedom and could amass great wealth from
29
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
their personal estates. She sees the harem, therefore, as being an institution
concocted from the minds of Greek and later writers. Yet the sources state
that even when women travelled across the country they were hidden
within curtained carriages, and the one incident recorded by Plutarch
(Art. 5.6; c£ Mor. 173 ff.) that we have of Queen Stateira breaking with
convention as she pulls back the drapes to exhibit herself to the populace,
is a device he uses to show her popularity and to compare her affability
with the cold aloofness of her arch-enemy and mother-in-law, Parysatis. 43
Brosius fails to realize that a harem is not necessarily a definable space; its
perimeters can change, and even though a woman might travel beyond
the walls of any organized harem-complex, her sense of segregation and/or
seclusion can remain. I concur with Brosius completely that Persian royal
women could be powerful and influential figures, but I want to emphasize
that their separation from an overtly public life does not necessitate any
loss of personal or even political power.
So who made up the royal harem? Without doubt, the most influential
woman at court, and someone who would certainly have been housed near
the king, was his mother. Her influence at court was usually unrivalled;
we are told that the king frequently dined with his mother (sometimes
with his wife), while a servant (probably a eunuch) with his mouth tied,
so as not to defile the king with his breath, held a large fan above the royal
pair, to keep the flies away. Courtiers ate in another room, separated from
the king and his mother by a curtain. 44
In a policy such as that of the Achaemenids, where the empire was
considered to be the personal domain of the dynastic family, it was natural
that the important women within the royal family (and in particular the
queen mother) would assume legitimate roles of authority within, and
perhaps even without, the royal household and Brosius has stressed that
queen mothers took it upon themselves to guard the safety of the throne
and of the son who occupied it. 45 Thus, queen Parysatis, the Achaemenid
dowager queen par excellence, became entangled in the deaths of the
pretender Sogdianus who threatened Darius II's accession to the throne,
and of the eunuch Artaxares the Paphlagonian who later tried to overthrow
him. 46 Sometimes, however, the power displayed by a queen mother
stemmed from personal reasons, usually from a vendetta, and had nothing
to do with the security of the dynasty (as we shall see).
Next to the queen mother in status was the king's wife or wives, since
most Achaemenid kings were polygamous; Darius I, for example, married
at least six women who bore the title king's wife. These women would
certainly have been lodged in the harem where they undoubtedly reared
their children - princesses, princes, and future heirs - and there is also
30
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 Be)
It seems that the number of women making up the royal harem could
be well in excess of 400 at any given time. Added to this of course were
the numbers of slave girls and waiting-women found in attendance on
the royal ladies and, on top of that, we then find the ranks of the harem
swelled by the eunuchs; while not every individual woman would have
necessarily had a eunuch slave, it is well attested that powerful wives and
Queen Mothers were served by a large retinue of eunuch staff. The Queen
Mother Parysatis, for example, is linked to at least twelve eunuchs in the
sources, (only two, Artaxares and Bagapates/Mastabates, are named) but
she may have been served by many more.
Where were these women and eunuchs housed? What is the evidence
for the physical presence of harem buildings in the Persian palaces? Early
excavators of Achaemenid sites, such as Ernst Herzfeld, believed that the
ceremonial royal palace of Persepolis presented conclusive evidence of
a harem. 51 Schmitt believed that he had found archaeological evidence
for the numerous women residing at the Persian court, and followed
Herzfeld's identification of the southeast building of Xerxes' palace as the
royal harem. 52 Similarly, A.T. Olmstead declared that:
To the west of the final treasury building, and separated from it by a street,
31
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
was the harem which Xerxes completed for his imperious queen, Amestris.
Surrounded by the guard rooms of the watchful eunuchs was a tier of six
apartments to house the royal ladies. Each tier consisted of a tiny hall whose
roof was upheld by only four columns, and a bedroom so minute that even
with a single occupant the atmosphere would have been stifling. 53
In fact, there are eight small harem-suites located along the central
hall (throne room) of the Malkata palace-complex, enough space to
accommodate the principal royal ladies of the Egyptian court.
The disputed rooms on the Persepolis terrace are indeed very small, but
the fact that the rooms are located in the heart ofXerxes' bl1ilding suggests
that the rooms had a function which far exceeded mere storerooms. The
imperial Ottoman harem complex at the sixteenth-centuryTopkapi palace
in Istanbul, is noted for the cramped, if beautiful, conditions in which
all members of the harem lived. It would appear that high social standing
did not necessarily mean spacious living quarters.
In her catalogue of Persian palaces, Nielsen suggests that harems can
be found at Persepolis, Pasargadai, and the two palaces built at Susa by
Darius I and Artaxerxes !.5 6 We need to bear in mind, however, that lying
around Persepolis and the other Persian palaces were enormous cities
made of stone, mud-brick and tenting. Gardens and lakes graced these
vast layouts and it is probable that if larger harems of the king did exist
they were set at a distance from the ceremonial centres of the palaces. It is
in these sites that the larger harems were no doubt located. In fact, with
32
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 Be)
33
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
It is natural to see the royal women as having their own staff of eunuchs
and other personnel; in fact according to Hellanikos, it was queen Atossa
herself who introduced eunuchs to Persia, 63 while late antique sources
claim that it was the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis. 64 While the two
accounts are without doubt fictitious, what is interesting is the concept
of women as the originators of the custom of castrating men and placing
them- into service. The Greeks certainly linked Asian women, especially
royal women, closely with the creation or employment of eunuchs:
a fragment from Sophocles' tragedy Troilus recounts how the Trojan queen
Hekabe ordered the castration of her son's tutor, 65 and in Euripides' play
Orestes, the Phrygian slaves who accompany Helen ofTroy are no doubt
eunuchs too. One of them tells how he would fan Helen with a rounded
feather fan while he sang an Asian song (1430-4):
In Phrygian fashion, it chanced I was swaying
Beside Queen Helen the punkha fan:
On the cheeks of Helen its plumes were playing,
Through the tresses of Helen the breeze was straying,
k I chanted a strain barbarian. 66
Edith Hall has noted that the punkha, a rounded feather fan used
to keep Persian royalty cool, was frequently shown in Achaemenid art
deployed by a eunuch; it would make sense to speculate that if Euripides
knew about punkha-fanning, he may well have known who performed
it. 67 By far the best evidence that can be used to identifY this Phrygian
slave of Helen's as a eunuch is Orestes' own statement that he is, 'neither
woman, neither found in the ranks of men' (1528).
The natural connection and affinity between women and eunuchs
found in the ancient sources is simple to explain. Most cultures that
make the association regard both women and castrated men as imperfect
creatures and incomplete human specimens. The heart of the matter lies
in the absence of testicles: Aristotle claims that male testicles act like
loom weights on the vocal chords, which they stretch, and it is because
of the taut chords that men and bulls have low voices and great courage.
34
Eunuchs and the royal harem inAchaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
Eunuchs and women have high voices and no courage simply because
they have no balls. 68
Of course, another facet shared by eunuchs and women is their ready
sexual availability. Persian sources tell us nothing of the intimate relation-
ships between Persian monarchs and their women, so it is no surprise that
we know nothing of a king's sexual relationships with his castrated slaves.
Nevertheless, our Greek and Roman authors often hint at eunuchs' sexual
availability for their royal masters. 69 The sexual relationship between the
eunuch Bagoas and Alexander the Great is well attested in the sources and
familiar to scholarship,7° but Curtius Rufus (6.5.22) makes it clear that
a sexual relationship with a eunuch was just another aspect of Achaemenid
royal practice readily adopted by the Macedonian conqueror: 'Bagoas
[was] an exceptionally good-looking eunuch in the very flower of his
youth. Darius [III] had had a sexual relationship with him and presently
Alexander did too.'
Less well known is the story recounted by Aelian of the sexual passion
shown by king Artaxerxes for a eunuch named Tiradates, 'the most
handsome and attractive man in Asia' (VH 12.1). In the tale, the good-
looking eunuch has died and the king is plunged into deep despair until he
is introduced to a beautiful Greek courtesan named Aspasia, the daughter
of Hermotimos of Phocaea. Immediately Artaxerxes is able to discern
Tiradates' feminine features in Aspasia's striking face and his passion is
re-ignited; but not to such an extent that he can perform sex with her.
The king sends the courtesan into his bed-chamber and begins to dress
her in the late Tiradates' clothing (cr-r6A.TJ); he is struck by the woman's
resemblance to the eunuch. And it was in the eunuch's robes that Aspasia
continued to visit the king and grant him 'consolation' for his grief: a case
for psychoanalysis if there ever was one!
Like the majority of the women they served, most eunuchs found in
the ancient sources are nameless individuals whose identities are lost
to history. Those who are named and who are given even a semblance
of individuality are the eunuchs linked to kings and noblemen and to
important royal females: to wives, mothers and daughters of kings and,
occasionally, to high-ranking noblewomen. Ktesias routinely records the
names of the most important eunuchs to serve under successive Persian
monarchs. He states, for example (Ktesias 51): 'Okhos, or Darius, was
sole ruler. Three eunuchs were influential at his court, especially Artaxares,
secondly Artobarzanes, thirdly Athoos.'
But it is difficult to know if these, and other named eunuchs who are
linked so closely to the king, had a hand in harem organization, or were
considered too powerful and kept out of the harem. The Greek text of
35
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
Esther notes that Xerxes' seven chief eunuchs, Haman, Bazan, Tharra,
Boraze, Zantholtha, Abtaza, and Tharaba, share the king's confidence and
his dinner, but they are instructed by the king to enter into the harem
to fetch queen Vashti (Astin) (LXX Esther 1.10). The Assyrian evidence
suggests that certain eunuchs were specifically trained for harem service
and were permitted to attend on the palace women only with the direct
approval of the king himself, and only while guards were present. The
Middle Assyrian 'harem edicts' make it plain that should a eunuch
enter the harem without permission he is guilty 'of an offence', which
suggests that harem service was strictly regulated. The claustrophobic
and oppressive atmosphere of the Assyrian palace becomes apparent in
an edict dating to the reign ofTiglath-pileser III (Middle Assyrian Palace
Decree 102-12):
Either royal eunuchs (Ja-ref-farranu) or court attendants [... ] If a woman of
the palace sings or quarrels with another of her rank, and one of the royal
eunuchs ... stands listening, he will be beaten one hundred times [and] one
of his ears will be cut off. If a woman of the palace calls to a courtier while
her hips are bare [and not covered] with a loin-cloth ... [and if] he turns to
speak with her, he will be beaten one hundred times. If a courtier wishes to
speak with a woman of the palace, he may not approach closer to her than
seven paces. If someone violates this decree and the eunuch in charge of
the palace hears of it and does not punish him, the eunuch in charge of the
palace will bear the punishment ... The [eunuch] in front of the palace will
bear the responsibility for all offences.7 1
36
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
37
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
38
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
for example, does not usually hold back on any sordid details of harem
intrigue, but he is completely silent on the subject of sexual shenanigans
within the harem, which suggests either that he chose to ignore them
(unlikely) or that they were not a significant feature of life in the inner-
court. Later Ottoman evidence suggests that under the watchful eye of the
Queen Mother, the harem could have the atmosphere of a convent. 82 The
distinct lack of sex-scandals in the ancient sources perhaps supports the
idea that the royal harem was perceived as a real seat of power.
The harem was a safe haven for the monarchy, a place in which royal
power was fostered and grew, but it did have its dangers: it would be
wrong to give a picture of all eunuchs contentedly serving their mistresses,
since access to the secrets of the royal family and daily service to the
king and the royal women obviously fuelled regal ambitions in some
harem eunuchs, and the fragments of Ktesias are littered with instances
of eunuchs attempting to usurp power or overthrow kings. What is
interesting, though, is the fact that in the sources no royal woman is ever
found conspiring with over-ambitious eunuchs and, in fact, the texts
indicate that in the case of treason, eunuchs and the royal women of the
harem do not mix. One story in particular supports this idea, that of
the extraordinarily powerful eunuch Artaxares who served at the court of
Darius II. Ktesias (43a) notes:
The eunuch Artaxares, being influential at court, conspired against the king,
wishing to supplant him. He asked a woman to make him a false beard and
moustache so that he could look like a man, but she betrayed him.
39
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
40
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 Be)
The king shut up and the queen mother won the day. But harem
intrigues continued to mount, and the dead eunuch became the point of
focus for the rivalry that existed between Parysatis and her daughter-in-law
Stateira, Artaxerxes' wife. Plutarch continues with his tale and points out
that Mastabates, even after death, continued to be the cause of domestic
discontent: 'Stateira opposed [Parysatis] ... and was angry, for against all
law and humanity, she had sacrificed to Cyrus' memory the king's faithful
friend and eunuch'.
Acknowledgements
This chapter has benefited from the generous advice of several individuals.
Accordingly, my thanks go out to Steven Griffiths, Nick Fisher and Anton Powell.
Especial thanks go to Shaun Tougher, for providing me with an opportunity to
work up my thoughts on Persian eunuchs and for his undergraduate course on
eunuchs at Cardiff University. He has been a patient editor and a good friend.
Notes
1 Achaemenid royal chronology runs as follows (all dates are Be):
Cyrus the Great 560/59-530
Cambyses 530-522
Bardiya (Smerdis) 522
Darius I 522-486
Xerxes I 486-465
Artaxerxes I 465-424
Xerxes II 424
Sogdianos 424-423
Darius II (Ochos) 423-405/4
Artaxerxes II (Arsakes) 405/4-359/58
Artaxerxes III (Ochos) 359/58-338/37
Artaxerxes IV (Arses) 338/37-336
Darius III 336-330
2 Flaubert 1852, trans. Krailsheimer, 24.
7 Brosius 1996. Eunuchs make only fleeting appearances in the book; there is
no systematic study made of eunuchs and royal women. In fact 'eunuch' does
not appear as an entry in the index.
8 Briant 1996, 279-88.
42
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
her beloved Antony, Cleopatra mocks a eunuch· named Mardian, saying, 'I take
no pleasure in aught a eunuch has. 'Tis well for thee that, being unseminared, thy
freer thoughts may not fly forth of Egypt. Hast thou affections?'
The eunuch answers, 'Yes, gracious madam.' 'Indeed?' asks the queen. 'Not
in deed, madam', Mardian explains, 'for I can do nothing but what indeed
is honest to be done: Yet I have fierce affections and think what Venus did
with Mars.'
Shakespeare's Mardian is a eunuch modelled in traditional vein.
An excellent study of the fictional harem (and the use of eunuchs within the
institution) in western literature is provided by Bernard Yeazell2000.
10 Peirce 1993. See also Gibbs and Bowen 1950, 71-89, 329-33. Chinese
13 For the textual traditions of Esther see Day 1995 and de Troyer 1995.
Even scholars who regard Esther as a historical novel concede that its author is
intimately acquainted with Persian royal custom. See discussions in Yamauchi
1990, 237ff.
14 Plato Rep. 479b.
15 Hall1989, 157.
16 Nielsen 1994.
17 See, for example, Reade 1972.
18 See Wilber 1989, 56 and Brown 1995, 96.
but one such relief does exist on an exterior door jamb of the palace of Darius I.
Perhaps this demarcates the public area of the place just as the eunuch relief seems
to denote entry into the private heart of the palace. For a dear illustration of the
bearded officials holding flywhisks and parasols see Wilber 1989 plate 13.
20 In his desire to read Persepolis as a temple dedicated to the celebration of
the New Year Festival, Fennelly 1980 has interpreted the beardless figures as
eunuch-priests in the service of 'a goddess'. As yet, however, no evidence has
come to light for any concept of eunuch priests serving within the state religion
of Persia. It is better to see the Persepolis reliefs as depicting elegantly dressed
and coiffured court eunuchs.
21 Meyer 1896, 194.
22 Neh. 1.11.
Hollywood epics often pick up on the Orientalist discourse: in the 1956 film
Alexander the Great, for example, a blond Richard Burton as the Macedonian
43
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
conqueror, defeats the Persian army and - almost as a reward - discovers the
tented seraglio of the Persian monarch, Darius III. The girls, attended by fat
effeminate eunuchs, and wearing classic Scheherazade harem-pants and jewelled
bikini-tops, are seen giggling together. Suddenly alarmed at the entrance of this
mysterious, handsome stranger, they hurriedly raise their gauzy yashmaks over
their faces, but too late; Alexander, like the cinema audience, is bewitched by the
spectacle of erotic Oriental hedonism.
25 See Dixon 1992.
26 See Marmon 1995 and Peirce 1993, 3 f£
27 See Briant 1996, 217-65.
wives in rotation.
32 See further Athenaeus 12, 528e-f and discussions in Sancisi-Weerdenburg
1987.
33 Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1987.
34 Lewis 1977, 21-2. Olmstead's narrative of Achaemenid history lays stress
on the nature of the harem; there is even an entry in the index under 'harem
intrigues'. See Olmstead 1948.
35 Lewis 1977, 22.
36 See in particular Olmstead 1948.
37 That, of course, is not to deny the importance of the satrapy system, or
Mitamura 1963.
39 One exception is a small raised-relief in the British Museutp showing King
Ashurbanipal dining al fresco with his wife Queen Ashurshurat in the gardens
of the royal palace, that is to say in the domestic quarter of the harem. For
details see Reade 1983, 65 and figs. 102 and 103. For Assyrian palace reliefs
see Russell 1991.
4° For the conception and subsequent imperial function of Persian art see
1990, 187.
42 See LXX Esther 2.3; Aelian VH 12.1. See further, Albright 1974.
43 Callirhoe travels through Persia in a carriage with closed curtains. See
see Brosius 1996, 94 f£, Briant 1996, 297 f£, and Cook 1983, 139 ff.
45 Brosius 1996, 105 f£
46 For Parysatis' influence at court see Ktesias 48-51; Dinon F 15b; Plut.
44
Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)
Art. 19. 2-3. See discussion in Brosius 1996, 100ff. David Lewis' work on the
Persepolis Fortification Tablets has led him to identifY Artaxares the Paphlagonian
as a certain Artahsaru, whose large staff of servants is visible in at least eleven of
the texts dated to the 420s BC. See Lewis 1977, 21.
47 See Brosius 1996, 105 ff.
48 Hdt. 3.134. See Brosius 1996, 106ff.
Egyptian New Kingdom harem see Leblanc 1999 and Tyldesley 2000, 113ff.
56 Nielsen 1994, 194.
Ogden 1999.
59 Dinan F 15b; Plut. Art. 19.2-3. See Brosius 1996, 110-11.
60 See Peirce 1993, 139.
decrees) see Roth 1995, 195-209. For a discussion of the Assyrian harem see
Kuhrt 1995, 526-31.
72 Frye 1962, 100.
73 Jones 1977, 175. See further comments in Baldwin 1984 and Day 1995.
75 For the role of royal women in the hunt see Brosius 1996, 91 ff.
76 Hdt. 3.31.1; 9.108.1; Ktesias 44. See Brosius 1996 90.
45
Lloyd Llewellyn-jones
78 Ktesias 36b.
79 See further Levine Gera 1993, 192ff.
80 Xen. Anab. 7.3.15.
81 Hdt. 7.107.
82 Peirce 1993.
83 Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1993.
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1995 Carthage. L'histoire, sa trace, et son echo, Paris.
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1995 Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, Oxford.
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1993 The Imperial Harem. Women and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire,
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49
3
EUNUCHIZING AGAMEMNON:
Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
Ruth Bardel
51
Ruth Bardel
52
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
In this case the 'peccant limb suffers in a grim attempt to make the
punishment fit the crime' (Driver and Miles 1935, 347).
Assyrian law is slightly less severe:
If a woman has crushed a man's testicle in an affray, one of her fingers shall
be cut off; and if, although a physician has bound it up, the second testicle
is affected with it and becomes inflamed, or if she has crushed the second
testicle in the affray both her [nipples(?)] shall be torn out. 4
In this talionic system of justice the testicle and the nipple, rather than the
hand, are analogous. In cases of adultery, Assyrian law stated that:
if the woman's husband puts his wife to death, then he shall put the man to
death; (but) if he has cut off his wife's nose, he shall make the man a eunuch
and the whole of his face shall be mutilated. 5
53
RuthBardel
the castration of the lover, making him a eunuch, and the tearing out
of the unfaithful wife's breasts are seen as corresponding punishments.
Furthermore, the punishment removes the offending body parts, in
particular the male genitalia and the female breasts, rendering the offenders
ill-equipped to repeat their offence. In the case of facial mutilation, the
adulterous lovers would not be (dare I say) particularly attractive to their
own sex, let alone to the opposite sex. The lex talionis, as illustrated by
these examples from Assyrian law, operates on a very basic, very physical
level - a kind of vindictive symmetry.
'Primitive' legal systems are not the only arena in which mutilation
takes place: the battlefield provides another context. A relief from the
temple of Medinet Habu in Egypt is one in a series depicting the military
campaigns ofRamesses III against the Libyans (c. 1180 BC) and portrays
an assemblage of captives and spoils. The bound prisoners are led in from
the right, while in front the scribes are 'busily taking a rather gruesome
count: piled before them are the genitals and hands of the slain, allowing
the enemy's losses to be computed' (Murnane 1980, 13). Such trophies,
hands and genitals, were customary and those who brought them in were
immediately rewarded with gold. The exact totals are confusing and highly
exaggerated but what is significant are the trophies themselves. 6 The hands
and genitals, hacked off the dead enemies' bodies, act as tallies for those
dead bodies: these 'trophies' are a grim synecdoche in the vocabulary
of mutilation.
The-mutilation of an enemy's dead body on the battlefield is a fear
which not only haunts the Homeric warrior but which is also, at times,
realised. In the Iliad, after Agamemnon has killed Hippol~chus, he cuts
off his hands (XEtpm; a1to ~t<j>£1 't!lTJ~m;), severs his neck with his sword
and rolls him like a stone through the crowd (II. 11.146:._7). Priam fears
that Achilles has hacked up (!ld.Eta'tt 'ta!lrov, II. 24.409) Hector's body,
trimming the trunk of its head, arms, hands and legs and chopping these
bits up into little pieces. 7 Among the things you could do to an enemy's
body is to carve up (a1tO'tE!lV£tv) his flesh and eat it raw just as Achilles
threatens to do to Hector (II. 22.346-8), as Zeus suggests Hera wishes she
could do to the Trojans (II. 4.34-6) and as Hecabe wishes she could do
to Achilles (II. 24.212-13). 8 Severing, carving or cutting up (a1tO'tE!lVCO)
the enemy's body and ingesting its parts is, these passages suggest, the
only way to assuage personal anger. Having one's corpse thrown to the
dogs or being left as food for the birds seems marginally better than being
carved up and eaten alive; both, however, point to a fragmentation and
dissolution of the body and its distinguishing features reducing, as Vernant
notes, a human to the condition of a formless thing (1991, 71).
54
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
To take the example ofThyestes' feast from the Oresteia: Atreus breaks
into pieces the toes, feet and fingers and hands of Thyestes' children so
as to render the food unidentifiable ('ta !lEV nooiJpTJ Kat XEprov aK:pou~
K'tEVa~ I £8pU1t't', avro8Ev ... I avopaKa~ Ka8iJ!lEVO~.I UCJTJilU o' mhrov mJ'tiK'
ayvoiQ: ... Ag. 1594-7). 9 It is clear from this account that the hands and
feet, the well articulated parts of the human body, would act as signifiers
for what the food actually was. Removal and the fragmentation, mincing
or crushing of these parts clearly disguises identity and incapacitates,
or to employ a pun, 'disarms'. 10 8pu1t'tro denotes breaking in pieces, to
break small, crush, and enfeeble. It can also mean to make effeminate or
unmanly (cf. Xen. Symp. 8.8 and Luc. Charid. 4); in Euripides' Bacchae,
Pentheus says to Dionysus, 'You are going to compel me to be broken
into pieces' (969). With a gruesome pun on the word 'tpu<j>av I 'tpuya~,
derived from 8pu1t'tro, Dionysus responds, 'And what a breaking up it will
be' (970) (cf. Kepple 1976, 107). The process of metaphorically breaking
Pentheus into little pieces, of gradually eroding his defences, of rendering
him weak and effeminate, which began early in the play, culminates in
his literal breaking into pieces by his mother and the maenads. Pentheus'
horrid death is also a kind of lex talionis, one which is intimately bound up
with his battle against divinity (Eur. Bacc. 45). Pentheus misuses his geras
and 'kingly power' ('tupavvioa, 43). In Plato's Gorgias, the punishment
for a man who is caught criminally plotting to make himself a despot
(turannidi) is racking, castration, the burning out of eyes, grievous
torments of every kind, crucifixion or burning in a coat of pitch (473b-c)
- punishments which are strikingly similar to Apollo's description of the
torture chamber in which the Erinyes belong in the Eumenides. Tragic
heroes are broken and fragmented in a very physical manner; a number
of mythical heroes are evoked by the description of the punishments
mentioned above, for example, Oedipus, Ixion, Heracles.
Outside the context of warfare, mutilation as a punishment is particu-
larly horrifying. In the Odyssey, Antinous threatens to send Irus the beggar,
who is about to fight Odysseus, to King Echetus if he is defeated: this
would be no holiday or simple enslavement, but as Redfield remarks, it
would be 'for the sadistic pleasure of that monstrous monarch' (1975,
269-70). The pernicious Echetus would cut off Irus' nose and ears with
the pitiless bronze, and will tear out/off his genitals and give them raw to
dogs to eat (Od. 18.85-7). The exposure of the genitals, the private parts,
is a particular affront to a man's aiooo~- his self-respect- having them torn
out and thrown to the dogs is a fate which really hits 'below the belt', where
it hurts or shames the most. This is Priam's worst nightmare, that dogs
would devour his exposed genitals after his death (aioro ... K'tallEVOtO) .U
55
RuthBardel
Antinous' threat to Irus becomes a grim reality for the traitor Melanthius:
Telemachus and Odysseus' servants inflict an Echetus-style punishment on
him (Od. 22.474-7) by cutting off his nostrils, ears, hands and feet, tearing
out/off his genitals and throwing them to the dogs to eat raw. Scholia
state that Echetus was a (mythical) tyrant of Sicily who discovered many
devices (!J.TJXavai) of torture or mutilation (aiKia) for the unfortunate
strangers sent to his domain. Echetus, discovering his daughter's 'intrigue'
with a lover, cut off the lover's extremities (l]Kpffi'tT)piacr£) as well as his
genitals ('ta aioo'ia <htEKO'IfEv) and maimed (7tTJpfficras), that is blinded,
his own daughter, Metope, an example of excessive paternal jealousy (Ap.
Rh. Argonautica 4.1092).
The association between mutilation, barbarians and emasculated males
is clear from Sophocles' fragmentary play, the Troilus, in which an enslaved
eunuch asserts that the queen herself (presumably Hecabe) had his testicles
cut out with a scimitar (fr. 620: crKaA!J.lJ yap opxns ~acrtA-1s EK'tE!J.voucr'
E!J.OUs). Hall states that the mutilation of Troilus' attendant may have
been 'much emphasized' in the play and suggests that it was a significant
factor in the more general feminization, not only of Asia, but also of
the barbarian body in the Greek imagination as it manifested itself in
tragedy (1989, 157). That it was the queen herself who had this mutilation
performed suggests that the barbarian political/royal body, itself perceived
as feminine, renders its entourage equally effeminate by this (barbaric)
operation. 12 Sophocles' fragmentary Po!yxena also mentions mutilation
(l]Kpffi'tT)ptacr!J.EVOt, fr. 528 Snell-Radt) which Harpocration (146, 12
Dind.) glosses as oi AU!J.atvO!J.EVOt 'tt<Jt 1tEptK01t'tO'\.l<Jt 'ta aKpq (the outrages
and lopping off of the extremities). This is quite probably a prophecy
regarding Agamemnon's murder. 13 The words aKpm'tT)ptat;m and 7tEptK01t'tffi
are used for the 'mutilation' of the Herms in 415 Bc. 14 Thucydides records
that the Herms 'had their fronts cut/knocked up all round' (7tEptEK07tT)crav
'ta 1tp6crm1ta, 6.27 .1) a phrasing which Hatzfeld describes as a 'formule
pudique' (1940, 161), for, as he and others- for example, Keuls (1985,
13) and Henderson (1987) -maintain, the phallus was a far more obvious,
vulnerable and outrageous target. Furthermore, the removal of the Herm's
phallus negates the meaning of its image (just as castration makes a man
a eunuch and changes his meaning/status?).
Although mutilation was thought in classical Greece to be a practice
more suited to barbarians than Hellenes (Hdt. 9.79), the examples
I have given from the Iliad and the Odyssey make it clear that such acts
of mutilation were not 'reserved in epic discourse for 'performance by
non-Greeks' (Hall 1989, 25-8). When, in 458 BC, Aeschylus makes the
Chorus of the Choephoroi add the detail that Clytemnestra mutilated
56
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
57
Ruth Bardel
58
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
59
Ruth Bardel
feeble and unable to avenge himself ('tva, <j>acri v, acr8Evi]~ yE.vol'to rcpo~ 'tO
avn'ticracr8at 'tOV <j>ovE.a, sch. Soph. El. 445). If the dead man is mutilated,
Rohde suggests, he will not be able to hold or throw the spear which in
Athens was borne before the murdered man at his funeral and was then
set up beside his grave - certainly for no other purpose than for supplying
the dead man himself with a weapon with which to take vengeance on
his own account. 29 Basically, a ghost without feet cannot walk, a ghost
without hands cannot hold a spear. Kerrigan states, 'Agamemnon has been
subjected to the fifth-century equivalent of being staked and wreathed
with garlic' (1996, 37). Murderers who wiped the il)strument of death on
their victim's heads - as Clytemnestra did in Sophocles' Electra - did so
in order to avert defilement (!-t:Ucro~) from the dead. This is similar to
sucking the blood of the murdered man three times and spitting it out
three times- as Jason does with Apsyrtus' blood, having mutilated ('tclf.LVE
8avov'to~) him. 30 Here too the aim is the catharsis of the murderer, the
expiation of an impious deed. As a concluding comment on his Appendix
on maschalismos, Rohde poses the following question, 'What "savage"
tribe ever had more primitive ideas or a more realistic symbolism than the
Greek populace - and perhaps not populace only - of classical times in
the sinister backwaters of their life into which we have here for a moment
descended?' If Rohde's question is trimmed of its notions of savagery,
crudity and depravity, leaving only the concept of realistic symbolism,
I believe that not only will Rohde's anguished quandary be answered but
also that the practice of maschalismos will reveal itself to be- in addition to
either a propitiatory sacrifice, an apotropaic gesture or a simpJe superstition
-central to the 'somatics ofDionysiac drama' (Zeitlin 1991).
For Aristotle ( GA 716a26-34), the fundamental difference between
male and female lies in their 'generative parts', that' is the female's
uterus and the male's testes and penis, what we would call 'primary sex
characteristics' or 'biological gender'. The male and female body are
further differentiated by their performative capabilities: in the pseudo-
Aristotelian Physiognomies (806b 32-5) we are told that 'Males are bigger
and stronger than females of the same kind, and their extremities are
stronger and sleeker and firmer and capable of more perfect performance
of all functions.' By 'extremities' Aristotle means arms, legs, hands and feet
-the 'instrumental parts' ('ta opyavtKa f.LEP11, Arist. PA 647b23) which are
distinguished by possessing the faculty to perform certain actions ('ta f.LEV
clVOf.LOtof.LEPll 't(\l ouvacr8ai 'tt TCOtEtV, GA 722b32). The 'extremities' are
also the 'moving parts' (KtV'll'ttKa f.LEP11) which, when differentiated into left
and right sides, privileged the right as the 'moving side' (oE~ta KtV'll'ttKa,
Problems 6.5). Zeitlin has shown how the 'dynamics of misogyny' (1978),
60
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
61
Ruth Bardel
62
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
speech in the manner of a Homeric warrior and then she outrages her
enemy's body just as a Homeric warrior might, thereby seeking to prevent
posthumous vengeance by cutting off his hands and feet and to sever the
link between father and son by cutting off his genitals.
Mter Agamemnon's murder, Clytemnestra declares her murderous
right hand to be a just craftsman (Ag. 1404-6). Clytemnestra's masculine
dexterity and murderous skill are also implicitly contrasted with Aegisthus'
feminine idle hands: the Chorus accuse Aegisthus of not having the courage
to commit the murder with his own hand (1633-4), a cowardice whiCh
is in keeping with his characterization as an effeminate 'stay-at-home'
(Ag. 1625-7: c£ 1224-5). The dexterity of the active right hand is a male
attribute adopted by the man-counselling Clytemnestra. The phallus is
the only part of the king's and husband's body wh~ch Clytemnestra cannot
annex, usurp, or appropriate so she lops it off- along with the hands that
once held the sceptre, that sacrificed Iphigenia and the feet that conquered
Troy and trod the purple pathway. There is, it seems, every reason for
the reticence of Agamemnon's ghost in the Choephoroi: Clytemnestra
has beaten him hands down, in life as well as in death. If, as has been
argued, revenge is mimetic and reciprocal (Nussbaum 1986) and therefore
lends itself admirably to the dramatic art (Kerrigan 1996), then the
very dynamics of revenge (and of theatre?) are literally crippled by
Clytemnestra's mutilation of Agamemnon's corpse. The 'inability' of
Agamemnon's mutilated ghost to appear in the Choephoroi is rendered all
the more bitterly poignant by the unexpected appearance of Clytemnestra's
own ghost in the subsequent play, the Eumenides, to exact revenge. One
can only conjecture that the castration of the king, the mutilation of the
body politic -Agamemnon's figurative and literal dismemberment - was
more than compensated for in the satyric Proteus with its ribald humour
and inevitable reinstatement and reassertion of the phallus. 36
Notes
1 See, for example, Stewart 1997, Montserrat 1998 and Bremmer 1991.
2 On eunuchs in ancient Greek drama, see Guyot 1980, 71-2 and Hall1989,
157-8.
3 Revenge and mutilation are intimately bound up with the failure of Agam-
emnon's ghost to appear in the Choephoroe. On this issue, see Sommerstein 1980
and Bardel1999, 120-50.
4 Driver and Miles 1935, 385.
5 Driver and Miles 1935, 389, my italics.
6 Peleus cuts out (ektemno) and keeps the tongues of the animals he slew in
63
Ruth Bardel
pass over the problems of maschalismos, for which one should consult E. Rohde,
Psyche ... these problems occupy another level of analysis which will be the subject
of a future study.' I have been unable to find this 'future study'.
8 Hecabe accuses Polymestor of rending asunder and cutting Polydorus' limbs
with the iron sword (Eur. Hec. 716-17. C£ 1076-8). Schlesier (1989, 117-19)
proposes a ritual sparagmos in this context, a notion disputed by Zeitlin (1997,
182 with n. 29) and Mossman (1994, 168). It is doubtful that maschalismos is
implied: see further Bardel1999, 205-6.
9 In an article (The Guardian, 8/9197) by Gordon Burn called 'Secret Lives,
Secret Deaths' on the recent case of the West murders at Cromwell Street,
Gloucester it was reported that one of the Wests' victims' bodies, found after 21
years, had certain bones missing, especially from the feet and hands and several
fingers and toes. The kneecaps were also missing. Apparently, West had the
space to bury the body intact without mutilating it. The mutilation was, Burn
suggested, 'done for compulsive and obsessive reasons'.
10 Despite this, poetic logic permits the 6vci.pcov f.!Op<j>rof.Lacnv (Ag. 1218)
is still beautiful despite the fact that his body is mangled by the sharp bronze (If.
22.71-6). See also Tyrtaeus (fr. 10.24-5) where it is a foul thing for the old to die
before the young, 'breathing forth his [the older man's] stout soul in the dust with
his genitals all bloody in his hands'. See further Richardson 1993 on this passage,
Kirk 1985 on Iliad 2.261-4 and Janko 1992 on Iliad 13.568.
12 Another fragment of the same play (fr. 623) mentions something being 'full
19, 20.5. Like Henderson (1987), Hatzfeld (1940, 161) cites Aristophanes'
Lysistrata (tmv Epf.LOKomorov (the herm-defacers/castrators), 1093-4) as evidence
that the phalloi of the Herms were cut off. The Lysistrata was produced at least
four years after the event and its reference to the mutilation of the Herms is, in
Henderson's view, a clever way to motivate the covering up of phalloi because
serious matters are to be discussed. At 1093-4 the Spartan ambassadors - with
huge erections (because of the sex strike) take off their coats and the Chorus leader
says, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you. The herm-choppers might catch sight of
you.' See also the unidentified male who castrated himself- with a stone - on
the altar of the 12 gods (Plut. Nicias 13.2) and a fragment from Phrynichus the
comic poet where a character addresses either Hermes himself or an effigy saying,
'Dearest Hermes, don't you fall too and get yourself castrated' tfr. 58).
15 See further Rohde 1925, Appendix II; Kittredge 1885, 155-6; ]ebb on Soph.
64
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
16 Resonances of this are found in the Odyssey: Penelope tells the 'bold and
shameless' handmaid that her outrageous conduct is clear and that with her 'own
head she will wipe out its stain' (19.92). See Rohde's Appendix II for further
references. On this gesture in relation to Apsyrtus' murder, see Bremmer 1997.
17 So Photios, the Suda, Hesychius and later scholars such as Rohde 1925,
Appendix II on 11acrxaA.tcr116<;.
18 As Rohde 1925, Appendix II, notes, verbs ending in -ii~etv which are derived
from the names of parts of the body, can denote according to the circumstances
the utmost variety of actions done to or with the part of the body concerned: it
would, therefore, be feasible to assume that maschalismos simply meant to tear
the arm from the shoulder at the arrripits- as Benndorf 1895, 132 suggested.
Benndorf cites a sculptured relief on which the gods appear to be tearing out the
right arm of their defeated enemy as an example of maschalismos. In response to
Benndorf, Rohde asks whether or not the Greeks would have really attributed
this much-execrated practice of cowardly murderers to the gods. One example
from Homer seems to suggest that the gods might be capable of just such a thing:
Ares in the Iliad (5.842-4) is caught red-handed- literally and figuratively-
by Athena, stripping a mortal's corpse of its armour. Given Ares' mindless and
outrageous battle tactics, which Athena is sent to check, what might he have
done to the corpse of 'huge Periphas' had Athena not intervened? Besides, the
very physical injuries the gods inflict on each other - castrations, blindings etc.
- speak for themselves. A late-archaic engraved gem is interpreted by Richter
1968, no. 742 as showing Athena in combat with the giant Enkelados: 'She has
wrenched off his arm and is running away.' On the motif of Greeks maltreating
Trojan women and children, see the panels of the Mykonos Pithos discussed
by Vermeule 1979, 114-15.
19 Vermeule 1979, 222 n. 16, observes that similar practices have been reported
in Algeria and Vietnam: elsewhere she notes that 'placing a man's severed genitals
in his mouth, as practised in the Algerian and Vietnam wars, is not a Greek
method of humiliation, unless it enters into the treatment of the body in
maschalismos' (234 n. 18). C£ Shay 1994 and Trittle 1997.
20 Vermeule 1979, 236 n. 30, notes a similar practice from Assyria: 'Esarhaddon
caught Abdimilkutte king of Kundi and Sizu like a bird in the mountains and
cut off his head: "(Then) I hung the heads of Sanduarri and of Abdimilkutte
around the necks of their nobles/chief officials to demonstrate to the population
the power of Ashur, my lord, and paraded (thus) through the wide main street
ofNineveh with singers (playing on) sammu-harps," ANEP 291'. Heracles cuts
out (apotemn6n) the ears, noses and hands of Erginus' heralds, ties the body
parts around their necks and sends this as a tribute to Erginus (Apollodorus
2.4.11).
21 See West 1966 on Th. 179-80 and Vlahogiannis 1998, 22 on the superiority
of the right hand. Vlahogiannis also notes that slaves may be mutilated but that
the 'integrity of the [Athenian] citizen body had to be kept intact' (24).
22 See Rose 1958 on 185ff. and Sommerstein 1989, on 186-90; the Greeks
65
Ruth Bardel
Appendix II.
25 See Parker 1983, 220 with n. 71 for a list of such theoi apotropaioi, which
can include the dead and Apollo. On maschalismos, its etymology and ritual
see Parker 1984.
26 See Rohde for a more detailed analogy between ~acrxaA.icr~ata and ro~o
on Cho. 483-4 notes, 'one can Ktisetv a religious institution (here [Cho. 484]
something in the nature of hero-cult, or at least the tendance of a venerated
family ghost) as well as a city or the like'. Rather than instigating a hero-cult,
Clytemnestra lops it off at source.
28 Rose 1958, on 441-2 points to Orestes' own lack of resources and the
practice of cutting the thumb off the right hand of a dead enemy in order that he
-or his ghost- may no longer be able to hold a spear (Rohde). Hughes 1991,
Appendix A, 194-8, cites the practice of maschalismos as a possible explanation
for the cut marks on bones found in graves. ,
30 Ap. Rh. Argonautica 4.447-80: the scholia glosses this with aKprotl]ptasnv.
31 For castration, Aristotle uses the verbs EK:te~vro (GA 716b; Problems 10.36)
expressed as 'seeing someone's hand in the matter'. Zeus' influence, the stroke of
his hand, can be traced in Troy's defeat (Ag. 367-8: compare 663; Cho. 394-5).
Orestes' own hand is guided by Justice and the gods (Cho. 948; cf. 435-7) as
he exacts vengeance for his father's death. Agamemnon who endured much in
a woman's cause loses his life at the hands of a woman (Ag. 1453-4) who claims
to be the instrument of the 8ai~rov (Ag. 1500-4).
33 See Young 1964, 15; Koniaris 1980, 42-4; and Tyrrell 1980, 44-6. Might
hung around the dead man's neck would be 'natural aKpro'tl]ptacr~ata toii veKpoii
66
Eunuchizing Agamemnon: Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and maschalismos
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70
4
].L. Lightfoot
The Dea Syria, or LUpia 8£6<;, is the name given to the north Syrian
goddess Atargatis by her classical worshippers. She began as the city-
goddess of Hierapolis (the Greek name of the Aramaic town of Manbig,
or Bambyke), though from the Hellenistic period her cult was carried
across the Mediterranean to the Aegean islands, mainland Greece and
Macedonia, Egypt, and finally, under the empire, to the Danube provinces,
(possibly) Gaul, and Britain. Of course, she was long established in Syria
itself, where her cult was disseminated, brought into contact with related
cults, and fractured into a thousand minutely differentiated local forms. 1
Although it is never possible to say exactly what a deity - any deity -
'really is', we can at least say the following about Atargatis' character.
Her iconography shows her enthroned in state between lions, which she
had inherited from earlier Syro-Anatolian goddesses and developed in
tandem with Cybele, and she wore a mural crown when represented as
a city-protecting deity. 2 She was partnered by Hadad, the west Semitic
thunder god, though she had greatly eclipsed him in importance. She was
especially associated with springs of water; fish were sacred to her, and
various ceremonies in her cult involved processions to and from water. In
short, she was a beneficent, protective deity, a goddess who could double
as the Tux11 IIoA.£coc;, or protecting Fortune of the City. She had militant
characteristics, but also nurturing ones; the combination is common
throughout Greece, Anatolia, and the Near East. She is addressed, like
many Anatolian and Levantine deities, as 'mistress' - Mcrnowa, K:upta -
and the sources sometimes present her relationship to her worshippers as
that of a mistress towards slaves, 3 imperious yet magnanimous, powerful
but merciful.
Among these 'slaves' by far the most distinctive group are the goddess'
self-castrated eunuch devotees. They are known mostly from Graeco-
Roman sources, literary and epigraphical, though they are also mentioned
71
JL. Lightfoot
in a Syriac text. For details we are wholly dependent on the former, which
portray them as attached to her service, but distinct from the college of
priests in her temple. They are depicted as ecstatics, associated with loud,
hypnotic music, auloi, cymbals, and tympana, which work them into an
anaesthetic frenzy. To the amazement and terror of onlookers they wound
themselves with knives, lash themselves and each other, and new devotees,
caught up in the general hysteria, perform the ultimate in consecration to
the goddess: the act of self-castration. Thus irrevocably tied to the service
of their divine mistress, they dress as women and live by begging, touring
towns and countryside and soliciting money and goods from the public
by their awe-inspiring displays.
The background to these practices is almost irrecoverahly murky. Earlier
literature often contains the claim that sacred eunuchism is typically
'Semitic': Graillot said so explicitly, and Robertson Smith, who did more
than anyone else to form the very concept of'Semitic' religious institutions,
regarded the sacramental shedding of one's own blood as one such ethnic
practice. 4 This view also points to the presence of effeminate or transvestite
priests in the high civilizations of Mesopotamia, where cultic personnel
of ambiguous gender are associated with lnanna/lshtar in Uruk, 5 and
to various sorts of gender inversion that classical sources connect with
Syro-Palestine. 6 But precise parallels are hard to find, or evanescent.
With the Mesopotamian material one is often unsure whether or not any
given category of priest was a eunuch (let alone a self-castrate), while the
nature of the historical connections (if any) with northern Syria remain
unelucidated. With the west Semitic material one is usually, dealing, not
with eunuchism itself, but with categories - such as 'sacred prostitution'
- that are supposed to be related to it, but bring formidable difficulties of
their own.? In these areas one encounters a powerful divin~ figure, a great
goddess with the power to change human gender; 8 but a similar figure is
connected with the eunuchs oflndia, 9 and she seems too vague or generic
to be useful in establishing precise historical relationships.
Another context for sacred eunuchs is Anatolia, where they are variously
attested. Not all are called galli, the word that will become standard in
Graeco-Roman sources for religious eunuchs and eventually for eunuchs
in general, nor are all associated with self-castration. They range from
the Euvouxot who, along with other Oll!J.Ocrtot (public servants), tend the
gardens in the sanctuary of Hecate in Lagina, 10 to the dignified figure
of the Megabyzus at Ephesus, who held office along with a maiden.U
The most celebrated case is the cult of Cybele, where Classical sources
repeatedly connect her eunuch galli 12 with the Phrygian 'temple state'
of Pessinus, though far and away the bulk of the evidence comes from
72
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
73
JL. Lightfoot
do gain some welcome context for the general scenario in Lucian and
Apuleius. Sixth and last, sources for the Sicilian slaves' revolt at the end of
the second century BC speak of their charismatic Syrian ringleader, Eunus,
from Apamea, who claimed to be inspired with dreams, prophecies, and
religious frenzy by the Syrian goddess. 18 All this behaviour is also ascribed
to the galli, whom perhaps he was emulating, but no source suggests that
he himself was castrated.
That means that our two best witnesses are also the two most 'literary',
and those hardest to take at face value. The prime difficulty about DDS
has always been taken to be the issue of its authorship. If, the argument
goes, it really is the work of the satirist Lucian, then we can no more rely
on any of its contents than we can on any of his other 'satirical' works,
such as the True Stories. In his certainly authentic works, Lucian was
a committed opponent of all religion, who draws upon established literary
and philosophical traditions to lampoon superstition and flummery. But
DDS itself is remarkably opaque, and it is difficult to say whether the belief
in Lucianic authorship is effect or in fact cause of its being read as satire.
In my forthcoming commentary I intend to argue for Lucianic authorship,
of which I a1Tl almost convinced on linguistic and other grounds; but I do
not think that the treatise must, for that reason, be satire. The difficulties in
evaluating DDS inhere rather in its genre, which is a pastiche of the fifth-
century Herodotean manner. The pastiche humorously exaggerates this
manner, sometimes approaching 'parody', but that is a word I avoid. Parody,
at any rate ancient parody, usually implies humorous transplantation into
an incongruous new context, whereas this is ethnography :ij.rmly on its
own ground. That is where the problems lie, and they are essentially those
that bedevil all ancient ethnography: the presentation of the subject-matter
as 'exotic', the failure to view the subject on its own terms (is that ever pos-
sible?), and- despite the 'exoticism' of the subject- its mediation through
a Greek (or Graeco-Roman) interpretative framework. Additional problems
here include the gentle fun at the expense of the Herodotean narrator,
whose foibles are here raised to a high degree: this is not, I maintain, 'satire'
of the cult, but it might compromise the text's evidential value.
So much to understand the literary context and positioning of the
galli in DDS. They are presented as the exotics par excellence in an exotic
cult. On 'certain days' in Hierapolis' spring festival, they gather outside
the temple, where, to the throb of drums and drone of auloi, they gash
their arms and beat each other, and onlookers are impelled to join in: the
young man 'to whom this fate has been allotted' comes into the ring, seizes
a sword which is lying at the ready, and- excises his genitals. He runs
through the streets with the severed objects, and receives female clothing
74
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
75
JL. Lightfoot
This is a document illustrating popular impressions and prejudices
about the galli. They are pathic homosexuals, extortionists, thieves, quite
without shame even when confronted with the evidence of their crimes.
The effect depends on its exploitation of familiar scenes and situations and
its reinforcement of popular prejudice; in other words, it is a collection of
topoi. We cannot take the descriptions of what the galli get up to behind
the scenes as evidence for anything very much. But the episode does
suggest that the sight of these beggars was familiar, that the audience might
at least be expected to recognize the milieu evoked by the author. Indeed,
the basic situation, in which a donkey bears divine images for a company
of mendicants on their progress through the countryside, reflects both
a well-known proverb about 'the ass that carries the mysteries', and also
a story which does the rounds in the writers of fables. 20 Here, a company
of mendicants wear out their beast of burden and then use its hide to
make tambourines, so that in death it has to withstand even stronger
blows than in life (was the author of the novel trading on his audience's
expectation that this would be a likely end to Lucius?). The sources speak
variously of 1-lTJ'tpayup'tat, n:iUot ayup'tat, and Galli Cybebes, and connect
them explicitly with Rhea and Attis.
Despite its negative presentation of the eunuchs, the novel does
contain a wealth of rich and evocative details, from which, for reasons
of space, I shall select just a couple. First, it is interesting that the self-
wounding is not presented simply in terms of anaesthetic unreflecting
frenzy, but, in the case of at least one man, precisely as a punishment
for religious disobedience and transgression, rather like the B.agellants of
early Christianity (Apul. Met. 8.27-8). Second, neither novelist calls the
eunuchs 'galli'. They usually call them 'pathics' (Kivatoot/ cinaedi), and
both use 'priests' (t£p£tc;/ sacerdotes) in a scurrilous epis~de when they
want to expose their hypocrisy. Once Apuleius also uses semiviri, Lucian
yuvatKiac;; Lucian also uses ayup-rat. But what seems to me worthy of
note is the way they speak to each other. Not only do they use a high
pitch, which is in fact characteristic of the way classical sources represent
effeminate speech. They also use feminine appellatives (Kopaata, puellae);
and they use feminine parts of speech of themselves and to each other
(Lucian Asin. 36 aau-rfj ... A-a~ouaa; Apul. Met. 8.25.4 misera; 26.1
mercata), while the narrative itself refers to them in the masculine.
They may also have assumed women's names. The subject of an epigram
by Philodemus about a devotee of the Mother of the Gods is called
Tpuyovtov, 'little dove' (Garland 3320-7 == AP 7.222),' which coheres
extremely neatly with the way the galli refer to themselves as palumbulae
in Apuleius (Met. 8.26.4). Other authors, speaking of galli in the
76
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
77
JL. Lightfoot
across Anatolia, and in whose debt both Atargatis and Cybele stood,
to varying degrees. In both cases we can point to likely iconographical
borrowings, although recent studies of Cybele have powerfully challenged
the thesis that her name itself reflects Kubaba'sY The difficulty is that
there is practically no evidence either for or against the presence of sacred
eunuchs in Kubaba's cult. It is true that the hero of DDS's aetiology
of sacred eunuchism in Hi erapolis is called 'Combabos', a name which
etymologically denotes him her servant (§§ 19-27). But the story itself has
demonstrable analogues in stories about secular eunuchs in royal courts,
and, whatever else it is, is not a i£po~ A6yo~ reflecting cultic realities in the
religion of Kubaba. Even if we concede the presence of sacred eunuchs in
the cult of Kubaba as a likelihood, this has only limited explanatory value.
First, Lynn Roller has recently argued for minimising the influence of
Kubaba on Cybele (1999, 44-53). Second, sacred eunuchs are (as already
noted) attested in many more cults in Anatolia: is Kubaba to be held
responsible for them all, or might we be dealing rather with some sort of
indigenous practice that did not simply diffuse from one single centre,
but was inherited from a prehistoric substrate, and gave rise to the very
various formulations and realizations attested in classical sources? Thirdly,
to address the particular similarity between the eunuchs of Cybele and
Atargatis, is not the appeal to distant common origins an unsatisfYing
explanation for the truly salient parallelisms, the common themes and
tropes, in classical sources?
I hope to deal at greater length with the highly complex relationship
between Cybele and Atargatis in my own edition of DDS. Certainly
Atargatis was in the debt of her north Syrian predecessors, and certainly
the influence of Kubaba was diffused throughout Anatolia, but by the
time we encounter the evidence for the cult of Atargatis, i~ and after the
Hellenistic period, it is in the process of encountering an overwhelming
tide of influence that sweeps in the opposite direction, from west to east.
That is, it is ever more in the debt of Cybele, and, to judge from the
evidence of iconography, this is not the Phrygian goddess at home in
her central Anatolian highlands, but the Cybele whose image the Greeks
constructed after they first encountered her in the cities of Ionia in the
sixth century BC. Atargatis moved closer to Cybele in many ways. Like her,
she sat enthroned between lions, or mounted on a lion, and she learned
to brandish Cybele's (Greek) attribute, the tympanum, sign of the heady
music associated with Cybele and her galli (DDS§ 15, c£ 50). 28 She seems
to have been carried abroad in company with Cybele in and after the
third century Be; classical sources were very alive to the similarities, and
reveal them housed in adjacent temples or sharing cultic personneP9
78
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
79
JL. Lightfoot
a western import. But might Hierapolis itself have confected a link with
Cybele? For that we have the testimony of a foundation myth concerning
'Rhea' (Cybele) and 'Attes' (Attis) in DDS §15, though it is obviously
adventitious, whether or not it represents local tradition (it may not).
Indeed, the presence of Attis, a divine prototype for the galli, is a significant
difference between the cults of Cybele and of Atargatis. Attis is a Graeco-
Roman accretion who is not attested in Phrygian material, nor is he, or
any corresponding figure, otherwise linked to Atargatis. 34 (Combabos, the
mythological paradigm in DDS §§19-27, is on quite a different footing.)
Does that indicate that the cult of Atargatis 'preserves' an earlier state of
affairs, an association with eunuchs before the particular, western invention
of Attis? Strikingly, the presence or absence of Attis seems to have no effect
on the literary portrayal of the galli in the two cults. 35
Whatever the history of sacred eunuchism in northern Syria, it has, by
the time we encounter it, been passed through a classical filter, whether
we mean to imply that the nature of the institution itself is altered
through contact with Hellenism, or just that it is represented with the
same biases. Have we any hope of identifying what these might be, if we
have no corrective material, nothing that allows the eunuchs to speak for
themselves, nothing that might serve as a control? Some doubts strike
quite deep. DDS and Apuleius/Lucian are far from alone in putting
all the emphasis on momentary religious ecstasy, the spectacular act of
self-castration, the blood: Catullus 63, on Attis, is but the most obvious
addition. to this category. But what no source tells us is whether their
communities included other sorts of person - born hermaphrodites
(though these would be rare) or those suffering from diseas~; those who
had chosen to live as women as a matter of personal preference; those
who had been castrated before puberty (for there were plenty around);
or perhaps even those who were not castrated at all, but had chosen to
associate themselves with the group, perhaps for economic reasons, as
professional beggars. 36 What suggests that we might think along these
lines is, first, the intrinsic improbability that the community sustained
itself only in the way Lucian describes; secondly, the fact that Pliny twice
speaks of galli castrating themselves in a way which is citra perniciem,
not dangerous; 37 and thirdly, analogies with modern communities of
religious (or quasi-religious) eunuchs. For example, the Indian hijras are
communities whose members are attracted to it for a variety of reasons,
economic, familial, physiological, sexual; more disturbingly, there are also
wide reports of coercion and kidnapping. At all events, the members do
not join as a result of momentary impulse. It seems worth raising the
possibility that our classical sources are systematically distorting the data
80
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
81
JL. Lightfoot
a structural contrast with the phallic interpretation that Lucian puts on the
cult in Hierapolis (§§ 16, 28), and which is borne out by the dedication
of phalli in Atargatis' sanctuaries at Delos and Dura Europos (though
galli themselves are not attested in either place). 42 Were they accorded the
positive recognition of being a 'third gender'? I think not: the tendency
is rather to regard them as neither one thing nor another. 43 Then again,
when Lucian describes their castration in DDS, he speaks as if the removal
of masculinity automatically equates with femininity: 'they no longer wear
male dress, but wear women's clothes and perform women's work' (§27).
This equates with what is enacted in the cult: once a man sets aside his
masculinity, he dons female dress. But also, there is a remarkably dose
literary parallel in the Hippocratic text which deals with the effeminate
Scythians: 'they don women's dress, renouncing their masculinity; they
become women, and they work alongside the women at the same tasks'
(Hipp. Aer. 22). In both texts, it is as if masculinity negated automatically
entails female outward appearance, and even female economic activity.
What proportion of Lucian's own statement is 'fact', and what is literary
affiliation, in the tradition of fifth-century Ionian ethnography which he
pastiches, is - as always -very hard to judge.
It is difficult to sum up when so little is known, but I hope to have
collected the data for eunuchs in the cult of Atargatis and to have drawn
out some of the resulting problems. Very little is known about the
galli other than from classical sources that are hostile or in other ways
problematic, and the institution and its history are no doubt complex in
ways that we cannot now even guess. But behind the distorted picture
that classical sources present, we should be prepared to' acknowledge
influences from both east and west, both 'oriental' and 'orientalising'.
How far did Hellenism simply accord the galli of Cybele and Atargatis an
undifferentiated treatment, and how far did it actually make them alike?
We could ask of the institutions what we could ask of any individual
among them: to what extent were they really 'like that', and to what
extent made so, or made to seem so, by Graeco-Roman image-making,
prejudice, and literary tradition?
Notes
1 The only empire-wide survey available is that ofHorig 1984, 1550-75. For
the Greek evidence, see Morin 1960, and for Syria, Drijvers 1980, 76-121. For
Hierapolis itself, RAC s.v. Hierapolis (Mabbog), 27-41 (Drijvers).
2 For her iconography, see LIMC s.v. Dea Syria (Drijvers); Horig 1979.
82
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
Euseb. vtt. Const. 3.55 (using the same phrase of effeminates at the sanctuary
at Aphaca, inland from Byblos).
7 Beard and Henderson 1997.
8 For their power to turn men into women, see Archi 1977; Roscoe 1996, 219.
1101.19, 't[oii pa~8ou]xou euvouxou, who works alongside the tEpEU<; to ensure
that boys' choirs perform their duty.
11 Strab. 14.1.23 (using the imperfect: it is unclear whether this has fallen into
bibliography.
13 Apul. Met. 8.24---9.10; Luc. Asin. 35---41. For the cult in Beroea, see Morin
59 (translation); Drijvers 1980, 76-7; for the Greek version, see Euseb. Praep.
Evang. 6.10.44.
15 CIL vi. 32462 = ILS 4280; c£ Giammarco Razzano 1982, 252.
16 Fossey 1897, 59-61 no. 68; Drijvers 1980, 119; Giammarco Razzano 1982,
253.
17 SEG 7 (1934), 801 (with references); Robert 1936, 108 no. 61; Drijvers
1980, 91-2.
18 Flor. 2.7.4-7; Diod. Sic. 34.2.5-9.
19 For public self-castrations, see Lactant. Div. Inst. 1.21.16; for the use of
knives, see Juv. 2.115-16; Mart. 9.2.14; for throwing severed genitals, see Dio
Cass. 80.11, Clem. AI. Protr. 2.15.2.
20 Henrichs 1976, 277; for the proverb ovo<; a:yolV JlUcrn'Jpta, c£ Ar. Ran. 159;
Apostolius 12.75; Suda o 382; Paus. Att. o 17 (Demon, FGrHist 327F12); for
the fable, c£ Aesop. Fab. 173 Hausrath; Babrius Fab. 141, Phaedr. Fab. 4.1,
of Galli Cybebes; Babrius re-used by Tzetz. Chi!. 13, Hist. 475, 251-67; cf.
Aesop. Fab. 193.
21 Adams 1984, 53---4 (Latin); Bain 1984,29-30 (Greek); c£ RACs.v. Effemi-
83
JL. Lightfoot
23 The calendar of 354, CIL U 260 (with commentary on 313-14); c£ Julian.
Or. 5 p. 168c-169d; Lydus Mens. 4.59-60; Macrob. Sat. 1.21.10, cf. Val. Max.
8.239-42. Note, however, that this is western, mostly Roman, evidence, and .
centres upon the figure of Attis: the Anatolian background (if any) is obscure.
24 Apul. Met. 8.28.2. For a relief found near Lanuvium showing a gallus
accompanied by a whip whose thongs are knotted with astragaloi, see Vermaseren
1977, no. 466.
25 Apul. Met. 9.8; c£ Juv. 6.517-21.
26 The standard work is still Laroche 1960; c£ Burkert 1979, 104-5.
28 For Cybele's tympanum, see Roller 1999, 136-7, 148, 173-4, 185, 296.
3° For the emergence of this type of figure in Greek sources, see Burkert 1979,
35 Cumont 1910, 679.43-4 'Sicher ist, das die syrischen Galli sich von den
grandes Galli (their height is a giveaway). For abduction and forced emasculation
alleged of the classical galli, see Martial 3.91. For doubt that every gallus was
necessarily castrated, see also Beard 1994, 173-4; Roscoe 1996, 203.
37 Plin. NH 11.261, 35.165.
38 Julian Or. 5 p. 168d, 'tO iepov Kat a7toppTJ'tOV eepo~; Firm. Mat. Err. prof
ref. 3.1-2; c£ the fragments of a Naassene hymn ap. Heitsch (xliv) fr. 2.11-12,
calling Attis xt..,oepov otaxuv cXIlTJeevta.
39 Apul. Met. 8.29.6 sacerdotum purissimam ... castimoniam, c£ Luc. Asin. 38;
Apul. Met. 9.8.1 purissimi illi sacerdotes; for Cybele's galli, see Dioscor. HE 1541;
Babr. Fab. 141.9; Var. Eum. 135 (119); Catull. 63.17; further ~xamples of ayvo~,
castus,purus in Nock 1972, vol. i. 9. According to Ps.-Cypr. AdSenatorem 15-17,
they claimed to be casti only on the days they celebrated their rites.
40 Bruneau 1970, 470 (ayvl)), 472-3 (purity regulation= !De/2530).
84
Sacred eunuchism in the cult ofthe Syrian goddess
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1984 'Female speech in Latin comedy', Antichthon 18, 43-77.
Archi, A.
1977 'I poteri della dea lstar b.urrita-ittita', Oriens Antiquus 16, 297-311.
Bain,D.
1984 'Female speech in Menander', Antichthon 18, 24-42.
Beard, M.
1994 'The Roman and the foreign: the cult of the "Great Mother" in Imperial
Rome', in N. Thomas and C. Humphrey (eds.) Shamanism, History,
and the State, Ann Arbor, 164-90.
Beard, M. and Henderson, ] .
1997 'With this body I thee worship: sacred prostitution in antiquity', in
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Body in Mediterranean Antiquity, Oxford, 480-503.
Bruneau, P.
1970 Recherches sur les cultes de Delos a l'ipoque hellinistique et a l'ipoque
impiriale, Paris.
Burkert, W.
1979 Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Berkeley.
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1900 'Dea Syria', in REiv. 2236-43.
1910 'Gallos', in RE vii. 674-82.
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1980 Cults and Beliefi at Edessa, Leiden.
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1897 'Inscriptions de Syrie', BCH21, 39-65.
Frankfurter, D.T.M.
1990 'Stylites and Phallobates: pillar religions in late antique Syria', Vig.
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1982 'I "galli di Cibele" nel culto di eta ellenistica', in Ottava Miscellanea
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1912 Le Culte de Cybele, mere des dieux, aRome et dans !'empire romain, Paris.
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1976 'Despoina Kybele: Ein Beitrag zur religiosen Namenkunde', HSCP
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1979 Dea Syria: Studien zur religiosen Tradition der Fruchtbarkeitsgottin in
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1984 'Dea Syria-Atargatis', ANRWii/17.3, 1536-81.
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86
5
Shelley Hales
For most Romans of the republican and early imperial periods, experience
of the eunuch came through contact with the cult of Cybele and her
consort Attis. 1 Cybele's cult, a manifestation of the Near Eastern and
Aegean worship of a mother goddess, was centred in Phrygia in Asia
Minor and was introduced to Italy in 204 BC, 2 via Rome's port of Ostia.
On her arrival, a temple was built for the goddess in the heart of Rome
on the Palatine hill,3 The cult was popular during the imperial period,
engendering much cultic activity both in and around Rome, particularly
at Ostia, and was just one of the many foreign cults operative within the
city. The mythology of Cybele's affair with Attis was canonized for the
Roman audience by Ovid at the very beginning of the first century AD. 4
In his version of the myth, Attis was Cybele's only lover but when he was
unfaithful, Cybele took revenge, driving him into a frenzy during which
he castrated himself and died. 5 Cybele then resurrected him to be her
divine consort, assured of his eternal fidelity. The cult was served by
the galli (led by the archigallus), a body of priests who purportedly (at
least in accounts of the Roman era) established their own relationship
with the goddess, as they celebrated the death of Attis, by similarly
castrating themselves. 6
The study of Cybele, Attis and her eunuch priests has had a long
history. It has inevitably involved questioning contemporary ideas of what
is Roman and exploring how to insert the alien into Roman culture_?
When Rome was still understood as the safeguard of Graeco-Roman
culture, at the hub of a vast empire which she must somehow initiate
into the ways of the centre, Cybele remained an anomaly. The difficulties
of accommodating an aniconic goddess with castrated servants into this
civilization could only be overcome by accepting a Romanized Cybele
whilst dismissing the more unsavoury parts of the cult, inevitably the ritual
castration, as something marginal and foreign. 8 As our understanding of
87
Shelley Hales
88
Looking for eunuchs: the galli and Attis in Roman art
89
Shelley Hales
mythological pornography which later found its way into the emperor
Tiberius' bed chambers. 21 It was preferable to see Parrhasios' repertoire
including graphic depictions of straight sex than an image of someone
of dubious sexual identity.
Galli
So how do these ancient and modern aversions affect the representation of
galli? There are images of galli and archigalli in and around Rome, many
commissioned by the priests themselves. The existence of such images in
itself demonstrates the toleration towards galli, their own relative wealth
and the pride they took in their positions. But they also help to show us
how they constructed their difference.
In other ancient societies, the physical difference of eunuchs was
regularly depicted. Assyrian representations might be understood to convey
the flabbiness associated with the hormonal effects of castration, through
the double chin. The beardlessness of the eunuchs also distinguishes
them from the long-bearded Assyrian elite. The freedom to portray the
physical attributes of the eunuch condition does not simply depend on the
different tenets of Assyrian art but also the acceptance of these eunuchs
within the Assyrian social system. 22 They have a carefully defined role
in society where their subservient position renders them safe. As their
position in the system depends on their physical difference, the portrayal
of that difference acts as a counterpoint to the elite male.
The Greek and Roman audiences themselves were not entirely incapable
of imagining or appreciating other bodily forms. The art of tl,1e Hellenistic
era of the last three centuries BC shows an increased interest in the exotic
and bizarre. The hermaphrodite, a 'female' figure with male genitals,
is a typical expression of this interest. 23 This figure, al~ng with other
Hellenistic themes, would find itself most conducive to Roman, domestic
tastes, copied throughout the houses and villas of Italy, for example at
the Villa of Oplontis. 24
The Roman gallus, however, would appear to have neither of the
interdependent advantages of an art which wanted to depict, and hence
externalize, his physical difference or a clearly defined place within, or
without, the Roman social system. In general, romanitas tended towards
aiding assimilation. Literary and visual rhetoric allowed foreigners to
assume guises ofRomanness if they so chose. The adoption of the language
of veristic and then imperial portrait types by the freedmen and women
of Rome, has long since been recognized as a means by which newcomers
of disparate races became acceptably Roman. 25 These portraits defined the
Roman man and woman as demonstrable, visible types, identifiable by
their clothes, hair and attitude.
90
Looking for eunuchs: the galli and Attis in Roman art
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Archigalli
The images of galli do not show us eunuch bodies -like the literary texts
they rely on costume to convey the idea of eunuchness. The motif of
castration is instead hinted at by constant allusion to the image of Attis,
whose own emasculation was generally held, at least in the Graeco-Roman
mind, to be the reason for the castration rituals of the galli. 38
The sarcophagus of a priest of Cybele, found in the cemetery at Porto,
perhaps the cemetery for Ostia, reiterates the importance of making
allusions to Attis. 39 On the sides of the sarcophagus, two reliefs show the
priest in his robes, going about his business, tending the shrines of Cybele
andAttis. However, on the lid he reclines in a different guise (Fig. 2). The
figure wears heavy jewellery; rings on the hand supporting his head and
on the other arm a bracelet depicting Cybele and Attis. Calza identified
the figure as an archigallus on the basis of that bracelet, understanding
it to be the okkabos worn by priests of this rank. 40 By doing so, he was,
of course, claiming citizenship for this man, explaining away yet another
uncomfortable image. 41 Whatever his status, however, this image shows us
a new level of assimilation between the priest of Cybele and her consort.
He adopts the reclining posture that we will later see is typical of the
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dying Attis and wears the eastern clothes of the Phrygian shepherd. He
begins to become Attis, an identity also ascribed to the Capitoline gallus
by means of an added inscription in Greek lettering. These galli reveal
a further level of difference, one that challenges the boundary between
mortal and divine.
A second object associated with an archigallus of Ostia, Marcus Modi us
Maxximus, furthers the connection between Attis and his priests. 42 The
man's oddly-spelt citizen name and his position are proclaimed in an
inscription on the object (which seems to take the form of a modius, or
grain measure) but there are no images of him here. Instead, symbols
associated with Attis, such as his panpipes, dominate the iconography. The
identity of the donor himself is only visually realized by a cockerel,
the Latin for cockerel being gallus. 43 In this image, the Roman man we
expect from the citizen name has disappeared, becoming completely
subsumed by his post as a gallus and taking the identity of Attis. The link
between Attis and gallus is reinforced in iconography of Attis, where he is
occasionally depicted riding on a cockerel. 44 The complexity of the joke is
here deepened. Gallus is not only the name of Cybele's priests but also of
the river by which Attis was raised and later died. Substitutions like the
cock allow artists to visualize links between the mortal and divine servants
of Cybele without having recourse to the depiction of mutilation.
It would seem, then, that the costumes of the priests of Cybele
deliberately differentiate them from traditional Roman priests, not only
by asserting their own difference but, more specifically, by alluding to
the different nature of their model, Attis. We might eve)l argue, but
only if Calza was right, that the archigallus, in particular, asserted his
rank by demonstrating a more complete absorption of the shepherd. The
dichotomy between dressing up as Attis and flaunting thdir own physical
difference is exacerbated by the question of how many of these Roman
galli and archigalli were eunuchs. But even if we were to accept that we
cannot safely identifY an actual eunuch, that those who commissioned
images of themselves may have been intact Roman citizens such as Marcus
Modius Maxximus, these images still raise interesting questions about
their patrons' ideas of self-presentation. If they are not castrated, then the
stress on dressing and acting like Attis might be explicable; galli have
to assume the guise of Attis because they are blatantly not him. That
Romans could take off the costume does not necessarily alleviate the
intensity of being Attis. It does, however, draw our attention to the
fact that these are Romans apparently deliberately alien~ting themselves
from the Roman north. They are not simply there to contrast with the
Roman male because that is, in fact, what they are. For Catullus' Attis,
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castration means divorce from his fatherland and family. 45 But for M.
Modi us Max:x:imus, becoming Attis serves a role in Roman society worth
commemorating. Of course, it is equally possible that, underneath these
same extravagant costumes, some of these galli are indeed castrated.
But how would we know? It becomes impossible to tell exactly who is
who: women, castrates and citizen men are all brought together by their
costume, regardless of conventional boundaries.
Attis
The increasingly important role of Attis within the cult of Cybele provided
the galli with a figurehead to emulate. The insistence on depicting Attis'
costume rather than physical disability made their assimilation of the
character much easier. Attis was the ultimate in the alien - different in
terms of race, gender and his subordinate status - yet easily imitated
by wearing the right clothes. As the Parabiago plate indicates, the
iconography of Attis placed great emphasis on his dress and paraphernalia.
His shepherd's tools, trousers and cap all allude to his social status and
ethnicity, not to his physical difference.
To this extent, the popular iconographic imagining of Attis pays even
less attention to the physical difference of Attis than that of the galli.
Elements of the story, one presumes, militate against this option. Attis has
to show us why he was so beloved by Cybele, a goddess usually above the
need for male company. Given this presentation of Attis as a beautiful,
virile youth, then his 'unmanning' might come as more of a shock. How
should the archetypal self-castrate be portrayed at the crucial point of his
story, in the episode of his death? 46 The typically classical moment is the
contemplation of the event before it occurs. In a fresco from the House
of Pinarius Cerialis in Pompeii, Attis contemplates the sickle which he
will use against himself The presence of this scene in a domestic context
reflects the eagerness of Roman householders to embrace the exotic in
their homes. But the full extent of Attis' montrosity is not realized. Attis
may have the weapon ready but he remains fully dressed, safely unexposed.
Again the emphasis is so strongly on the costume that some have seen this
not as Attis himself but as an actor playing AttisY Yet another layer of
ambiguity prevents us from accessing the eunuch body.
A class of reliefs, however, does actually depict the moment of Attis'
death, always in the same location under a pine tree by the River Gallus,
his injuries always hidden. In an example from the Sanctuary of Cybele in
Ostia, Attis is again fully dressed lying in the pose adopted by the figure
on the Porto sarcophagus. An allusion to his castration is made by the
presence of testicles pictured in the space between his knees as if just fallen
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from their rightful place. But the connection between these bodily parts
and the body itself is made very remote. 48 The alternative, as shown in
a relief from Glanum in southern Gaul, is to show him almost naked,
save his cloak and Phrygian cap, but covering up his wounds with his
hands. 49 Here we might feel one step closer to encountering a eunuch
body but, even here, Attis remains identifiable not by his deformity but
by his costume.
Even when his body is exposed, Attis' mutilation often remains non-
apparent. A popular Attis type depicts the shepherd in a slashed body suit
which billows out at the groin, revealing the crucial part of the anatomy. 5°
Almost always, the genitals are intact. Whether these images are to be
understood as Attis before his fall or perhaps as reflecting a possible
restoration after his resurrection remains unclear. What is clear is that
the majority of images of Attis avoid having to depict him in a state of
mutilation. He is the paradigm of self-castration, yet offers no visual
model of his physical difference. His physical appearance is used to remind
us that he was once a normal youth, his beardlessness an indication of his
age, rather than to define a third sex, the eunuch.
So, if the intact nature of some of the men involved might explain the
role of costume in the galli, then what might it mean for Attis? \lVhy the
accent on covering up what Attis has removed - in effect what makes
him Attis? Finally, in moving from the Ostian cemetery to the sanctuary
of Cybele and now into the shrine of Attis itself, the worshipper sees
Attis revealed (Fig. 3)_51
Fig. 3. Attis, Sanctuary of Cybele, Ostia. Vatican Museums. Photo: Fratelli Alinari.
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This image represents the moment following that depicted in the relief
at Glanum where Attis sank down by the Gallus. Now Attis reclines by
the Gallus (here personified as a river god), apparently restored after his
ordeal. The garland of fruit and pine-cones and the vegetation in his right
hand symbolizes strength returned. The god is nearly, but crucially not
quite, naked, still dressed enough to convey his identity. His Phrygian
cap competes for space on his head with a crescent moon and a circlet of
sun-rays. 52 But here, at last, Attis' body, the body we have been promised
since we looked at the very first image of a gallus, reveals the eunuch
condition. Far from depicting mere castration, the artist has removed any
sight of male genitals. In their place he has substituted a smooth pubis, its
female characteristics complemented by the curves of the torso. A second
Attis from the same sanctuary clearly depicts the hermaphroditic nature
of the god, bereft of male genitalia. 53
Such representations are relatively rare. The reclining Attis was found
in the inner shrine of the Attideum, guarded by two Pans, ensuring that
only initiates may see his true nature. 54 The inscription below the figure
tells us that Gaius Cartilius Euplus dedicated it by the inspiration of the
goddess. This is the revelation of Attis' true nature by Cybele herself and
reveals not his reproductive power but that of the goddess. The resurrected
Attis remains a dangerous concept- even as a hermaphrodite, he is upside
down, male and female in the wrong places.
It is from this image that the galli of Ostia must have conceived their
paradigm. They subsume their identities to him to become Cybele's
servants. The robes which they wear to identifY themselves with Attis are
not there to mask the manhood of Roman citizens but to hide the truth
of Attis' emasculation. As with Attis himself, the signs of potency which
the Cybele priests exhibit, such as the sheaves of corn which sprout as
tail feathers from the cockerel of M. Modius Maxximus, do not stress
their own biological potency, but the prosperity they can bring to Rome
through the power of Cybele. The images show that their choice is just as
valid in protecting Rome as the more 'manly' job of a Ramen or pontiff.
They can likewise act as benefactors to the community, even though they
have taken a different route.
The confusion in distinguishing between gallus, archigallus and Attis
underlines the fact that the visual presentation deliberately blurs the
boundary between Roman and alien, mortal and divine. How could
anyone tell castrated and non-castrated, worshipped and worshipper
apart? The Roman citizens who presented themselves as Attis presented
themselves as challenging everything that would generally be thought of
as justifYing their Roman identity. Boundaries that the male, patrician,
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Notes
1 For a general introduction to the cult see Vermaseren 1977. Roller 1999
offers a more recent alternative. Hepding 1903 represents the comparable study
of Attis.
2 See Livy 25.1.6. Also Ov. Fast. 4.247-348; Herodian 1.11.3-5. Gruen 1990,
Beard 1994 is easily the best. Sawyer 1996 and Roller 1997 continue to see
the gallus as wholly alien.
8 Sawyer 1996, 123 suggests that the incorporation ofCybele into the Roman
pantheon may have been something of a 'Trojan horse'. That is to say that the
Romans do not realize what they are letting themselves in for. Roller 1997,
549, makes the difference even more explicit- galli in Asia can be respected by
Romans while galli in Rome must be abhorred.
9 Beard 1994, 180-1.
10 Vermaseren 1977, 71-87, deals with the iconography of Cybele. For this
plate see 72-4. The dating of the Parabiago plate is uncertain. The debate is
summarized by Elsner 1998, 209.
11 The iconography of Attis is discussed in Vermaseren 1966.
the city.
13 Lambrechts 1952, 251 ff. See also Turcan 1996, 43. Other images linking
emperors or their wives to the cult can be found in Calza 1946, 201-3. Roller
1999, 313, mentions, for example, an image (in the Getty) ofCybele surmounted
by a portrait head of Livia.
14 Dion. Hal. 2.19.4-5.
15 Beard 1994, 174, discusses this issue and refers the reader to Sanders 1972.
16 Turcan 1996, 347 n. 75, suggests that okkabos might not only mean bracelet
but necklace as well. In that case, in fact, might all our images be of archigalli?
17 The cult remains apart from traditional religion, only of importance to
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18 See Vitr. De arch. 7.5.3-4 and Hor. Ars P. 11.1-5. For a discussion see
Elsner 1995, 51-8.
19 Quintilian is talking about the eunuchs who served the cult of Artemis. Smith
1996, however, doubts that these priests were eunuchs: see esp. 332-5.
20 Plin. NH35.70.
21 Carcopino 1923, 267-99. Turcan 1996, 49, is also inclined towards this
the castrated Attis. For a discussion of the role of the bisexual being in ancient
myth see Delcourt 1958.
24 See DeCaro 1987.
25 The principal advocate of this approach has been Kleiner 1977.
26 Popular Roman perceptions of eunuchs can be found in Juv. 6.511-21
1999, 320-5, draws a parallel berween the galli and the hijras of India who
similarly adopt women's clothes.
29 Mart. 3.81.
°
3 Calza 1932, 227-31.
31 Prud. Cath. 10.1076 ff. states that flagellation is a ritual of the archigallus.
32 See, for example, Vermaseren 1977, 99.
ambiguities of the castrated male. For a brief discussion of this poem see Roller
1997, 551-2.
34 In Varro's Eumenides, the hero is transformed into a gallus simply by putting
on women's clothes: see Roller 1999, 308.
35 Roller 1999, 295, believes that these, at least, are attested in Asia Minor.
36 The relief of a priest of Bellona is pictured and discussed 'by Elsner 1998,
208-9.
37 In her contribution to this volume Lightfoot considers the possibilities of
western influence moulding the cult of Cybele.
38 Roller 1999, 237 ff., feels that this is a sign of the Romanization of the cult as
a western audience tried to make sense of the alien rituals connected to Cybele.
In that case it might be suggested that the very appearance of Attis on the galli is
a sign of a western construction of an eastern cult.
39 The discovery and identification of this sarcophagus is the subject of Calza
1932.
4° Calza 1932, 233.
41 It is interesting to note that Roller's brief discussion of the Capitoline gallus
promotes this figure to the rank of archigallus as well: Roller 1999, 295.
42 Published in Calza 1946, 215-16. I would like to thank Mary Beard for
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Looking for eunuchs: the galli and Attis in Roman art
Bibliography
Beard, M.
1994 'The Roman and the foreign: the cult of the "Great Mother" in imperial
Rome', inN. Thomas and C. Humphrey (eds.) Shamanism, History and
the State, Ann Arbor, 164-90.
Calza, G.
1932 'Una figura-ritratto di archigallo', Historia 6, 221-37.
1946 'Il santuario della Magna Mater a Ostia', Mem. Pont. Ace. Rom. 6,
183-205.
Calza, R.
1946 'Sculture rinvenute nel santuario', Mem. Pont. Ace. Rom. 6, 207-27.
Carcopino,].
1923 'Attidea II. Galles et archigalles', Melanges d'archaeologie et d'histoire
40, 237-324.
DeCaro, S.
1987 'The sculptures of the villa ofPoppaea at Oplontis: a preliminary report'
in E. MacDougall (ed.) Ancient Roman Villa Gardens, Washington
D.C., 77-133.
Delcourt, M.
1958 Hermaphrodite. Mythes et rites de !a bisexualite dans l'antiquite classique,
Paris.
Elsner,].
1995 Art and the Roman Viewer, Cambridge.
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102
6
Introduction
The reflections on eunuchism and castration contained in the voluminous
writings of Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 BC-AD 45), especially in his several
exegetical treatments of the Joseph narrative in Genesis, provide a critical
key for examining Philo's conception of the categories of male and
female. 1 The foremost practitioner of biblical interpretation among the
Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria and our primary source for Jewish
philosophical thought in the Hellenistic period, Philo sought to integrate
the assumptions of scriptural revelation and the traditions and techniques
of philosophical dialectic. The novel forms of cultural accommodation
pioneered by Philo point the way to pagan and Christian philosophical
thought oflate antiquity, in which the innovations forged in the Hellenized
Near East would come to seem commonplace. Like these later thinkers,
such as Plotinus and Origen, Philo was vexed by the complexity of
situating the human body within his philosophical programme. 2 It was
with the aim of clarifYing the place and function of the human body and
the biblical commandments to which it is subject that Philo explores the
figure of the eunuch.
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between Philo's
use of gender categories and his attitudes toward eunuchism, castration,
and circumcision by exploring his allegorical exegesis of the Joseph narra-
tive. 3 I argue that his various, and sometimes contradictory, treatments
of castration have important implications for Philo's conception of the
commandment of male circumcision. 4 The centrality of circumcision for
the creation of visible Jewish difference in antiquity is unquestionable. 5
The act and sign of circumcision did not, however, function in a social
and cultural vacuum. Circumcision was not simply an anomalous Jewish
peculiarity, but, to the Greek and Roman elites of the early empire,
Jewish circumcision belonged to a larger category we might best term
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Ra 'a nan Abusch
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Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
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to ensure for himself and his family material survival in the face of
dwindling resources.
The gaps in this story are as impossible to resolve as they are numerous.
At the heart of any understanding of this narrative is the hermeneutic
puzzle of how we should read the character of Joseph; is he a model for
self-restraint and piety in the face of temptation or perhaps a vain, self-
promoting pretty-boy? 25 This question vexed the Rabbis as well. Both
possibilities are found side-by-side in Genesis Rabba, a compilation of
Rabbinic exegetical traditions on the book of Genesis. In an extended
treatment of this passage found in Genesis Rabba 87.3, the Rabbis
present Joseph as an ethical model, but also as a tattle-tale who acts with
condescension towards his brothers and as a dandy who calls attention
to his beauty and flair. 26 They suggest that Joseph has been purchased
by Potiphar to serve as a catamite and that Potiphar's castration for his
transgressive sexual preference is a punishment from God.U The Midrash
here even suggests that Joseph 'may be compared to a man who is sitting
in the marketplace penciling his eyes, fixing his hair, and prancing about
(,~i'V~ l"l.,l'1Q, ,,V~~ ii'r10, ,"~~V~ fUQWQQ ).' 28 The Midrash explains
that God, infuriated by Joseph's vanity, sends the wife of Joseph's master
to test his self-restraint. 'If you are a real man,' God says in the Midrash,
'here is a she-bear, come, wrestle with it.' This description of]oseph's body
movements, mannerisms and personal grooming habits go hand in hand
with the characterization of Joseph as Potiphar's potential catamite. In
fact, a careful reading of this description of Joseph's distinctive habitus
suggests that the Rabbinic composers of this Midrash were \J.S attuned as
their Hellenized counterpart to the connection between body language
and ethical character. 29 Like Philo, the Rabbis were sensitive to the clues
encoded in the biblical narrative. 30 1
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Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
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capable of blighting the successive growths, which were meant to live. (He
is like) a craftsman whose work it is to produce pleasure and can produce no
fruit of wisdom. He is neither male nor female (ou'tE &ppT)v ffiv OU'tE Si)A.Eta),
for he is incapable of either giving or receiving seed (mr£p1-1ma). None
such does Moses permit to enter the congregation of the Lord, for
what use can he find in listening to holy words when the knife has cut
away the power of faith and the store of the truth. 37
In this passage, Philo explicitly compares the stewards at the Egyptian court
to those who, by separating themselves from the cycles of reproduction,
have removed themselves from the community of Israel. These passages
employ a set of stock images that travel from one context to another. For
Philo, the eunuch combines physicality, passion, and pleasure with a lack
of reproductive capacity. Eunuchs are a perversion of Philo's conception of
human nature, an embodied nullification of his cosmic economy.
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Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
The phrase used here, Kat' aA.A.ov A.Oyov, might alternatively be translated
'According to an alternative interpretation'. While this phrase may merely
mark the contrast between the two interpretations Philo provides, it
may indicate that he is here transmitting a received exegetical tradition.
Whatever the best translation of this phrase may be, it is certain that the
abrupt change in discourse indicates that this 'alternate' reading stood out
for Philo as much as it does for the modern reader. It is no longer Potiphar
who is the eunuch, but Joseph. And the eunuch, far from representing
emasculate and emasculating passion, signifies the transcendence of the
physical and sexual self.
In light of Philo's frequent condemnations of eunuchs and castration,
this interpretative tradition is novel and surprising. Yet, I believe that this
passage articulates an undercurrent in Philo's approach to the mutually
constituting problems of gender and embodiment. In fact, in a passage
dealing precisely with the struggle to overcome human desire, Philo
relates:
To my thinking, those who are not utterly ignorant would choose to be
blind rather than see unfitting things, and to be deprived of hearing rather
than listen to harmful words, and to have their tongues cut out to save them
from uttering anything that should not be said ... Certain wise men, they tell
us, while being tortured on the wheel to induce them to reveal secrets have
bitten off their tongue, and so contrived a worse torture for their torturers,
who found themselves unable to obtain the information they wanted. It
is better to be made into a eunuch than to rage after sexual intercourse
(E:~c.uvouxta8Tjvm yc. !llJV Ufl£tvov f17tpo<; auvouaia<; A.unav). 41
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Ra 'a nan Abusch
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Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
Acknowledgements
I owe a great deal of gratitude to mentors at Princeton and in Amsterdam. Jan
Maarten Bremer and Ross Kraemer have added much keen insight. I want to
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Ra 'anan Abusch
express special appreciation to David Runia for having lent a virtual stranger
much time and creative energy. And, as always, Jan Willem van Henten and
Athalya Brenner have provided a special combination of ideal working conditions
and generous mentoring. I dedicate this chapter to my mother, Susan Abusch,
who has battled through so many transformations of her body and her self
Notes
1 For the texts ofPhilo's writings extant in Greek, I have used Colson 1929-65,
Baer's remarks are surprisingly close to feminist readings of Philo's use of gender
categories, despite his 'ideological' naivete. 'It is precisely Philo's depreciation
of woman that permits him to use her as a symbol of sense-perception, and,
on the other hand, his castigation of female sense-perception and the natural
world which leads in turn to a further devaluation of woman' (p.40). However,
where Baer perceives a fundamental difference berween Philo's use of male and
female within the created sphere and within the sphere of the undifferentiated
and uncreated Original Man, npiiho~ av8prono~, Mattila 1996 rightly argues that
Philo's gender categories pervade his anthropology and ontology at every level,
thereby shaping his conception of the divine as well. .
4 For discussion of Philo's attitude towards and conception of circumcision see
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Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
ship to the divine impregnation of the soul. See also Som. 2.273, Deus Imm. 138,
and Spec. Leg. 1.129 for the comparison between virgins and widows.
10 Recent discussions of Philo's representations of women, both biblical figures
and contemporaries, have been superficial and unsatisfying (Wegner 1982 and
1991; Sly 1990). Kraemer 1989 provides a richer account of the function of
gender within Philo's idealized portrait of the female proto-monastic Therapeutae
in De Vita Contemplativa.
11 Cher. 50. In Praem. Poen. 158-60, Philo writes: 'For when the soul is
"many," full that is of passions and vices with her children, pleasures, desires,
folly, incontinence, injustice, gathered around her, she is feeble and sick and
dangerously near to death. But when she has become barren and ceases to produce
these children or indeed has cast them out bodily she is transformed into a pure
virgin.' C£ Quaest. in Gen. 4.117-19, 242; Quaest. in Ex. 2.3.
12 See the comprehensive table at Baer 1970, 58-61 for sources relating to the
variety of passages in the Philonic corpus, e.g. Vit. Cont. 60 and Spec. Leg.
1.325 and 3.38--40. See Szesnat 1998, 97-107, for an excellent discussion of
this theme.
14 The reference here to Demeter is inexplicable. Philo, or a later tradent, no
doubt conflated this native Greek deity with one of several mother goddesses
whose attendants were castrated priests, such as the galli of the Anatolian goddess
Cybele. On the relationship between goddesses and their castrated attendants,
see the standard treatment by Vermaseren 1977 and, for a recent reassessment,
Sodergard 1993. See also Lightfoot and Hales in this volume.
15 Ebr. 211.
16 ]os. 58-66.
17 ]os. 58-9.
18 Eunuch 10, Demonax 12. See Gleason 1990 and 1995 for brilliant discussion
of this material. She analyses the function of rhetorical training and performance
for the cultivation of authority and the concomitant construction of masculinity
among Roman sub-elites, arguing that a rigorous semiotics of gesture, tonality,
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Ra 'anan Abusch
and style by which men scrutinized each other undergirded their strategies of
competition and alliance.
19 This distinction between 'crushing' and 'cutting' perhaps echoes the medical
<maoovtt «<>aparo and 6 euvouxo<; ci>aparo respectively. The Hebrew C"',C has
two possible, and not necessarily incompatible, meanings in the present context,
'eunuch' and/or 'officer'. In only some biblical texts does C"', C carry the
particular meaning of 'eunuch' (e.g., Isaiah 56.3-4; Esther 2.3, 14-15; 4.4-5).
The Akkadian origin of the word is sha~reshi, 'he who is chief'. There is still no
scholarly consensus about the exact meaning of this term. A large number of
artistic representations of the unbearded sha-reshi exist in which they are depicted
alongside the sha-ziqni, the bearded ones; these two classes of court officials are
frequently used together as a comprehensive term for Assyrian governmental
officials, but what exactly these words signifY has received insufficient attention.
See Grayson 1995 for the latest synthetic treatment of the question. LXX makes
this identification unambiguous.
25 For a collection of such traditions see Kugel1990 and Neihoff 1992.
26 For similar traditions, see BT Sotah 12b, 36b; Genesis Rabba 83.6, 86.3-6,
91.6. Levinson 1997, 269, reads these traditions through the lens of Graeco-
Roman theatrical culture, demonstrating that 'through a cross-coding of the
gender and cultural codes in the Joseph narrative, the hegemonic discourse of
the theater is exploited to denigrate the dominant foreign cvlture as a form of
deviant identity'. Although sympathetic to Levinson's focus on ethnicity, this
chapter instead emphasizes the way Philo's ethical and philosophical categories are
mapped as gender transgression and transformation. It still remains to contrast
Rabbinic and Philonic exegesis of the Joseph narrative in terms of their (differing?)
relationships to the surrounding Graeco-Roman culture.
27 In an attempt to explain the apparent identification of Potiphar ~~"'Q,~)
the 'eunuch' with Potiphera (V,~ "''Q,~ ), the priest of On of Genesis 41.45,
the father of Aseneth and eventual father-in-law of Joseph, the Rabbis suggest
in Genesis &tbba 87.3 that Potiphar had acquired Joseph in order to use him for
sexual purposes and was castrated as a result. The punishment of castration is
derived from a word play on Potiphar's name, whose last element V,~ means
'to destroy', and hence 'to castrate'.
28 Genesis Rabba 87.3. Translation mine.
116
Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
on many of these same clues in the biblical text. In the Testament ofjoseph, as in
Philo, Joseph is portrayed as the enkratic man (tou £yKpatou<;) par excellence,
an ethical model of temperance and chastity (Hollander 1981). His obsessive
concern for his chastity transforms his sexual potential into a powerful and
attractive religious force. Similarly, in the proto-Romance joseph and Aseneth,
Joseph's combination of beauty and aloofness lend him power and authority.
Aseneth even mistakes the angel who comes to her for Joseph, perhaps alluding
to Joseph's youthful and indeterminate beauty.
31 Joseph is the only man in the Bible described as beautiful and comely,
M~,Q M~~, ,~l'1-M~~ (Genesis 39.6). These epithets may merely echo Joseph's
maternity through Rachel, ·since the phrase is only otherwise used to describe
her (Genesis 29.17). Yet, later narrative and exegetical treatments of Joseph's
character and behaviour, Jewish, Christian, as well as Islamic, make his beauty
central to their interpretations of the narrative.
32 This description of the court eunuch draws heavily on Hopkins 1978, where
for the first time a sociological analysis is applied to the function of the eunuch
at the late Roman imperial court.
33 Genesis 41.50-52.
34 Jubilees chs. 34 and 39 likewise emphasizes that, like Potiphar, the two
is, this word is especially emphatic in this context, where it possesses both
a normative and a philosophical meaning.
40 Leg. AIL 3.236-7.
41 Det. Pot. Ins. 176. Origen cites this very passage in his justification of Jesus'
call to self-castration at Matthew 19 .12. See below for discussion.
42 See Som. 2.64 where Philo writes: 'For just as we find on trees, to the
117
Ra 'a nan Abusch
43 Spec. Leg. 1.9. Later in Spec. Leg. 1.303 Philo adds: 'But the law says that some
are uncircumcised in the heart. Circumcise the hardness of your heart ... prune
away from the ruling mind the superfluous overgrowths sown and raised by the
immoderate appetites of the passions and planted by folly, the evil husbandman
of the soul.' Likewise, at Mig. Abr. 92, he writes: 'It is true that receiving
circumcision does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and
the putting away of the impious conceit, under which the mind supposed that it
was capable of begetting by its own power: but let us not on this account repeal
the law laid down for circumcision. Why, we shall be ignoring the sanctity of
the Temple and a thousand other things, if we are going to pay heed to nothing
except what is shown us by the inner meaning of things. Nay, we should look on
all these outward observances as resembling the body and their inner meaning
as resembling the soul.'
44 Spec. Leg. 1.1-10.
45 Wolfson 1987, 196, likewise highlights the role of circumcision as a pre-
requisite for inclusion in the religious community and, therefore, for access
to religious experience in Rabbinic and mystical Judaism. He finds the most
powerful expression of this 'nexus between circumcision and the appearance of
God' in a text from Numbers Rabba 12.10. At the core of this complex exegetical
passage lies the statement: 'The "Daughters of Zion" are those [males] who were
distinguished by circumcision, for if they were uncircumcised, they would not
have been able to look upon the [divine] presence.'
46 Hanson 1966, 82, argues in favour of the historicity of Origen's self-
48 Commentarium in Evangelium Matthaei 15.3 citing Det., Pot. Ins. 176. See
118
Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
Bibliography
Baer, R.A.
1970 Philo's Use ofthe Categories ofMale and Female, Leiden.
Barclay, ].M.G.
1998 'Paul and Philo on circumcision: Romans 2.25-9 in social and cultural
context', NTS 44, 536-56.
Bourdieu, P.
1977 Outline ofa Theory ofPractice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge.
Boyarin, D.
1992 '"This we know to be the carnal Israel": circumcision and the erotic life
of God and Israel', Criticallnquiry 18, 474-505.
1995 'Homotopia: the feminized Jewish male and the lives of women in Late
Antiquity', Diffirences7.2, 41-81.
Brown, P.
1988 'I beseech you: be transformed', in The Body and Society: Men, women,
and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, New York, 160-77.
Caner, D.
1997 'The practice and prohibition of self-castration in early Christianity',
VC51, 396-415.
Cohen, S.J.D.
1993 '"Those who say they are Jews and are not": how do you know a Jew
in antiquity when you see one?', in S.J.D. Cohen and E. Frerichs (eds.)
Diasporas in Antiquity, Atlanta, 1-45.
Collins, J.J.
1985 'A symbol of otherness: circumcision and salvation in the first century',
in]. Neusner and E. Frerichs (eds.) 'To See Ourselves as Others See Us~·
Christiam, jews and 'Others' in Late Antiquity, Chico, 163-86.
Colson, F.H. (trans.)
1929-1965 Philo, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols., Cambridge, Mass.
Crouzel, H.
1989 Origen, trans. A.S. Worrell, San Francisco.
duBois, P.
1988 Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and ancient representations of women,
Chicago.
Foucault, M.
1986 The Use ofPleasure, trans. R. Hurley, New York.
Gleason, M.W
1990 'The semiotics of gender: physiognomy and self-fashioning in the
second century C.E.', in D. Halperin,]. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.)
Before Sexuality, Princeton, 389-415.
119
Ra 'anan Abusch
120
Eunuchs and gender transformation: Philo's exegesis ofthe joseph narrative
121
7
Walter Stevenson
Introduction
Modern students of early Christianity have tended to avoid the topic
of ancient castration. 1 For instance, while reading through the Penguin
translation of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, one comes upon an early
Father named Melito the Eunuch. The editor's footnote states that 'eunuch'
was just an early Christian way of saying 'celibate'. 2 Of course we might
expect someone translating for a popular audience to brush off the topic,
but the discomfort with eunuchs lives also at more detailed levels of
scholarship. If one were to glance quickly at the most recent edition of
Melito the Eunuch, one would learn in the introduction that, 'we may
infer. .. he (Melito) was ascetic, since "eunuch'' at this period usually meant
"celibate"' - this without any further evidence given. 3 Perler's edition
states the same opinion citing a list of passages, which I will show do not
fully support his point. 4 Only Blank's edition is open to the possibility
that Melito was a castrated man. 5 And yet, in spite of a wide array of
celibate Fathers in the second and third centuries, there are none except
Melito called the 'eunuch'. Though scholars may well have good reason
to avoid a subject they find distasteful, it may still be worth the time to
consider the evidence.
In this chapter I will try to show that, in fact, eunuchs were prominent
in the early development of Christianity, and in particular that the
castrated state of the third-century Church Father Origen is significant
in understanding both the social and intellectual origins of Christianity.
Though Origen's emasculation leads to a fruitful and interesting discussion
of castration as sexual denial in the second and third centuries, this
chapter will turn instead to investigate a fundamental paradox in Christian
Alexandria. 6 It seems that Christians were practicing castration, while
officially discouraging it. Alexandrian authors were subtly allegorizing the
prevalent Judea-Christian texts on eunuchs, while believers were acting on
remarkably literal interpretations of these texts. And the veritable founder
123
Walter Stevenson
124
Eunuchs and early Christianity
... even if the Holy Spirit had prescribed complete and genuine virginity
or continence so that He would not allow the fervor of the flesh to froth
over even in a single marriage, even so nothing surprising would seem
to be introduced. The Lord himself opened the Kingdom of Heaven to
eunuchs [spadonibus], as he himself was a eunuch [spado]. And the Apostle,
looking at his example, moreover himself a eunuch [castratus], preferred
continence.
Here not only is Christ a eunuch, which clearly implies a celibate, but
Matthew becomes a castratus. It appears that Tertullian, having used the
word spado twice already, just wanted to get an effect with a different
word that would both imply celibacy and also make reference to a reading
of Matthew 19.12. It would be absurd to argue from this example that
Tertullian thought Matthew was a surgically altered eunuch.
But there are other passages in which Tertullian seems to cross over to
a more nuanced usage, for instance, in his Adversus Marcionem 1.1. After
a blistering attack on Marcion and his native Pontus, the fiery Mrican
states that a bestial home gives rise to a bestial man: 'Jam et bestiis illius
barbariae importunior Marcion. Quis enim tam castrator carnis castor, quam
qui nuptias abstulit?' ('Now Marcion is even more troublesome than the
beasts of his barbarous homeland. Who is such a self-castrating beaver as
one who rejected marriage?') Here the myth of beavers as self-castrators is
applied to Marcion, who clearly denigrated marriage. 13 If it was good that
Matthew was a castratus, why is it bad now that Marcion wants to make
other people castrati? While we were to understand above that Matthew
was not a literal, surgically altered castratus, this beaver must be seen as
a literal castrator for the denigrating image to work on Marcion. Are
we to equate Matthew with the 'castrated' followers of Marcion? Upon
consideration it is no surprise to find that Tertullian is not using his terms
very consistently.
Here is another example. While, as we have seen above, Christ is the
great spado, elsewhere God himself is the anti-spado: 'Filius spadonis esse
non possum, maxime qui patrem habeam eundem, quem et omnia' ('I cannot
be the son of a eunuch, especially since I have the same Father as all
Creation does.') Tertullian makes no pretence of being consistent or even
careful with these terms. And he is not alone among early Christian
authors.
At this point it should be clear that the term cuvouxoc; is not so simply
understood as the tradition implies. The variety of meanings placed on the
language of eunuchs and castration undermines any effort to substitute
a simple term like 'celibate' every time someone is called a eunuch. A more
nuanced study is required.
126
Eunuchs and early Christianity
This ardent believer needed a permit since, beginning with the emperor
Domitian's broad legislation against castration in the late first century, and
continuing with a variety of additional restraints throughout the second
century, Roman law forbade emasculation within the boundaries of its
empire. Of course we are told that this young man was refused, but it
is clear Justin not only believes that Christian desire for self-castration
is noble, but also that this philosophical emperor would readily believe
the account, understand the context, and perhaps even applaud such
heroism.
127
"Walter Stevenson
Gnostic 'Encratites'
It is normally assumed that the group of early heretics called Encratites
used strong figurative language to dissuade believers from marrying.
The stance of this conjectured group is reconstructed by scholars from
the attacks of orthodox Fathers (as well as the less-than-fully-orthodox
Tertullian's passages cited above). But only Clement extensively quotes
these teachers, and their language does not clearly imply that believers
should not physically emasculate themselves. What influence these
Alexandrian teachers would have had on the adolescent Origen is a matter
of conjecture, but the possibility that they would favor literal self-castration
should at least be considered. For instance, Julius Cassian published a work
called IlEpt Euvouxim;, or On Eunuchism. In it he taught that marriage
should be avoided apparently through self-castration:
Let no one say that since we have appendages such that some of us are
designed female and some male, some for receiving and some for implanting,
God designed us to be this way. For if this were God's plan, towards which
we are striving, he would not have blessed eunuchs: the prophet (Isaiah)
would not have said 'they are not fruitless trees' taking an analogy from
the tree for the man who by deliberate choice emasculates himself from
ideas of this sort. 16
Once again there is a fixation on the appendages ('ta IJ-Opta) and a very
unfigurative description of human sexuality. If this is just encouragement
to live a virginal life, it is worded in a very strange way.
A similar line of thought is added by Basilides, another of the very
128
Eunuchs and early Christianity
Though, in fact, the followers of Basilides were known for their liberal
sexual lifestyle, 21 their teachings on castration seem to have stuck closely to
those ofValentinus and Julius Cassian. And although all of these teachers
are traditionally understood to be figuratively promoting celibacy, the
quotations themselves use the language of castration. It is unlikely that
these influential second-century teachers made an explicit priority of
promoting castration, but their influence should not be underestimated.
In an intellectual climate where the body is described with 'useless'
appendages, and where its functions are negated, it is easy to imagine
some turning to surgical solutions.
Castrated monks
In addition to Gnostic testimony, there is evidence of whole monastic
orders requiring castration for members. 22 Epiphanius, in his catalogue
of heresies composed in the fourth century, describes one of these, the
Valesians:
I often hear of Valens. He was an Arab, and though I don't know anything
definite, I have considerable suspicion that his sect still lives on to this day
in Bakathi in the region of Philadelphia on the other side of the Jordan
river. .. They were members of the Church until that time when their
insanity came to its fullness and they were excommunicated. For they are
all castrated ... 23
Christian tradition
Another body of evidence arguing for the historicity of Origen's castration
is Christian tradition. The Church began to legislate against eunuchs
129
"Walter Stevenson
from the beginnings of canon law, and the implied need for this frequent
legislation itself argues that castration was common. 25 Furthermore
theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries were quick to label castrated
Christians as heretics, with Origen the most celebrated example. But
in spite of the later theological movement to stamp out the practice of
castration, the record tells us of several monastic orders whose initiates
were castrated, and a variety of individual eunuchs stretching all the way
back to the first Ethiopian Christian, the courtier who appears in the Acts
of the Apostles. 26 In short, church history shows us that Christian eunuchs
were well known in the second and third century.
Origen's sources
Finally Origen himself in his own commentary on the Gospel of Matthew
reveals several other possible sources that may have influenced him towards
castration. The widely influential second-century text, the Sentences of
Sextus, stated: 'Cast aside every part of the body that does not lead you
to self control; for it is better to live continently without some body
part than destructively with it', as well as: 'You may see that people have
saved the health of the rest of their body by chopping off and casting
away parts. How much better to do this for continence?' 27 He even
found a citation from Philo to support castration: 'it's better to castrate
yourself than struggle with illicit sexual intercourse' .28 And so when we
consider that castration was discussed and esteemed among Alexandrian
Christians, that Eusebius concedes Origen's castration as the only blot
on his otherwise stainless life, and that Church history; suggests the
commonness of castrated Christians, it seems that the evidence points to
the historicity of Origen's self castration.
130
Eunuchs and early Christianity
Clement
The early Alexandrian Christians, who show themselves to be Philo's
disciples in method and content, not only agree with him but quote
him. Clement of Alexandria, teaching a generation before Origen, in an
evangelical work addressed to pagans, states:
Don't you see Moses, the veritable prophet of truth, ordering that those
with mutilated genitals (8A.a8ia<; and anoKEKOf.Lf.LEVo<;) cannot enter the
assembly? And also the son of a whore? He is showing allegorically through
the above the type of the atheist, the one cut lacking procreative power,
the other divine strengthY
Origen
Origen follows in this tradition as well. It is interesting that Origen does
not treat the topic of eunuchs nearly as frequently as Philo and Clement,
often avoiding opportunities in his commentaries; for example, in his
extant homilies on Leviticus he wholly ignores the strictures against
castration. But when he comes to the key passage of the New Testament on
eunuchs, the passage that inspired him to emasculate himself as a youth,
he, like Clement, turns to Philo. In beginning an historical survey of
eunuchs in the Jewish tradition, he starts with the castrated servants of
Pharaoh in Genesis 40.1, and calls them 'those unable to give birth to any
good' (ayovot nav-ro~ KaA.oii). 32 Origen, following the lead of Clement
and Philo before him, disparages castration.
It seems, then, that Origen had castrated himself, like other ardent
Christians in Alexandria, and did so under the influence of current beliefs.
131
WTalter Stevenson
But it is also dear that the most influential scriptural exegetes of Alexandria
strongly disapproved of castration, following their reading of Scripture.
Therefore it will be useful to look more closely first at the Judea-Christian
tradition, and then its Alexandrian hermeneutics.
The strength of this taboo that extends all the way to sacrificial animals
is striking, and indicates that the early Hebrew people rejected any form
of emasculation. Deuteronomy 23, as we have seen, repeats the strong
prohibition against castrated men participating in religious ritual:
A man whose testicles have been crushed or whose male member has been
cut off must not be admitted to the assembly ofYahweh.
132
Eunuchs and early Christianity
resentment against the Lord: a special favour will be granted to him for his
loyalty, a most desirable portion in the temple of the Lord.
Here the eunuch is the symbol of the most gifted members of the
congregation. In summary, from the time of Levitican legislation the
tradition has apparently made a complete reversal on eunuchs. In the
Torah they are forbidden and the procedure of castration is even unclean
for animals. The post-exilic prophetic tradition undercuts this stance,
and by the time of Hellenized Judaism eunuchs have become figures of
prestige and examples of virtue.
A modern critic would tend to understand an historical development
when reading these passages. The rigid taboo of Leviticus and Deuter-
onomy gave way to acceptance in Isaiah and Wisdom which in turn rose to
an exalted status in the Gospel of Matthew. But our early Alexandrian crit-
ics did not see a development. Rather they felt challenged by a discrepancy
between Jewish law and the prophetic tradition. It was unacceptable, as
they understood it, that Isaiah and Jesus would have flatly denied what
they considered Moses' legislation against eunuchs. Starting from faith
these critics had to find a critical strategy that would harmonize Scripture's
conflicts. This strategy was allegory.
Alexandrian hermeneutics
How allegory became central for interpreting Jewish Scripture is a well
discussed question outside the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that
by the time of Philo, allegorical interpretation had become central to
Judea-Christian exegetes in Alexandria. An appropriate example can be
drawn from Origen's influential commentary on the Song ofSongs. 35 The
text itself simply relates the story of a dark-skinned lover, disparaged by
other women, who wins the love of the king. But Origen asserts that
on a spiritual level the lover represents the new Christian Church made
up of all the races of the ancient world, the other women represent the
133
"Walter Stevenson
Jews, and the beloved represents Christ, who loves all these women, but
who chooses to marry the dark-complexioned church. 36 Origen insists
that both the literal and spiritual meanings are valid, but implies that the
spiritual or allegorical is privileged.
Recent works on Alexandrian hermeneutics have varied greatly. For
instance, David Dawson has seen strong Hellenic influence and has argued
that figures like Clement were close to Stoic 'professors' in their strategies
and goalsY Henri Crouzel, however, the most authoritative biographer of
Origen, argues that the sort of allegorical reading Origen practices appears
in the letters of Paul as well as Revelation. 38 While avoiding the intriguing
issue of Greek or Hebrew influence on Alexandrian hermeneutics, I would
call attention to Origen's rhetorical techniques and strategies. After all,
ancient rhetoricians taught that allegory was merely one of many rhetorical
techniques. 39
Origen as rhetor
Origen can easily be seen as similar to other professional teachers of his
time. We know that he was connected to famous ancient figures like
his own 'pagan' teacher Ammonius under whom Origen studied with
Plotinus; that is, we know that Origen was very much a part of the world
of the professional sophist/philosopher. 40 In this form of analysis Origen,
like professional teachers in antiquity or beyond, would have sought to
carve out 'market share' with well placed attacks on competitors who
would be cast as heretics and pagans in these polemical battles. This is
an attractive view for us considering how strong the Greek traditions of
rhetoric were in Alexandrian culture, and especially in the works of Philo,
Clement and Origen. 41
Two aspects of Origen's interpretation of Matthew' 19.12 suggest
a fundamentally rhetorical purpose: that Origen seems to presume that
(Matthew's) Jesus would follow the rules of rhetoric; and that Origen
shows some strong rhetorical tendencies himself
The foundation of Origen's discussion of this passage appears to be that
Jesus was speaking figuratively at Matthew 19 .12. He describes two groups
as his opposition. First he discusses those who take the whole passage
as literal - those who argue that there are eunuchs who are born that
way from their mothers, eunuchs who were castrated by other humans,
and those who physically castrate themselves for the kingdom of heaven.
And second, he attacks the majority who interpret the first two categories
literally and the third as figurative. Origen proceeds to argue that the first
group is na'ive and susceptible to embarrassing attack even from the most
tolerant pagans. He applies almost his whole discussion to the second
134
Eunuchs and early Christianity
135
"Walter Stevenson
Origen that Jesus did not intend his followers to castrate themselves. Their
mistake, and the mistake that Origen spends most of his discussion of
the passage on, is this: that they are undermining Jesus' rhetorical intent,
and starting down the slippery slope to literalism. It is difficult to see
Origen's charges as anything but 'academic'. It seems to be his strategy to
expose the incompetence of his competition (in this case they are probably
Gnostic heretics who must be disparaged). This competitive strategy adds
another rhetorical stroke to our understanding of Origen's writing.
And so the overall picture of Origen as rhetor/sophist would look
something like this: Origen projects his own rhetorical world view by
describing Jesus' intentions in Hellenistic rhetorical terms; his arguments
are meant to appeal to the predilections of a pagan audience rather than
to some privileged Christian truth; he himself uses many rhetorical tropes
that seemingly undercut the seriousness of his point; he uses the oldest of
tropes, the recusatio that he is not stooping to petty rhetorical polemics;
and his motivation seems less theological or moral and more polemical.
Starting from a close reading of his exposition, we seem justified in
concluding that Origen writes more as a rhetorician than a theologian.
Origen as evangelist
But there is a problem with this argument. Modern scholars of Origen
have dated his commentary on Matthew to near the end of his life. 45 By
this time Origen was undoubtedly one of the most famous and prestigious
intellectuals of his period. He even achieved the honour of invitation
from the emperor's mother, Julia Mamaea, to her salon. 4~ By old age,
it is difficult to imagine him having any serious rhetorical competition
for students or prestige. Even the slights to his reputation apparently
originating from his old bishop in Alexandria, Demetri'us, would have
been lost, rhetorically at least, in the mists of time. In short, though
Origen shows techniques and strategies similar to his pagan peers, his
fundamental motivation seems different.
To find this motivation it is only fair to look at his own statements
of exegetical purpose. At the beginning of his discussion of Matthew
19.12 Origen states this:
Before I argue what seems to me the true interpretation of this passage, I will
describe the two leading interpretations. And I will refute these as much as
possible so that, while guarding against any errors, we will be able to live
better if we follow the correct teachingY
It is very likely that Origen is refuting not only the still attractive teachings
of the Valentinian school, but also refuting his own surgical example. One
136
Eunuchs and early Christianity
137
"Walter Stevenson
Notes
1 The term 'eunuch' is a broad one certainly extending far beyond 'castrated
man'. I will discuss the variety of meanings in early Fathers below, but will assume
for this p_aper that the vast majority of eunuchs in antiquity were castrated. An
exhaustive treatment of the terms can be found in Maas 1925. The classic article
on ancient eunuchs is Hopkins 1963 (also Hopkins 1978, 172-'-96). See also
Tougher 1997, and see Stevenson 1995 for a broad treatment of eunuchs in the
second and third centuries.
2 Williamson 1964, 231.
3 Hall1979, xi.
4 Perler 1966 lists Matt. 19.12; Justin, I Apol 15.4; Athenagoras, Supplicatio
138
Eunuchs and early Christianity
See also Scholz 1997, 143-72, for a discussion of sexual renunciation in early
Christianity.
7 See the Revised English Bible, ad foe. 'For while some are incapable of
marriage because they were born so, or were made so by men, there are others
who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let those
accept who can.' This sort of narrowly interpretive translation seems at the least
to obscure the original text.
8 Methodius, Symposium 1.1.
9 See Clem. AI. Paed.3.4.24: 'There are many eunuchs who are pimps, and
since it's thought that they cannot be lovers, they can help out those seeking
a love affair without any suspicion'.
10 See Justin, I Apol. 1.29.
13 See Juv. 12.34, where Juvenal implies that beavers chew off their own
gonads.
14 This tradition began in antiquity with Epiph. Panarion 64.3.
15 Justin, I Apol. 1.29.
16 Clem. AI. Strom. 3.13, the translation is mine, with the last phrase clearly
19 Clem. AI. Strom. 3.13. See also 3.7 in which Valentinus is quoted as teaching
that Christ was so continent (E:yKpaTI]<;) that, though he ate food, it never was
digested. It seems that the physical nature of humanity was not sacred to him.
°
2 Clem. AI. Strom. 3.1.
21 Clem. AI. Strom. 3.7.
22 See also Epiph. Adv. haeres. 3.2.1095 for another group in the east.
24 The tradition had well known followers in modern Tsarist Russia, the Skoptsi,
some of whose monasteries were known to be very popular. See Engelstein 1999,
and Rapaport 1943.
25 See Canon 1, for instance, of the Council of Nicaea: 'If any one in sickness
139
Walter Stevenson
Ebrietate 220, discusses at length the Pharaoh's eunuchs calling them (cro<j>ia~
iiyovot) 'those unable to give birth to wisdom'. See Abusch's penetrating discussion
of this passage in this volume.
33 These translations are taken from the New Jerusalem Bible (New York,
1985).
34 See Abusch who points out some very promising paths of interpretation for
39 Though allegory was held in disregard generally, see Quint. lnst. 5.11.21,
6.3.69, and 8.11.14. The influence of Greek teaching is obvious here since
Quintilian is merely transliterating the Greek word.
40 See Crouzel1956.
41 Buell1997 develops the term 'self-authorization' for Clement's position. This
Matthew is on the whole less mystical and more pastoral than the Commentary
on john.'
46 If we can trust Euseb. Hist. eccL 4.21.3-4.
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-willter Stevenson
Scholz, P.O.
1997 Der Entmannte Eros, Dusseldorf.
2001 Eunuchs and Castrati: A cultural history, Princeton.
Stevenson, W
1995 'The rise of eunuchs in Greco-Roman antiquity', journal of the History
ofSexuality 5, 49 5-511.
Strecker, G.
1967 'Math. 19.12 und die alten Christen', in Walter Bauer: Aufsiitze und
Kleine Schriften, Tubingen.
Torjesen, K.J.
1986 Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method in Origen's Exegesis,
Berlin.
Tougher, S.
1997 'Byzantine eunuchs: an overview, with special reference to their creation
and origin', in L. James (ed.) Women, Men, and Eunuchs: Gender in
Byzantium, New York, 168-84.
Van den Hoek, A.
1995 Christian Controversy in Alexandria: Clement's Polemic against the
Basilideans and Valentinians, New York.
1998 'The "catechetical" school of early Christian Alexandria and its Philonic
heritage', Harvard Theological Review 90, 59-87.
Williamson, G.A. (trans.)
1964 Eusebius: The history ofthe Church from Christ to Constantine, London.
142
8
Shaun Tougher
The study of eunuchs in history has tended to focus on their place and
function at royal and imperial courts, despite the existence- as this volume
seeks to demonstrate - of other interesting and fertile topics of study, such
as gender, religion, and art. Thus it is with some reservation that I address
the more traditional political topic here. But the court role of eunuchs in
history is important, and one that our historiographical sources certainly
report, given their major theme of politics. My starting point is the court
of the later Roman empire (c. fourth to sixth centuries AD), the institution
responsible for the increased presence and visibility of eunuchs in Roman
society and in our sources. The role of the eunuch in the late Roman
court system, in which eunuchs could rise to the heady political and
social heights offered by the post of grand chamberlain (praepositus
sacri cubiculi), has been analysed in a classic article by Keith Hopkins,
seeking an answer as to why eunuchs became so valued an instrument
of the late Roman emperors. 1 Part of the answer for Hopkins was the
outsider element of eunuchs; the fact that they were imported from non-
Roman territory made them outsiders in Roman society, forcing them into
a dependent mutually-vital relationship with their master the emperor. 2
This judgement has recently been emphasized again by Schlinkert. 3 In this
chapter I wish to explore whether other court systems where eunuchs had
a role shared this factor of the eunuch as ethnic outsider. If this is indeed
a constant feature, this would enable Hopkins' analysis to inform more
generally the study of eunuchs in history. I wish to consider in particular
whether the foreign eunuch is a feature of the court of the continuation
of the Roman empire in the east, which we call the Byzantine empire (c.
seventh to fifteenth centuries AD). I will suggest that the factor of the
court eunuch as an ethnic outsider is not an essential constant, and
certainly not in the case of Byzantium, where homegrown eunuchs seem
to have become the norm. This fact may have reduced the efficacy of their
role in the Byzantine political system, resulting in the disappearance of
the phenomenon of the powerful court eunuch. Ultimately, the general
143
Shaun Tougher
question 'Why eunuchs?' still remains open, but the answer is surely
dependent on the physical nature of eunuchs, rather than on where they
came from.
144
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
Ancient Assyria
Grayson, at his most compelling, advocates that there were indeed court
eunuchs in ancient Assyria. Most of these eunuchs, he argues, derived
from foreign captives and tribute, but looking to the examples of China
and Byzantium, he suggests that eunuchs who reached the highest offices
could be from the Assyrian nobility itsel£ 19
145
Shaun Tougher
Hellenistic kingdoms
With the conquest of the Achaemenid empire by Alexander the Great
and the subsequent establishment of the Hellenistic kingdoms, the
Macedonian royal courts opened to the influence of the eastern model.
The old kingdom of Macedonia itself was not affected it seems, but there
is evidence for eunuchs at the Ptolemaic and Seleucid courts, as Grayson
notes, though a fuller picture is provided by the survey of Guyot. 31 Under
the Ptolemies we encounter such diverse figures as Aristonikos (active
under Ptolemy V) 32 and Eulaios (active under Ptolemy VI), 33 whilst under
the Seleucids we meet Krateros (under Antiochus VII). 34 Concerning the
ethnic origin of such Hellenistic eunuchs, Guyot states 'that in general
those who served the Graeco-Macedonian elite of the Hellenistic courts
were barbarians. He argues that Eulaios was an imported slave, and
although Aristonikos and Krateros identifY themselves in inscriptions
respectively as the son of Aristonikos, from Alexandria, and the son of
Krateros, from Antioch, he sees these as fictitious claims to ease their
assimilation to the elite. 35
Beyond the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, a most striking case
is that of the kingdom of Pontus under Mithridates VI (120-63 BC),
that infamous opponent of Rome and member of a dynasty of Persian
descent. 36 Eunuchs appear often in Appian's account of Mithridates and
his court. 37 We meet Dionysius a naval officer, Tryphon a would-be
fortress-holder, special agents and general attendants on the king and the
royal women. Yet on the question of origin we are frustrated. There is no
146
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
direct statement about origin and, as Guyot notes, while all but one have
Greek names, this reveals nothing about their place of origin, as slaves here
too were given new names. 38 It can be noted however that Appian records
that Mithridates' son punished the pro-Roman city of Amisus in Pontus
by selling the inhabitants into slavery and castrating the boys. 39
One Hellenistic eunuch whose origin we do appear to know is the
famous Philetairos (Frontispiece), a Paphlagonian. 40 Strabo in particular
details the history of this first Attalid dynast of Pergamum. 41 The story
runs that he became a eunuch by accident, when as a child he was crushed
in a crowd. Thus Philetairos appears to be a special case, for he was not
deliberately created for service. However this depends on whether one
believes the story. It could be malicious slander, or one could argue that
it was devised to cover up a deliberate castration; Guyot prefers the latter
interpretation. 42
Medieval Islam
The court eunuchs in this context, Grayson says, are again foreigners. 43
Ayalon, the major contributor to this field so far, 44 commented:
the overwhelming majority of the eunuchs ... had been brought over from
outside the borders of the Muslim lands. They had thus been usually
transplanted from a different civilization and different religion ... to a Muslim
environment. 45
Ottoman empire
On this medieval and modern Islamic empire, Grayson remarks: 'the
eunuchs in Ottoman Turkey were all foreigners, coming from Mrica,
including Ethiopia'. 48 Certainly it is true that Mrica was key in the supply
of 'black' 49 eunuchs 'via Egypt, present-day Libya, the Red Sea, Arabia,
and the Persian Gulf'. For the study of this supply Toledano is notable
for his exploitation of the Turkish archival source of the Register of the
Biographies of the Imperial African Eunuchs, yet even with this resource
he notes that it is 'difficult to determine the exact places of origin of the
147
Shaun Tougher
China
China is perhaps the most famous imperial court that employed eunuchs. 56
On the ethnic origin of those used, Grayson declares 'there is no evidence
that any of the eunuchs were foreigners'. 57 This however is authoritatively
contradicted by Tsai; there was indeed a domestic supply, but the 'non-
Chinese peoples who lived in China's peripheral regions' were also
affected. 58 Under the Ming emperors most foreign eunuchs were supplied
from Annam and Korea. Tsai argues:
There were compelling reasons for placing eunuchs from outside races and
tribes in positions of trust, because one of the major concerns of the emperor
was the security of the imperial line. The best way to preserve it and keep
court secrets was to use foreign-born eunuchs. 59
Byzantium
Coming at last to Byzantium, we do find the classic scenario of outsider as
court eunuch. 60 In the late seventh century we meet Stephen the Persian,
who was treasurer (sakellarios) for the emperor Justinian II during his
first reign (685-95). 61 On the fall of Justinian Stephen's fate was to be
dragged bound by the feet to the market of the Bull and burned to death. 62
A ninth-century example is Damianos the Slav, who was chief eunuch
(parakoimomenos) of the emperor Michael III (842-67). 63 In the early
tenth century we also encounter Samonas the Arab. 64 Samonas (perhaps
in origin a prisoner of war) was a domestic servant in an, elite household
in Constantinople. He entered imperial service when he informed the
emperor Leo VI (886-912) of a plot against his life; he then rose to
148
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
become the emperor's chief eunuch. In the eleventh century the emperor
Constantine IX Mono machos ( 1042-59) appointed as grand hetaireiarch
the eunuch Constantine the Saracen. 65 Eunuchs could also find their way
to Byzantium from the west; in 949 the Italian ambassador Liudprand of
Cremona presented four penis-less eunuchs, known as Carzimasians, to
the emperor Constantine VII (913-59) as a gift; these eunuchs were items
usually sold by the merchants ofVerdun in Moslem Spain. 66
But for Byzantium more emphatic, and in apparent contrast to the
practice of the later Roman empire, is the internal production of eunuchs. 67
Evidence for this phenomenon is particularly pronounced for the tenth
and eleventh centuries, reflected in general comments and specific cases.
The tenth-century Arab writer Masudi matter-of-facdy notes that the
Byzantines, like the Chinese, did practise the castrating of their own
children. 68 This finds corroboration, for instance, in the story of the
background of Constantine the Paphlagonian, chief eunuch in the early
tenth century to the emperor Leo VI and then to the empress Zoe
Karbonopsina (fourth wife of Leo VI, regent for Constantine VII). 69
The story runs that Constantine was castrated by his father for the sake
of a career in Constantinople, and our source comments that this was
a custom amongst farmers in that region. 70 There are other good examples
of Byzantine eunuchs, even if we do not always necessarily know their
exact origin. 71 It is striking that several other Byzantine eunuchs whose
origins are known happen to be Paphlagonians, as Paul Magdalino has
recently highlighted. 72 Magdalino cites seven cases between the dates
906-1042, the most famous being John the Orphanotrophos.73 This
court eunuch even managed to secure the throne for his own brother,
Michael IV (1034-41), and then also for his nephew, Michael V (1041-2).
Strikingly John was not the only eunuch of the family; so were his brothers
Constantine and George.
In or out?
From this overview of the ethnic origin of eunuchs employed at a range
of royal and imperial courts the following observations can be made. As
noted at the start, the evidence provided by our sources is a major issue.
How full is the picture available? We have seen that the origin of eunuchs
is not always recorded. Despite this it is very dear in certain cases that it
is outsiders who are required; the Ottoman empire is a particularly good
example. At the same time, however, we have seen that domestic supply
exists. As Grayson noted, this is especially true for Byzantium and China,
and he is thus moved by these comparative examples to deduce that it
was an element of the Assyrian and Persian courts. Whether we accept
149
Shaun Tougher
150
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
Byzantium. 85 A knock-on effect of this shift may have been the undermin-
ing of the political value of court eunuchs in Byzantium and the eventual
disappearance of the politically powerful court eunuch, the last truly
notable example being Nikephoritzes in the second half of the eleventh
century under the emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071-8). 86 This has
puzzled Byzantinists, and explanations have ranged from the westernisation
of Byzantine high society to the change in the nature of imperial rule
with the advent of aristocratic rule by the Komnenoi. 87 But perhaps the
Byzantines simply came to realize that homegrown eunuchs no longer
yielded the advantages that their non-Roman counterparts had once
provided. The isolation and devotion of the court eunuch had been lost;
eunuchs such as John the Orphanotrophos had their own agendas. It is
interesting to note Shepard's exploration of the use of foreigners in his
service by Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118); perhaps this emperor was
striving to find an alternative to the failed eunuch system. 88
But maybe such an interpretation overvalues the belief that the ethnic
outsider status was such an essential and valuable commodity where court
eunuchs were concerned. We have encountered more than one culture
where a domestic supply of eunuchs existed. Was it such an advantage to
have foreigners, as historians such as Ayalon and Tsai think? If so, why did
some courts not follow this strategy rigorously? In the case of Byzantium,
a foreigner like Samonas could have more care for his own circumstances
than those of the emperor. 89 Ktesias records striking details concerning
Izabates, one of the leading eunuchs ofCambyses II (530-522). 90 Izabates
was not entirely isolated in society, for he had a cousin Kombaphis, also
a eunuch. This Kombaphis was said to have great influence with the
Egyptian king Amyrtaios, and engineered the loss of Egypt to the Persian
Cambyses, in order to become governor of the country. It appears that
eunuchs could act, or be imagined acting, contrary to the wishes of their
master and for their own benefit. Thus the assumption that eunuchs who
were ethnic outsiders were intrinsically advantageous to their masters
should be questioned. 91 Of course it must be remembered that eunuchs
could be outsiders for other reasons beyond their ethnic origin. As will
have been clear from this chapter, many eunuchs who worked at royal and
imperial courts were of slave origin. Low social origin is also a recurring
factor. But more fundamentally we need to realize that the essential fact
about eunuchs who served at courts is that they were eunuchs. Certainly
this was Patterson's response to Hopkins' analysis in his book Slavery
and Social Death. 92 Patterson found Hopkins' answer to 'Why eunuchs?'
unconvincing. Notably exploiting evidence from Byzantium and China,
he preferred to argue that what is crucial about court eunuchs is their
151
Shaun Tougher
symbolism, not where they come from: the ultimate ruler requires the
ultimate slave; and they are a mediating symbol between the human and
the divine, the subject and the ruler. Whether we agree with this answer
or not, the point that the solution lies with the condition of the eunuch
as a castrated man is surely true. 93 The comparative approach (focusing on
the aspect of the ethnic origin of court eunuchs), through the divergences
found across time and cultures, tends to reinforce this conclusion.
Notes
1 Hopkins 1963, which was the basis ofHopkins 1978, 172-96.
' 3 1 Schlinkert 1994. This idea is echoed by Ayalon 1979a on Islamic eunuchs
and Tsai 1996 on Chinese eunuchs: see below for further comment.
4 These laws were preserved by Justinian, Cod. lust. IV.XLII. For Roman
n.124.
6 Procop. tVtlrs 8.3.12-21.
7 See Scholten 1995, esp. 28-33.
8 As Scholten 1995 stresses, these eunuchs were mostly of slave status; they
were to be bought within the empire as commodities. As such they were sundered
from their society of origin, forced into total dependence upon their buyers and
owners, enhancing their outsider status.
9 Jones, Martindale and Morris 1971, 314-15; also Dunlap 1924, 270-1;
11 Martindale 1980, 704-5. It seems that Mamas was not a ty,pical product of
the slave trade in eunuchs; he was castrated for medical reasons, and had family
contacts at the monastery of St Theodosius near Jerusalem.
12 Martindale 1980, 101-2; also Greatrex and Bardill1996.
13 Martindale, 1992 B, 912-28. See also Dunlap 1924, 284-99; Fauber 1990.
14 Hunt 1996, 569, states that the imperial eunuchs at the late Roman court
does permit eunuchs to adopt, in Nov. 98 he still insists on the ban on marriage,
since the purpose of marriage in Christian society was the production of children
(Noailles and Dain 1944, 320-7).
17 Grayson 1995, 92.
19 Grayson 1995, 95. Xen. Cyr. 5.2.28, 5.3.8, 8.4.2, certainly includes the
152
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
story of the noble eunuch Gadatas (taken as an Assyrian by, e.g., Gera 1993, esp.
203--4), though his castration was a punishment inflicted by the Assyrian king
rather than being due to a deliberate decision to become a court eunuch. Notably
Gadatas did eventually acquire a court role, but for the Persian king Cyrus, whose
chief mace-bearer he became. See Guyot 1980, 204.
20 See the contribution of Llewellyn-Jones in this volume.
21 Xen. Cyr. 7.5.59-65. On this text and eunuchs in Ktesias and Herodotos
188.
25 Guyot 1980, 31.
26 Hdt. 6.32.
27 Hdt. 8.104-6. Hermotimos was a victim of war, as Gera 1993, 218,
comments.
28 On Ktesias and the nature of his text see Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1987. The
Lewis 1977, 20-1, has suggested that the portrayal of the Athenian demagogue
Cleon by Aristophanes in his Knights as the Paphlagonian slave owes something
to this real-life powerful Paphlagonian eunuch, rather than being explicable
simply as a pun on 1ta<!>A.<ism (paphlazo), meaning 'to bluster'. Dover 1972,
89, notes that the 'representation of [Kleon] as a Paphlagonian is designed to
suggest, in accordance with the common forms of political antagonism, that
he is not of true Athenian origin', as well as making us think of 'bluster'. It
seems that Artoxares also served as the model for the character of Artaxates, the
most powerful and trusted of the Persian king Artaxerxes' eunuchs in Chariton's
Callirhoe: see Goold (ed.) 1995, 11.
31 Grayson 1995, 88; Guyot 1980, 92-120.
32 A rare eunuch for he is praised: Polyb. 22.22. One wonders why Ammianus
did not note this example of a good eunuch in his quest to find an example from
history prior to that paragon Eutherius: Amm. Marc. 16.7.
33 Eulaios is cast in the more typical role as an effeminate corrupter: Diod. Sic.
the same phenomenon in the case of Philetairos, for whom see below.
36 See for example McGing 1986, Hind 1994.
37 And note also Ammianus' story about Menophilos a eunuch ofMithridates:
153
Shaun Tougher
53 His brother Jafer also had himself castrated, but did not survive the
operation.
54 Penzer 1936, 122.
55 Toledano 1984, 381.
56 See for instance the contribution ofTsai in this volume.
57 Grayson 1995, 86.
58 Tsai 1996, 14-17. See also Mitamura 1970, 52-65. Jay 1993, stresses that
eunuchs could have family life after castration, thus undermining the view that it
was loyalty to the emperor through lack of any other social ties that made eunuchs
so desirable. She does not seem to consider the issue of origin.
59 Tsai 1996, 16.
60 AI-Jahiz (d. 868-9) in his Animals and his Refutation of the Christians,
and Theophanes.
62 Nikeph. 40.37-41: Mango 1990, 96-9. Also Theoph. 369: Mango and Scott
1997, 515.
63 Guilland 1943, 220. Theoph. Cont. 5.16.
64 Kazhdan (ed.) 1991, vol. 3, 1835-6; Janin 1935; Jenkins 1948, repr. 1970, X;
forthcoming. '
68 Lunde and Stone 1989, 345; Ayalon 1979a, 75 and n.4.
154
In or out? Origins ofcourt eunuchs
73 Amongst the other seven are Constantine Gongylios, Joseph Bringas, and
the uncle of Symeon the New Theologian, if not Symeon himself. On John
see Kazhdan (ed.) 1991, vol. 2, 1070; Janin 1931. Angold 1991, esp. 22 and
n. 48 usefully draws attention to a connection between John and the Komnenoi:
'Isaac I Comnenus granted an annual sum of 24 nomismata to the monastery of
Theotokos Dekapolitissa for a candle to burn in memory above the grave of]ohn
the Orphanotrophos.' It seems odd that Michael Psellos does not make more
of John's condition as a eunuch.
74 See below for further reflection on this issue.
75 Magdalino 1998, 149-50.
76 Procop. "!Vttrs 8.3.12-21. The palace eunuch Euphratas, himself an Abasgian,
83 Wiedemann 1986.
84 And note also that Byzantium can still acquire foreign eunuchs, as pointed
out above.
85 See Tougher forthcoming.
86 For Nikephoritzes see Kazhdan (ed.) 1991, vol. 3, 1475; Angold 1997,
121-4; Lemerle 1977, 300-2. Nikephoritzes' family had their origins in the
theme of Boukellarion.
87 For the westernisation theory see Guilland 1943, 234. For the Komnenian
solution see Kazhdan and Wharton Epstein 1985, 69-70. See also the discussion
in Gaul's contribution to this volume. Gaul stresses that eunuchs are at least still
to be found at the late Byzantine court.
88 Shepard 1996.
155
Shaun Tougher
93 For a recent attempt to answer this question for Byzantium see Ringrose
1996.
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159
9
'EUNUCHS OF LIGHT' 1
Power, Imperial Ceremonial and Positive Representations
of Eunuchs in Byzantium (4th-12th centuries AD)
Georges Sideris
161
George Sideris
When we read these attacks, we can see that the charges are the same
in the fourth as in the twelth century. 9 It would be tedious to list these
alleged traits which, in fact, are stereotypes. In general authors described
eunuchs as unjust, evil-minded, greedy, easily corrupted, egotistical,
jealous, ~owardly, deceitful and servile. Sometimes, they denounce their
indiscriminate sexual depravity, asserting that they have relations with
either men or women. 10 The fact that eunuchs were often slaves or
former slaves feeds the negative images, for their lowly situation is seen as
increasing their natural servility and their vices. 11
Often, these attacks are linked to a conception of eunuchs derived
from physiognomical treatises and the medico-philosophical tradition.
Physiognomy claimed to interpret the traits of the soul from physical
characteristics. The bodily corruption engendered by castration involved
the soul's corruption. As a result of losing their virility, eunuchs lost all
the qualities which made the masculine character: temperance, courage,
fidelity, sense of justice, moral sense, altruism. In fact, since eunuchs are
androgynous, their traits are close to the characteristics assigned to women.
Nevertheless, even if eunuchs are no longer men, they do not become
women, so they do not have the advantage of womanly qualities; feminine
aspects mean, in the case of eunuchs, vice and weakness. 12
Nevertheless, this 'eunuchophobia' is just a political tendency. We find,
throughout Byzantine history, a stream of thought favourable to eunuchs,
and particularly to imperial chamberlains. I will present here testimonies
by different authors, from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, which paint
a positive picture of Byzantine eunuchs.
162
'Eunuchs oflight:· ... Positive representations ofeunuchs in Byzantium
163
George Sideris
In fact only some of these eunuch saints were real eunuchs. Nevertheless,
the most important thing is that Byzantines worshipped them as eunuch
saints. In the twelfth century, Theophylact names Indes, Yakinthos and.
Proteus. 21
Several eunuch chamberlains are praised for their faith, their piety
and their charity. We have quotations from both Orthodox and non-
Chalcedonian writers. Thus, Mark the Deacon, in his Life of Porphyry,
bishop of Gaza in the late fourth to early fifth centuries, describes the
eunuch Amantios, castrensis (steward of the imperial household) of the
empress Eudoxia, as someone truly irreproachable who did not cease to
distribute alms, to fast, to give shelter to numerous guests and to contribute
to pious works. 22 In 419-20, the bishop Palladius ofHelenopolis dedicated
his Lausiac History to the grand chamberlain Lausus, whom he qualified as
a 'very faithful servant of Christ'. He praised him for, among other things,
his generosity, his alms, his virtue, and his love of knowledge. 23
In his Lives ofthe Eastern Saints, John of Ephesus describes the lives of
the chamberlains Mishael and Theodore. They were both monophysites,
like John of Ephesus himself Mishael was grand chamberlain, probably
under the emperor Anastasius I (491-518). According to John, Mishael
was 'a Christian and merciful and ascetic man'. John speaks of Mishael as
a monophysite saint and martyr, a victim of persecution:
and (he) was moreover perfect in all spiritual things, insomuch that he
underwent exile for the sake of the truth of the right faith, that he might
not communicate with the synod of Chalcedon, insomuch that he spent
a considerable number of years in the exile.
At last Mishael was recalled to Constantinople. He completed his time
in the palace and retired. He gave his wealth to the poor, then 'lived an
ordinary and poor life, down to extreme old age, and thus departed from
the world bearing great and noble testimony'. 24
The chamberlain Theodore served first under Mishael and eventually
retired with great wealth after serving as castrensis under Justinian I (527-65).
According to John of Ephesus, Theodore 'began eagerly and joyfully to
scatter that gold, and to sow all his wealth in good soils which are the
hands· and bellies of the poor'. He distributed all his property, freed his
slaves, giving them gifts, sold his silver and his valuable clothes. He lived
like a poor man in a villa called Serna, where Mishael was buried, and
there he ended his life. Theodore had a brother, whose name was John,
who was also a chamberlain and imitated his ascetic life. The Life of the
Blessed Theodore calls him 'the blessed Theodore ... who, while he was in
the body, practised a heavenly and divine mode of life'. John of Ephesus
164
'Eunuchs oflight:· ... Positive representations ofeunuchs in Byzantium
praises his ascetic way of life, his charity and his monophysite faith: 'his
soul was thus intoxicated with the fervour of divine love, and no worldly
property was regarded by him'. In fact Theodore is a real monophysite
eunuch saint. 25
In his chronicle, Theophanes Confessor shows how the iconoclast
emperor Leo IV (775-80) persecuted some chamberlains in 780, because
they worshipped holy icons. He paraded them in chains through the Mese,
the main street of Constantinople, then he locked them up. One of them,
Theophanes, who was formerly chamberlain and parakoimomenos (lord
of the imperial bedchamber), died. Theophanes Confessor considers him
a saint: 'Whereupon the said Theophanes died, thus becoming a confessor
and winning the crown of martyrdom.' 26
Many patriarchs were eunuchs. During the first iconoclasm there were
two eunuch patriarchs, Germanos I (715-30) (who was castrated when
his father, the patrician Justinian, was put to death under Constantine IV
because he had plotted against the emperor Constans II) and the iconoclast
patriarch Niketas I (766-80)_27 Methodios I (843-7) was perhaps also
a eunuch. 28 The eunuch patriarch Ignatios (847-58 and 867-77) was
the son of the emperor Michael I. During the tenth century there were
three eunuch patriarchs: Stephen II (925-7), Theophylact (933-56) (son
of the emperor Romanos I), and Polyeuktos (956-70). 29 There were
many eunuch bishops in Byzantium. For instance Theophylact cites the
archbishop ofThessalonike, and the bishops of Pydna, Petra, and Edessa
in Bulgaria. 30
165
George Sideris
This echoes Isaiah 56, and Corippus clearly links eunuch imperial court
service and celestial service. Furthermore Corippus gives this description
of the eunuch Narses, Justin's sword-bearer:
He was in gold all over, yet modest in dress and appearance, and pleasing
for his upright ways, venerable for his virtue, brilliant, careful, watchful
night and day for the rulers of the world, shining with glorious light: as the
morning star, glittering in the clear sky, outdoes the silvery constellations with
its golden rays and announces the coming of day with its clear flame. 34
Corippus here associates light and the eunuch's beauty. This association,
which is a topos in the case of an emperor, is astonishing here, concerning
a eunuch. Moreover, it is announced in an official panegyric, which means
that this theme was officially recognized as early as Justin's reign. We can
see here that the ideology of the panegyric sets out, within the context
of imperial service, themes which associate on the one hand Byzantine
court eunuchs and the kingdom of God, and on the other hand Byzantine
court eunuchs and light.
In the tenth-century Book ofCeremonies of Constantine VII (913-59),
imperial ceremonies, where eunuchs play an important role, are conceived
as an image on earth of the celestial kingdom, and they show the empire's
beauty. 35 The Peloponnesian patroness of emperor Basil I (867-86),
Danelis, brought a hundred graceful eunuchs to Constantinople for the
needs of the imperial court. 36
166
'Eunuchs oflight~· ... Positive representations ofeunuchs in Byzantium
and angels are both royal messengers and they both introduce dignitaries
to the sovereign (the Byzantine emperor, Basileus, on earth and God in
heaven). In fact, the angel with his golden sceptre plays here the role of an
imperial ostiarios, with his golden stick. 39 God sends one of his messengers
to call John to him. Leontios explicitly draws a parallel between the
imperial eunuch and the angel when he says:
Without delay he [John the Almsgiver] forthwith sent for the patrician,
Nicetas, and said to him with many tears: 'You, my master, called me to
go to our earthly king, but the heavenly King has anticipated you and has
summoned to himself my humbleness.' He then related to him the vision
which he had just seen of the eunuch, or rather of the angel. 40
167
George Sideris
168
'Eunuchs oflight:· ... Positive representations ofeunuchs in Byzantium
the epigram that surrounds the image, makes dear its spiritual meaning:
Leo's gift of the Bible is to redeem his sins. This miniature illustrates the
eunuch's piety. 53 The eunuch's face, beardless and grey-haired, is turned
toward the Virgin with an expression and a movement of the eyes that
suggest profound contemplation. The beauty of the clothing and the
gestures, and the serenity of the eunuch's peaceful face, express the state
of grace, both physical and spiritual, in which the eunuch finds himself. 54
The piety and beauty of the eunuch were major themes related to the
power of eunuchs at the imperial court. These are the themes portrayed
in the miniature by the sakellarios Leo, which ultimately proves to be
an image of power. 55
In conclusion, as well as negative criticism of eunuchs, there also existed
in Byzantium, as studies have confirmed in recent years, a body of positive
representations of eunuchs. In particular, eulogies and favourable speeches
demonstrate the existence of a veritable eunuchophilia in Byzantium. But
it is power, and the way that it is portrayed, that appears central. Imperial
eunuchs in the emperor's service benefited from the effects of power
generated by their position in the court hierarchy and their participation
in imperial ceremonies. Further, they were themselves in a position to
elaborate portrayals of power favourable to them. The elegy of Kallinikos
in the sixth century and the miniature of the sakellarios Leo in the tenth
century are expressions and dazzling representations of this system.
Notes
1 This phrase ('<Protoetoe'ic; euvouxot') is taken from The Vision of the Monk
volume.
8 Gautier (ed.) 1980, 289, 1.1-6.
9 But see the comments of Mullett in this volume.
(ed.) 1980,293, ll.9-17. For comment see Boulhol and Cochelin 1992, 55-6;
Ringrose 1994, 93-5 and 102-3. On eunuchs and homosexuality see Claudian,
169
George Sideris
and Morris 1971, 314-15; Thompson 1947, 20 and 80; Woods 1998, 106;
Tougher 1999a, 65-8.
14 Amm. Marc. 16.7.5.
15 Amm. Marc. 16.7.5-8, tr. Rolfe (ed.) 1982, 229-31.
16 Amm. Marc. 22.3.12. See also Matthews 1989, 92-3, 275.
see also Jones, Martindale and Morris 1971, 558; Browning 1975, 36-7.
18 See for instance the contribution of Stevenson in this volume.
19 On these aspects see Boulhol and Cochelin 1992, 60-2; Ringrose 1999,
127.
20 Lactant. De mort. pers. 11.3, 14.2-4 and 15.2. Chamberlains Dorotheos,
Gorgonios, Petros: Euseb. Hist. eccl. 8.1.4 and 6.1-5. See also de Gaiffier 1957,
18-26; Jones, Martindale and Morris 1971, 270 (Dorotheos 2), 398 (Gorgonios
I); Guyot 1980, 194-5 (Dorotheos), 206 (Gorgonios), and 218 (Petros).
21 In Gautier (ed.) 1980, 327, 11.8-9. See also de Gaiffier 1957, 36-46; Boulhol
(citation 11, 1. 23). On Lausus see also Martindale 1979, 660; Scholten 1995,
230-1.
24 John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 57, tr. Brooks 1925, 200-1. See
(citations, 200, 202 and 203). See also Martindale 1992, 1244-5.
26 Theoph., in de Boor (ed.) 1883, 453, 11.10-20, tr. Mango and Scott 1997,
625.
27 On Germanos' career and on Niketas see Auzepy 1999, 289-92; Guilland
168). '
29 On these and later eunuch patriarchs see Guilland 1943, 203 (= Guilland
1967, 168-9).
170
'Eunuchs oflight:· ... Positive representations ofeunuchs in Byzantium
1991, 89. For the author and the date see Mavroudi 1998, vol. 1, 16-50 and
126-8; Oberhelman 1991, 11-13.
43 In Preger (ed.) 1901, 10, 86-7, and 11, 88-90. See also Dagron 1984,
22, 50, 192, 200-2, 230-4, 268-9, and nn. 84-98. On the association of the
terrestrial court with the heavenly court see Maguire 1997.
44 Angelidi 1983, ll. 1-5, 20-9 and 72-164, 79-80, 82-6, and see the introduc-
tion 74-6. On koitonites see Oikonomides 1972, 301 and 305. On celestial
Jerusalem see Angelidi 1982, 207-15.
45 Angelidi 1983, 86-7, ll.185-208, and see the commentary, 97 n.19 and
20.
46 In Gautier (ed.) 1980, 295, 11.23-4, and 319, 11.10-13. See also the
53 See Spatharakis 1976, 9-10; Dufrenne and Canart 1988, 20; Olster 1994,
171
George Sideris
Bible see Mathews 1977, 94. On the image of imperial power in the 9th-11th
centuries and imperial piety see ]olivet-Levy 1987, 441-70.
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175
10
THEOPHYLACT OF OCHRID'S
IN DEFENCE OF EUNUCHS
Margaret Mullett
177
Margaret Mullett
178
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
a model of a life of decorum, and his text as the child of a very wise man,
a friend of purity, a eunuch remarkable for his wisdom. 13
179
Margaret Mullett
Conclusion: the eunuch asks if he should go on: no, says the other or I shall
become a eunuch myself... He is not saying that chastity is impossible without
castration, just that the chastity of eunuchs is praiseworthy.
They get up, embrace and kiss; the eunuch takes his (listening) nephew in his
arms and kisses him, pleased with the debate; they part.
Setting: Theophylact does not ask them where they are from (not Thessalonike)
lest he is drawn into the debate. This is what Theophylact has brought his
brother from Thessalonike, not without difficulty, though his memory still works
even in old age.
180
Theophylact ofOchrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
the non-eunuch does not include greed for food, fickleness or meanness;
other Byzantine stereotypes he neglects are lack of control, lack of courage,
weakness and incapacity for natural affection. Nor does he emphasize
aspects of gender, as did Basil ('neither feminine nor masculine') or Masudi
on eunuch sex ('they are women with men and men with women'). 21 But
then his speech was incomplete when the eunuch began to reply.
The speech of the eunuch is much longer. 22 He responds with vigour,
and in different ways to each criticism. To the charge that eunuchism is
against nature, he offers a comparison with asceticism; to Deuteronomy
23.2 he offers Isaiah 56.3-5; 23 on the canons he claims both that all
depends on the purpose of castration (good in childhood for chastity or
bad in adolescence for contraception) and that a historical perspective is
necessary: castrates are no longer particularly susceptible to heresy, for
example, and now eunuchs are really useful to the state. To the charge that
it is against Justinianic legislation he retorts that Justinian couldn't keep
his own law, and in view of Narses it was just as well; he pre-empts any
use of the Photian synod by pointing out the bad blood between Photios
and Ignatios; the alleged vices, he says, are not worth refuting, and in any
case they are less bad than the special vices of non-eunuchs; eunuchs in
the palace can be influenced by good empresses; if you criticize eunuchs
in the church you are running down Christianity itself; in the theatre,
he concedes that he could add to the complaints - but refuses to accept
that this condemns all eunuchs. In the liturgy eunuchs are not solely
responsible for church music; and he then launches into general responses
both negative and positive, before the sparkling conclusion. In this text
Theophylact is using a whole panoply of argument to delight and console
his brother.
There are constant reminiscences of other works by Theophylact, in
particular the logos on the errors of the Latins written for an ex-pupil. 24
The stress on oikonomia, the emphasis on reading the spirit as well as
the letter of the law, the dismissal of traditional arguments - all except
the filioque (the phrase added in the west to the creed and disputed by
the east) in the one text, or his refusal to credit all the charges of eunuch
vices in the other - show a similar perceptive tolerance, an openness
to difference which he still combines with a sense that he is a stickler
for the canons. 25 In others of his works, however, when not working to
commission or involved in his arguments, and not writing to a eunuch,
he is not so favourable towards eunuchs. In particular his commentary
on the key biblical passage Matthew 19.12 takes a traditional patristic
metaphorical interpretation which excludes actual cutting, 26 and says
explicitly that to become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven does not
181
Margaret Mullett
182
Theophylact ofOchrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
183
Margaret Mullett
and, inside that, the argument of the eunuch and his interlocutor in
Thessalonike, surrounds not a dialogue but a disputation in which each
makes one speech divided by a transition. The argument is personalized:
the point of it is to criticize the eunuch for castrating his little nephew, who
is present throughout, listening keenly and is then kissed over and over
again at the end. The protagonists dispute on a basis of cordial respect:
theirs is the body-language of collegiality, if not greater intimacy, and they
address one another as 9aUJ.HXO"tE, XPTJO"'t6ta'tE av8prov ('wonderful', 'most
excellent of men'). 36 The relationship between the uncle and nephew is
clearly meant to be an example (for he is after all a living refutation of
criticisms of eunuchs), of an idealized picture of responsible parenthood.
In this, in contrast to the young bloods who have themselves cut in order
to make themselves more attractive to the lighter kind of woman, devoted
parents are seen to support their children's choice of eunuchism in zeal
for purity and cleanliness. Eunuchs are seen in a double and very loving
affective literary shell.
Thirdly, this is a very local document. It is set in Thessalonike when
the emperor was there. The balance of probability is that this imperial
presence is not that of the first Norman War in the 1080s, but of the
second, in the 11 OOs. If this is so, Theophylact brought back his agogimon
to Demetrios probably in his see of Ochrid or in his estate at Ekklesiai on
the Vardar, where Demetrios probably died in 1107. 37 The protagonists
are not from the city, but other people in the text are: the metropolitan
of the city, Theodoulos, is revealed as a eunuch, as is Theophylact's other
correspondent the bishop of Kitros. Theophylact wro~e one letter to
Theodoulos (G72) as a colleague and friend, with no trace of the old
rivalries of the sees of Ochrid and Thessalonike after the conquest of
Bulgaria discernible in the sigillia ofBasil II (976-1025). The relationship
with the bishop of Kitros seems much more intimate, a close friend
and confidant to whom Theophylact wrote four letters over the period
1097-1107. They sent gifts to one another, incense and cinnamon, and in
letter G52 Theophylact shared with the other the problems of the passing
through of the First Crusade; while in G 113 and G 121 he confided the
story of Demetrios' illness and death. Also revealed as eunuchs (though
contemporaries could in any case presumably tell) are the bishops of Petra,
a suffragan ofThessalonike, and Edessa, a suffragan ofTheophylact. 38
Finally, another local hero who is mentioned in the text is Symeon the
Sanctified. He appears as the culmination of the recital of holy eunuch-
saints, deacons, priests and bishops: '
There are eunuch monks also, like Symeon, the charming, the graceful, the
prudent, whom we have seen in this town, and who led a community of
184
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
monks on the holy mountain with all strictness, and who has founded here
(Thessalonike) a monastery of eunuchs. 39
The story is not told; simply Symeon is sketched in to add to the local
colour and the strength of the case.
Given these personal and local features, can this text survive at all as
a document of the Zeitgeist, or merely as evidence for a narrower society:
that remarkable homosocial continuum represented by the complex emo-
tions and relationships ofTheophylact's network with their characteristic
concerns and discourse? 40
Ringrose's case for a developing acceptance of eunuchs in the state and
in some areas of the church is built on her need to find a context for
Theophylact's text. 41 There is, however, a sense in Theophylact that what
he is writing is not going to be accepted by all, and, just as Simon noted
that Theophylact is not fully briefed on the legal casework, so Theophylact
seems rather unaware of the better hagiographical backing for a developing
tolerance of eunuchs in Byzantine society. His saints, apart from Symeon
the Sanctified, are all martyrs of the period of the tetrarchy in the late third
and fourth centuries, and they are largely popularised in the Metaphrastic
menologion, a hugely popular text in aristocratic circles of the eleventh
century. He fails, however, to name names, for example of the patriarchal
eunuch-saints or Symeon the New Theologian, or indeed anyone more
recent or relevant. 42 Perhaps Theophylact's is what it appears to be,
a highly individual account, not written because of a gathering support for
eunuchs in the empire- or contrariwise because of a sudden blow to their
political importance and influence through the advent of Komnenian
family government. 43 Paul Magdalino has suggested recently that eunuchs
may have become less high-profile under the Komnenoi, but that this
does not necessarily mean that they became less useful. The fact that they
appear to make a come-back at the end of the twelfth century under the
Angeloi (a highly suitably named dynasty) would in itself suggest that
they had not yet disappeared from view. Even some of the old sources of
supply of eunuchs might still continue, though continuing reference to
Paphlagonians in the sources should probably not be taken to mean that
there is continuing attestation ofPaphlagonian eunuchs. 44
What should be borne in mind is the noticeable personalization of
all politics and politicization of all personal relationships at the time of
Alexios Komnenos. No emperor knew better how to exploit relationships
of kin, fictive kinship, patronage, or liege-homage. 45 And Theophylact
saw everything, even his own identity, through his network of personal
relationships which he manipulated to stave off the threats of the demosion
(the fisc), to protect his parishioners, to maintain and develop friendships.
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Alternative models for the third gender are proposed and opposed, and the
result is to cast doubt on traditional asceticism. Recent work by western
medievalists has suggested that clergy were excluded from key masculine
roles such as war and child-begetting, and may have been regarded as
a separate gender. 48 That this possibility is present even in a society with
eunuchs may be seen clearly from Theophylact's outrageous suggestion
that ascetics act equally against nature, but do not have the courage of
their convictions to excise their sexual organs.
You have modified the nature of your sexual organs, since the formation
of sperm is the natural function of testicles which were created for the use
of procreation - but you deplore the production of sperm because of your
love for excellent virginity. If you, being in perfect possession of reason, had
decided not to use your sexual organs for the purpose for which they were
created and then at the right time decided to have them refUoved, you would
not have been worthy of criticism. 49
We can say, can't we, that this transformation of your body has transgressed
186
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
the laws of the Creator, since he created you to be in good health and you
have transformed yourself into the opposite?
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schema. A monastery is where one would expect to find angels at this date.
Theophylact's text shows an ascetic clearly contrasted with a eunuch, and
in the nature of the polemic if the eunuch wins, the ascetic has to lose,
not just the argument, but the primacy of status. If the eunuch is a living
refutation of calumnies against eunuchs, the ascetic shows the limitations
of his way of life; it is no less than eunuchism a life against nature, in
which the body is destroyed for the sake of the spiritual exercises which
allow the approach to God. A pagan, Theophylact says, would be justified
in criticising eunuchs for unnatural practices- but you ascetics? 58
The topicality of this text is remarkable, but again a personal angle
obtrudes. When Theophylact received letter G37 from Symeon the
hegoumenos of the monastery at Anaplous, which told of the death of
the ex-hegoumenos, it made him properly happy - and drew the ribaldry
of his kyklos, well aware of how much he had suffered himself from
scandal caused by the actions of monks. 59 However, other letters show
him struggling to support monastic communities and individuals in all
parts of his archdiocese (as he does a eunuch community in letter G96). 60
And Theophylact's reaction to the death of Symeon's predecessor seems
perfectly proper in view of his anxiety for the fortunes of the monastery
under an abbot who had been a hesychast rather than an administrator.
There is no reason to believe that Theophylact was deeply opposed to
monks. But from the last section of the eunuch's speech emerges a sense
of the limitations of asceticism with a view to chastity, purity and inner
cleanliness: sophrosyne, agneia and katharotes. This, if it does date from
the first decade of the twelfth century, is an early sign ,of the crisis of
confidence in holy men which was to manifest itself in the twelfth century
and lead both to what Beck has called 'hagiographic disappointment'
and to the curious disappearance of the holy man as 'defined by Peter
Brown. 61 Fifty years later, criticisms of extreme asceticism were more
commonplace: Tzetzes satirizes the wandering monks in the streets of
Constantinople, dripping with chains, thrusting their (fake) sores under
the noses of passers-by, Ptochoprodromos reveals the hypocrisies and
class structures of successful monasteries, and Eustathios ofThessalonike
called for reform. 62 Back at the time ofTheophylact, Alexios Komnenos,
like marty emperors before him, forged a close alliance between empire
and the holy: under his mother's influence he took a holy man along
in his baggage on campaign, he cultivated and patronized many holy
men (though, as Armstrong has shown, at the cheapest possible rate and
preferably at his womenfolk's expense); 63 his great reconquest of Anatolia
was marked by the convergence of two important holy men, Meletios from
Myoupolis, present at the profectio bellica by vision, and Christodoulos
188
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
from Patmos. He took his whole family out on daytrips to his nearest holy
man, St Cyril Phileotes, and he acquired the reputation of an emperor
who was the friend of monks, philomonachos, who treated them with
impeccable consideration and proper body-language, and who was able
on his deathbed to draw on his investment: 'All hermits living in caves or
on mountains or leading their lives in solitude elsewhere were urged to
make long supplications for the emperor.' 64 In contrast Alexios' son John
II (1118-43) assisted his wife to found one very high-profile monastic
establishment in Constantinople, whilst his grandson Manuel I (1143-80)
attempted a monastic experiment at Kataskepe, a kind of All Souls of
monastic superstars, protected by generous grants from the need to exploit
their own estates. 65 There seems to be a need to clean up at least the
wilder fringes of monasticism: there still are stylites on the squares of
Constantinople, but tolerance for the fools (saloi)and migrants (xenoi)
and grazers (boskoi) of a previous age was running short. The biographer
of St Cyril Phileotes was careful to defend him against potential criticism
for lack of stability, for asset-stripping and heavy economic activity, and for
extreme ascetic practices: he begins with heavy flagellation and chains, but
comes off chains and is commended for modesty by his spiritual adviser.
The life frequently commends moderate ambition and records realistically
partial achievement: Cyril is shown as damaged and wounded by his
battles with porneia, which he combats with a red-hot coal, unthinkable in
earlier saints' lives, where the holy struggle terribly but win. At the heart
of the life is a debate with an abbot who accuses Cyril of excess: he wins
by not disputing the charge, but accepting it with humility. A nephew is
advised not to set his sights too high, but he is anxious to beat Cyril in
fasting, and eventually gives up fasting altogether. When people go wrong
in this life they go badly wrong, taking to the hills as bandits or smeared
by association with a Black Mass. And it all looks back nostalgically to
the golden days of the emperor Alexios, the friend of monks. But there is
also a sense that there is a limited pool of talent, that saints are not to be
expected these days, that a moderate approach is the safest. 66
This suspicion of extreme asceticism may account for the success of the
spiritual texts of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis under its modest
first founder Paul. 67 The foundation charter of this monastery had been
adopted by the time ofTheophylact's logos into two Constantinopolitan
typika, one of which, Phoberou, also incorporated large passages of a letter
of Paul Helladikos. 68 The Evergetis spiritual anthology had what looks like
a recension for pious laypeople, and was hugely influential in orthodox
monasticism. Their line on fasting, Krausmi.iller has shown, was lax
compared with much contemporary practice. 69 Thus, writing at the time
189
Margaret Mullett
of the last flowering of the traditional alliance between emperor and holy
man, Theophylact echoes the modest aims of Evergetis and prefigures
the revulsion against the punk monks70 of the capital in the mid-twelfth .
century.
He also pulls out of the hat a last great illusion. He finds a way in which
eunuchs have a clear advantage over non-eunuch ascetics, and he makes
this his last major point. It is devastating.
I think that freedom from the flow of semen stands above all for the man
who is a lover of cleanliness, and who does not suffer being polluted by
involuntary and natural occurrences. Enjoying this freedom, we avoid the
scruples of conscience which you suffer even if reason persuades you not
to classifY them as pollutions and not to think that the elevation of the
bulging member is anything, this elevation which the member boasts of
on the grounds that it is the upright member. You will not deny that your
conscience is troubled, and particularly when you are persuaded by the
words of Basil the Great.7 1
Then the joke, and back to scholarly qualification and almost patronizing
condescension to the stars of the ascetic life:
I am not laying down a law from what I have said about eunuchs that no-one
can be chaste otherwise, for it is possible with many struggles and heightened
abstinence - which are found too seldom in comparison with the crowds of
people who practise priestly celibacy. 72
And the opponent is finally tarred with the brush of intolerance, and
worse, love of the flesh and envy (phthonos). This may say something
about the relations between monks and eunuchs at the time. Two other
sources offer intertextual enlightenment. We can see from the Diegesis
merike, a late twelfth-century account of scandals on Mt Athos in the
reign of Alexios Komnenos, that the existence of bpys and beardless
ones in monasteries was hardly less shocking than the presence of Vlach
shepherdesses. 73 When the typikon ofPhoberou adopted the letter of Paul
Helladikos, in the context of concern about porneia in monasteries, both
190
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
male and female, it repeated a long story told by the eunuch Eutropius,
a secretary of Juliana Anicia, who entered a monastery but was tempted
by the beauty of his godson who came on visits. Even after his departure
the Devil tempted him with visions of the boy so that his 'member began
to burn with fire and rise in insurrection against me and to exude drops
of filth so that my thighs were befouled with unclean moisture'; God
rescued him and freed him from the temptation which was destroying
him. 74 We can see from these texts that there was a problem for some on
holy mountains in a fear of the seductive powers of boys and eunuchs
in monasteries, hardly less than those of women and female animals:
philosarkia perhaps.
But Theophylact's marshalling of nocturnal emission (or the lack of
it) as the strongest argument for the reinstatement of eunuchs in the
Byzantine gender system of sophrosyne has wider implications than the
strange death of the Byzantine holy man, or the particular hang-ups of
the garden of the Panagia. If patristic scholars and western medievalists
are right to see discussion of nocturnal flux as a focus for debate about
the boundaries of the Christian community, here we see a strong bid for
inclusivity from a position of strength for eunuchs, and, despite ascetic
techniques for control of wet dreams, a serious question-mark placed
beside the place of the ascetic.7 5 But then of course, this argument may
again simply be part of the transactional content ofTheophylact's network,
of crucial significance to his brother, his friends and himself, but bending
no gender-system of Byzantium. All depends on how we read this text.
Notes
1 Theophylact ofOchrid, Logos, in Gautier (ed.) 1980, 287-331; Spadaro (ed.)
1981. The title is not original.
2 See for example Cheney 1995, ch. 7, 99-125, where the author includes
speeches and poems see Gautier (ed.) 1980; for the letters see Gautier (ed.)
1986.
191
Margaret Mullett
5 See Nikolaev 1951; Xanalatos 1937; Papayanni 1989; Harvey 1993. Praechter
1997, 173-7.
9 George Tornikes, in Darrouzes (ed.) 1970, ep. 6, 118.14-16; ep. 10,
128.9-10.
10 See the argument in Mullett 1997, 174.
11 Theophylact, in Gautier (ed.) 1986, ep. 110, To the Doctor of the Emperor
Kyr Niketas, 530-2; ep. 121, To the Bishop ofKitros, 558; ep. 122, To the Bishop
ofDebra, 561.
12 Theophylact, in Gautier (ed.) 1986, ep. 121, 559; Gautier (ed.) 1980, poem
32 Ringrose 1994 and 1996; Tougher 1997 and 1999. S'ee now also Sideris
in this volume.
33 e.g. Theophylact, On the Error of the Latins, in Gautier (ed.) 1980, 247-85:
192
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
identification of the pupil through the lemma and a note ofDemetrios Chomatenos,
105; on Maria of Alania as Theophylact's literary patroness see Mullett 1984.
34 Theophylact, in Gautier (ed.) 1980, 297.3 and 299.28.
35 See Mullett 1997, 14, 32-4; and 1981.
36 Theophylact, in Gautier (ed.) 1980, 297.9-10.
37 On the second Norman War see Chalandon 1900; McQueen 1986; Shepard
1996.
38 Gautier (ed.) 1980, 297. On the bishop of Kitros, see Mullett 1997, 184.
Theophylact, Gautier (ed.) 1986, ep. G72, 387; ep. G2, 303-5; ep. Gll, 539;
ep. 121, 559.
39 Gautier (ed.) 1980, 329.
40 On Theophylact's network, see Mullett 1997, 163-222; for the placing of
1999, 182-3.
56 John Moschos, Pratum spirituale, ch. §3, MPG, 87.3, 2853-6; ch. 60, MPG,
Peers 2001. On eunuchs and angels see also the contribution of Sideris in this
volume.
5B Gautier (ed.) 1980, 299.
59 Gautier (ed.) 1986, ep. G37, 253-7.
60 Gautier (ed.) 1986, ep. G96, 491.1.
61 Beck 1959; the model of the holy man proposed in Brown 1971 lay
behind much of Hackel (ed.) 1981, including Magdalino 1981. See now
Howard-Johnston and Hayward (eds.) 2000.
62 John Tzetzes, ep. 104, To Demetrios Gobinos, in Leone (ed.) 1972, 150-2;
193
Margaret Mullett
206; for the pivotal debate with the abbot, ch. 29, in Sargologos (ed.) 1964,
127-36; for withdrawal from chains, ch. 16.3, in Sargologos (ed.) 1964, 89-90;
for the nephew, ch. 52, in Sargologos (ed.) 1964, 245-8; for the Black Mass, ch.
53, in Sargologos (ed.) 1964, 249-55.
67 See Mullett arid Kirby (eds.) 1994 and 1997.
Papadopoulos-Kerameus (ed.) 1913, 1-88. For the use of Paul Helladikos' letter,
quoted by Dominic Montserrat at the conference, see Thomas and Hero 2000,
vol. 3, 873-4 and Jordan 2000.
69 Krausmiiller 1996.
70 A phrase coined by Michael Angold.
time c.ertain persons reminded the emperor Lord Alexios saying, "Our holy
Master, even if the monks of the Holy Mountain do not have sheep or flocks, yet
they do have boys and beardless youths." The thrice-blessed and·famous emperor
whose judgement is imperial muzzled them in the words of the Gospel, saying,
"They have Moses and the prophets." They added and answere4 back the emperor
saying, "Holy Master, about beardless youths, the prophets 'and every word of
the Righteous One were relaxed so that 'on account of boys and their scandals
we cannot impose rule in the monasteries because there are more boys than
gerontes.' " And the emperor said, "What ought we to do about the boys? Herod
is dead and I (171) am not turning into a child-slayer, and all the more if you
realize that their mothers are going to come to us lamenting."' This complaint
does not go away, and the emperor is forced to threaten nose-slittings and other
fearsome punishments for monks who continue to complain about the eunuchs
and beardless boys.
74 Tj;pikon Phoberou, ch. 57, in Papadopoulos-Kerameus (ed.) 1913, 8, tr.
194
Theophylact of Ochrid's In Defence of Eunuchs
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century', in Mullett and Kirby (eds.) The Theotokos Evergetis, 86-102.
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Armstrong, P.
1996 ~exios I, holy men and monasteries', in Mullett and Smythe (eds.)
Alexios I Komnenos, 219-31.
Beck, H.G.
1959 Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich, Munich.
Brakke, D.
1995 'The problematization of nocturnal emissions in early Christian Egypt,
Syria and Gaul',Journal ofEarly Christian Studies 3.4, 419-60.
Brown, P.
1971 'The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity', ]RS 71,
80-101.
Chalandon, F.
1900 Les Comnene, I, Essai sur le regne d'Alexis I Comnene, Paris.
Cheney, V.T.
1995 A BriefHistory of Castration, Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
Cullum, P.H.
1999 'Clergy, masculinity and transgression in late medieval England', in
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Darrouzes, ]. (ed.)
1970 Georges et Demetrios Tornikes, Lettres et discours, Paris.
Gautier, P. (ed.)
1974 'Le typikon du Christ Sauveur Pantokrator', REB 32, 83-111.
1980 Theophylacte d'Achrida, I, Discours, traites, poesies, Thessalonike.
1985 'Le typikon de la Theotokos Kecharitomene', REB 43, 5-165.
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1933 'Autour du voyage de Pierre Grossolano, archeveque de Milan a Con-
stantinople en 1112', EO 32.
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1981 The Byzantine Saint, Birmingham.
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ofTheophylact ofOchrid', REB 51, 139-54.
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1910 Poemes prodromiques en grec vulgaire, Amsterdam.
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1994 'Lobpreis des Eunuchen', Schriften des historischen Kollegs, Vortrage 24,
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1981 'Un inedito di Teofilatto di Acrida sull' eunuchia', RSBS 1, 4-38.
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2002 'Erotic dreams and nightmares from antiquity to the present', journal of
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1961 'Notes de prosopographie et de titulature byzantines 1', REB 19,
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1963 'Notes de prosopographie et de titulature byzantines 2', REB 21,
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184-98.
1965 'Notes de prosopographie et de titulature byzantines 4', REB 23,
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1999 'Angels incarnate: clergy and masculinity from Gregorian reform to the
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1832 Eustathii Opuscula, Frankfurt-am-Main.
Thomas, J. and Hero, A. C.
2000 Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 5 vols, Washington D.C.
Tougher, S.
1997 'Byzantine eunuchs: an overview, with special reference to their creation
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198
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199
Niels Gaul
200
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c.l250-1400
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202
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c. 1250-1400
youth, and had to overcome it successfully (actually, he was the only one
who succeeded in subduing it). Another, quite important, conclusion
that seems possible from this passage is that eunuchs were no longer
brought up exclusively 'in the shadows' of the women's quarters but in
a more relaxed atmosphere, and had considerably closer contact with
the world beyond. 36
On the other hand, prejudices against eunuchs seem to be concealed
under a rather thin surface; and Gregoras, albeit grudgingly, obviously feels
obliged to defend his uncle against the charge of effeminacy, against those
who doubt that eunuchs feel 'heterosexual' desire. He cleverly does so by
turning the argument commonly used against 'effeminate eunuchs' to his
uncle's advantage: if eunuchs are more womanlike, yuvcnKroOEcr't£pov, 37
it is even more difficult for them to achieve saintliness; 38 accordingly his
uncle deserves even higher praise.
Despite Gregoras' attitude, the social network surrounding the castrated
holders of offices at court and in church, namely George Pepagomenos
and Michael Kallikrenites, does not allow us to conclude that eunuchs in
distinguished positions were generally perceived as outsiders. Both received
flattering letters and poems, from the (notorious) epistolographer Michael
Gavras and the court poet Manuel Philes respectively39 - a profile likely to
be shown also by non-castrated officials. In his poems, however, Manuel
Philes could not refrain from hinting repeatedly at George Pepagomenos'
eunuchism. In the last line of a poem praising the foundation of a church
of St George, the personified church itself makes a pun on the donor's
physical condition, putting d)vou~, 'well-minded', instead of the expected
£uvouxo~, and employing the rather rare term 'tO!J.ta<; ('eunuch'). 40 Another
poem41 addresses Pepagomenos in his function as !J.Eya<; EKKA1')crtapx1')~;
the writer obviously seeks permission for two aged people to get married
(vv. 9-10). 42 The addressee is referred to as an 'unmarried man' (literally:
'virginal man', nap8£vo~, v. 4) and as 'avoiding yourself any wedded union'
(<j>£uyrov 0£ 'tijv crus£u~tv) (v. 3); his inability to procreate is paraphrased
euphemistically (v. 6): 'you who do not intend to produce offspring'
('t£K£tv ouMv 8£A.rov). Again the poem culminates in a pun, this time
on the receiver's surname (vv. 7-8): although Pepagomenos bears the name
of the bitter cold (Pepagomenos derives from the verb nayoro/-ffivro, 'to
freeze'), he kindles the flame that suits weddings. It is certainly not without
irony that a eunuch was in charge of marital law at the church of Hagia
Sophia, and we may imagine Philes choosing his words rather carefully.
Still, the mere fact that the poet alluded to Pepagomenos' eunuchism twice
allows us to conclude that the latter felt quite comfortable with it.
203
Niels Gaul
204
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c.I250-I400
205
Niels Gaul
206
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c. 1250-1400
More generally, these three eunuchs seem to frighten the court: after they
have thrown the unhappy Kallimachos into prison, the frightened senior
gardener will not answer Chrysorrhoe's question about Kallimachos, for
fear of the eunuchs (vv. 2341-2). The king's cry: 'this y£voc, of double sex,
or rather, of no sex at all' is certainly to be connected with the old dilemma
of where to place eunuchs on the Byzantine ladder of gender hierarchy:
in the middle, at either end, or at both? 64 It is sufficient demonstration
that the oldest perceptions of eunuchs and their gender were still alive
in the fourteenth century.
However, the bad press eunuchs received in Kallimachos and Chrysor-
rhoe is counter-balanced by their appearance in the other two novels.
In Velthandros and Chrysantza we meet an (unnamed) court eunuch
functioning in a way quite similar to that assigned to Michael Kallikrenites
by Andronikos II during the first civil war. Velthandros' father, Rodophilos,
~a<nA£UC, of the Romans ('the Byzantines'), who once expelled his own son
from the realm, feels death approaching and sends a eunuch messenger
to bring Velthandros back. This eunuch seems to be an old and trusted
member of the imperial household; although his tide in the court hierarchy
is not specified, it is to him and not the captain (KOilTJC,) of the ship that
Velthandros directs the final account of his adventures (vv. 1224-304).
Rhodamne's eunuch page in the Livistros romance is the only eunuch
character assuming so important a role that he is introduced to the reader
by name, Vetanos. 65 This young eunuch (he is repeatedly referred to as
'little eunuch', £uvouxonou/..oc,) is praised for his exceeding beauty as
well as for a fair share in his lady's words, secrets, and ruses (49-51).
In a situation quite similar to that of Chrysorrhoe, Vetanos - although
set to guard his lady's seclusion by her father himself, Chrysos ~a<nA£UC,
of Argyrokastron - helps Rhodamne and Livistros to stay in contact,
playing a key role in the exchange of secret letters (40-1053). 66 Warning
Rhodamne against the powers of Eros in the beginning (325-38), her
longing for Livistros subsequently moves him to pity. He alerts his lady to
the fact that Livistros' letters are dedicated to her, not one of her ladies-
in-waiting (394-9). It is also he who urges her to reply to these letters
(570-4), and finally even to exchange rings with Livistros as tokens of
their mutual love (765-8). For some reason Vetanos, who is befriended by
one ofLivistros' men (58, 248, 476-81), appears to be very eager to serve
Livistros right from the beginning, addressing him first in a refined letter
(461-75, accordingly we may conclude that he was properly educated)
207
Niels Gaul
Conclusion
Eunuchism featured at the Byzantine imperial and patriarchal courts, and
possibly in aristocratic households as well, at least up to the beginning of
the fifteenth century. Undoubtedly, however, eunuchs were less numerous
and - accordingly, one might assume - less influential than in earlier
centuries.
The reasons for this decline cannot solely be attributed to Guilland's
supposed 'westernization' of Byzantine society. This argument seems
valid only in so far as the imperial court as a whole - first under Manuel
I Komnenos, 67 and especially after 1204- increasingly resembled a western
court. The way of conducting the empire's government undeniably
changed, but this development, one would think, was independent of
an individual emperor's attitude towards eunuchism. On the contrary, in
the few cases where criticism occurs, it draws very much upon the same
prejudices against eunuchs' gender and character as were detectable in
earlier centuries, not betraying any particularly western derivation (where,
supposedly, such a systematic criticism could hardly have developed,
considering the absence of regular contact between Latins and eunuchs).
The only hint at a possible influence of western ideas, judging from
Nikephoros Gregoras' Life of Stjohn, is the fact that it was no longer
desirable for a well-off family to reckon a eunuch among its members. On
the other hand, the silence of Pseudo-Kodinos on distinctive features of
their outward appearance as well as the rather 'open-minded' upbringing
of StJohn at the imperial court ofMichael VIII may suggest that eunuchs
were much more integrated into the 'normal' court society than hitherto.
Nor does Guilland's second argument, concerning dynastic stability,
provide sufficient explanation; it does so only in so far as a desire for
208
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c.l250-1400
APPENDIX
1. Eunuchs known by name in the thirteenth to early fifteenth
centuries
1.1 Eunuchs at court
1.1.1 Constantinople
[i] Andronikos Eonopolites (Avop6vn:oc; 'Hovo7tOAt't1'Jc; ('Irovo7tOAt't1'Jc;?),
PLP #6713): llEyac; opouyyapwc; in Constantinople (1286-9),
'ta'tac; 'tfjc; auA-f\c; (1280/1); recommended the later patriarch
Athanasios to Emperor Andronikos II.
[ii] john Kallikrenites ('Iroavv11c; KaUucp11Vt't1'Jc;, PLP #I 0370): otKEtoc;
of the Empress Helene Dragas, wife of Manuel II Palaiologos
(about 1400).
[iii] Karvas (Kap~ac;, PLP #11145), died mid-December 1291(?):
servant of Andronikos II in Constantinople; was murdered while
he tried to prevent Michael Komnenos Angelos, heir to the
domain ofThessaly, from fleeing.
[iv] Michael Kallikrenites (Mtxm1A- KaUtKP11Vt't1'Jc;, PLP #10371):
7tpOKa8it!levoc; "COU Komovoc; in Constantinople (1321-30/1),
1tavcr£~acnoc; cr£~acr'toc; and otKetoc; of emperor Andronikos II,
c. 1330. Sent to Andronikos III thrice during the civil war; later
the patriarch sent him on a diplomatic mission to Armenia and
Cilicia.
[v] Philialetes (<l>tAtaATt"C'llc;, PLP#29822), died before 1401; founder
209
Niels Gaul
210
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c.l250-1400
Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to Professors E. Trapp (Bonn) and E.M. Jeffreys (Oxford)
as well as to Mr D.W. Farrell (Oxford) and, especially, to my mother, who
read through half of the prosopographical dictionary of the Palaiologan period,
generously helping me with my hunt for late Byzantine eunuchs.
Notes
Translations from Greek into English are my own. Byzantine Greek '~' is
transcribed as 'v' rather than 'b'.
1 Tougher 1997 provides a useful introduction to the phenomenon ofByzantine
century dynastic thinking may have been more common among ordinary - or
politically dissatisfied- people (cf. e.g. Macrides 1981), Komnenian as well as
211
Niels Gaul
Palaiologan emperors were certainly well aware of the danger of revolts initiated
by members of their own families. As Magdalino 1993, 190, has it: 'The threat
which the reigning emperor had formerly faced from the heads of rival families
had moved within his own family.' It should be noted that the founder of the
Palaiologan dynasty, Michael VIII, established himself on the throne by means of
usurpation, and that John V Palaiologos in his youth experienced the usurpation
ofJohn VI Kantakuzenos. Compare moreover the fate of Andronikos II and John
V Palaiologoi respectively in their later years, as well as the rivalry among the
younger siblings ofJohn VIII (see, in general, Nicol1993).
6 Hopkins 1978, 180.
7 Trapp 1976-96 [hereafter PLP]. This present study is effectively based upon
references to eunuchs that can be traced in the PLP. It has to be acknowledged that
further sources of such kind as the 1336 horoscope for the empire ofTrebizond
(Lampros 1916), which are not represented in the PLP and remain unknown
to me for the moment, might further modifY our perception of eunuchs in the
later Byzantine empire.
8 Pach. Rel. hist. 4.681.19; Kant. Hist. 2.223.22.
and Magdalino 1996, 146-55, esp. 147 n.6 for earlier references. However,
Magdalino does not discuss the changing role of eunuchs during these years,
simply stating 'there is enough to indicate that eunuchs remained an influential
force behind the obvious power structures of the sekreta and the imperial family'
(1993, 260). See also the comments of Mullett in this volume.
10 Angold 1975, 147-81. As long as a prosopography of the Nicaean Empire
12 Laiou 1981, esp. 249-57, and 1982, esp. 199-201. Cf. ,most recently
14 Tougher 1997, 177-80, and especially in this volume, has' pointed out that
the Byzantines, disregarding their own legislation, did produce eunuchs within
the boundaries of their empire. Thus, lacking any evidence, there is no reason to
assume that any of our samples carne from abroad.
15 Miklosich and Muller II, 388-9.
16 Cf. Schreiner 1971, 156-60, for a prosopography of the Pepagornenoi
212
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c. 1250-1400
20 Lampros 1916,40.13-15.
21 Lampros 1916,44.26-8, 45.8, 45.22--4.
22 Cupane (ed.) 1995, 190 (vv. 2226-7).
24 This may hold true especially for the office of tata~, which we find (possibly)
no less than thrice among our group of fifteen. The exact duty performed by
a tat<l~ is unknown; the office was not introduced before the end of the twelfth
century and ranked fairly low, at the thirty-sixth position (Ps.-Kod. off 138.17).
In the thirteenth century he belonged, together with the myKEpVTJ~ and the
E1tt tfi~ tpartESTJ~, to the three major aulic functionaries appointed by Michael
VIII for his son, Andronikos II (Kazhdan (ed.) 1991, vol. iii, 2013-14 s.v.
'tatas'). Thus the office of tata~ rather suggests a, possibly honorific, service
in close proximity to the emperor than an elevated status at court. Both the
other offices were reserved exclusively for eunuchs up to the eleventh century
(Guilland 1967, 237-50).
25 On StJohn of Herakleia see generally Guilland 1926, 4-5 and 126-8, and
Laurent 1930.
26 On hagiography of the Palaiologan period in general c£ Macrides 1981,
29 Castration for medical reasons was permitted from the ninth century
contribution of Mullett in this volume), was the first to maintain that a castrated
man's soul is not affected by the <jlucrt~ of his body. For a detailed discussion from
a Byzantine point of view of whether or not castrated men could achieve sanctity
c£ Ringrose 1999, esp. 126ff. By the end of the fourth century eunuchs were
clearly not 'eligible' for sanctity as, according to the Fathers, their celibacy was
imposed upon them rather than being their own achievement.
35 A novelty of the Nicaean court in exile, who were trained for a career in
213
Niels Gaul
39 Gavras sent two letrers to Kallikrenites (epp. 48, 214) and Pepagomenos (epp.
409, 444) each; Philes dedicated one poem to Kallikrenites (anecd. 38) and two to
Pepagomenos (poem. I p. 137, 357). Compare PLP #10371 and #22357.
40 Phil. poem. I p. 137 (nr. 283.10).
41 Phil. poem. I p. 357 (nr. 191).
42 This office did not come into existence before the beginning of the fourteenth
century, c£ Darrouzes 1970, 136, 284-8; before then, the eKKA.lJcrtapxnc; was
usually in charge of the sacristy of a church or monastery (c£ Darrouzes 1970,
136; Kazhdan (ed.) 1991, vol. I, 682 s.v. 'ekklesiarches'). In Darrouzes' slightly
later list P2 the office is linked to the 11£:yac; xaptoq>uA.a~ (p. 573, 3): 'flyouv 6
IJ.Eyac; eKKA.lJcrtapxnc;'. In list R, while both offices are listed separately, the office
of IJ.Eyac; xapto(j>uA.a~ is described as follows (p. 574, 4-5): 'as the right hand of
the patriarch, he is a legal representative (eKOtKoc;) in all matters, taking care of the
exhortations (1tpotpo1tac;) and the wedding contracts (yaiJ.tKa cruvaA.A.awma)'.
Although no definition of the office of IJ.Eyac; EKKAlJcrtapxnc; is given, he may well
have been concerned with questions of canonical law too.
43 See Ringrose 1996 on the various 'mediating' functions of eunuchs in
Byzantine society.
44 Pach. Rel. hist. 4.681.19.
45 Kant. Hist. 1.64.12-65.14, 1.94.13-95.10, 1.118.16-119.7.
46 Cf. Tougher 1999, 93-100. This eunuch's behaviour seems worthy offurther
referred to in this passage, preferably the last ones mentioned, were eunuchs
themselves. However, both Alexios Apokavkos (PLP #1180) and Manuel Kin-
namos (PLP #11724) were certainly married; nothing seems to be known about
John Gavalas (PLP #93286).
51 Ringrose 1994, 96 and 515 n. 41.
52 Cf. Tougher 1999, 92.
53 C£ Bryer 1981.
impact this marriage may have had on the development of eunuchism in the.
Osmanh harem.
214
Eunuchs in the late Byzantine empire c.I250-1400
57 For a general overview compare Beaton 1996, 101-16, with Agapitos and
Smith 1992, 73-90. The classification 'vernacular' is somewhat misleading,
because there is general agreement that all three of these novels were produced
in, as well as for, a milieu closely related to the imperial court of Constantinople.
The Kallimachos romance, for example, may have been written by a nephew of
Emperor Michael VIII, cf. Beck 1971, 124-5, and Beaton 1996, 104 and
108-9. However, Agapitos and Smith 1992, 131, and Agapitos 1991, 15-16,
suggest some caution. While at present no final agreement on the chronological
order of these novels has been achieved (though see Agapitos 1993 and 1999,
112 n. 7), Agapitos has recently proposed - in a paper delivered at the xxe
Congres international des Etudes byzantines (August 2001) - to date Livistros
and Rhodamne as early as the Laskarid period (he considers Theodore II Laskaris
to be the author of the romance).
58 Guyot 1980, 72-7, analyses appearances of eunuchs in the ancient Greek
novel: they always appear in a Persian context, where Chariton depicts them
neutrally, while Heliodorus and lamblichus make ample use of prejudices and
characterize them as cruel. C£ also Scarcella 1996, 233f. on the pejorative
attitude displayed towards them.
59 Beaton 1996, 79. Although Manasses, writing his novel, was influenced by
ancient models (c£ Mazal 1967, 132, and above, n. 58), his dislike of eunuchs
was not limited to this genre: it is a prominent feature also of his world chronicle.
See most recently Magdalino 1997, 163, with further references. Hunger 1978,
II, 125, already acknowledged that in the twelfth-century novel eunuchs fit 'eine
auf das byzantinische Milieu der Zeit bezogene Darstellung'.
60 Mazal1967, fr. 80,6-9 (p. 184), c£ also fr. 110 (p. 192) andfr. 161 (p. 204).
romance and epos (DigenisAkritis) see Pieler 1971, Magdalino 1984b and 1989,
and some essays in Beaton and Ricks 1993. A 'semi-realistic' setting seems to
hold true also for the Byzantine Achilleid's Naples version, where the use of
the title and of the insignia ofOecmcrtTJ<; (Smith 1999, esp. vv. 88, 116, 175-7,
366-78 and commentary) designates the emperor's son and heir to the throne,
as in contemporary politics. See also n. 57.
62 The Kallimachos and Velthandros romances are quoted from Cupane (ed.)
1995.
63 I understand these rather unclear verses to express the eunuchs' hope that the
additional suggestion.
215
Niels Gaul
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1984 The Byzantine Aristocracy, IX-XIII Centuries, Oxford.
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1996 The Medieval Greek Romance, 2nd edn, London.
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1993 Digenis Akritas: New approaches to Byzantine heroic poetry, Aldershot.
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1971 Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur, Munich.
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1981 'Greek historians on the Turks: the case of the first Byzantine-Ottoman
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1930 'La personnalite de Jean d'Heraclee (1250-1328). Oncle et precepteur
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1981 'Saints and sainthood in the early Palaiologan period', in Hackel (ed.)
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1984a 'Byzantine snobbery', in Angold (ed.) The Byzantine Aristocracy, 58-78.
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1860-90 Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi, Vienna.
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1855-7 Manuelis Philae Carmina, 2 vols., Paris.
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1996 'Social and economic structures in the ancient novel', in G. Schmeling
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1828-32 Joannis Cantacuzeni eximperatoris historiarum libri IV, 3 vols.,
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Tougher, S.
1997 'Byzantine eunuchs: an overview, with special reference to their creation
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Byzantium, London and New York, 168-184.
1999 'Images of effeminate men: the case of Byzantine eunuchs', in D. Hadley
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1976-96 Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, Vienna.
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219
12
Most of the stories about Chinese eunuchs come from the twenty-three
standard Chinese Dynastic Histories, which were long a monopoly of
Confucian historiographers. These historical literati used their monopolistic
writings to promote the politics of the sage-kings and the imperial system.
And, if the system derailed, they felt that they were responsible for mending
it. Unfortunately, cruel political realities often defeated such idealism, and
ultimately they attributed all evils to the despised and hateful eunuchs,
when in fact the cause of the ills of their society was the very imperial
system that the Chinese intelligentsia gleefully served. Consequently,
Chinese historians rarely openly and persistently criticized the autocratic
political system and the tyranny generated by it. Instead, they singled out
the eunuchs as the scapegoats and refused to treat the group of courtiers
as a social and political complex. This chapter attempts to deviate from
orthodox Chinese ideological abettors and tries to give eunuchs a more
balanced treatment. It presents Chinese eunuchism in the context of
imperial despotism, court politics, and the eunuch institutions the emperor
created and which received their power from him.
Nobody knows when and how eunuchs were first institutionalized
in China, except that castration was frequently used as a substitute for
the death penalty. In China, palace eunuchs were called siren, meaning
'waiters in the palace chambers'. They were also called huanguan, which
was a recognized official title during the Shang dynasty (1765-1223 BC),
appearing on the Shang oracle bones: Since then, both the Chinese words
huan and guan mean officials or officialdom. According to Zhouli (Rites
of the Zhou dynasty, 1122-256 Be), the king invested one queen, three
madams, nine concubines, twenty-seven varied ranks of consorts, and
eighty-one court ladies for the duties of the Inner Court. In conjunction
with this system, the Zhou king also employed castrated men to supervise
royal chambers and guard his harem. In spite of the long-held suspicion
that Zhouli was a composition of the late Han dynasty, it provides all
221
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
222
Eunuch power in imperial China
223
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Jin during a court audience. He Jin's deputies in turn brought their troops
to the capital Luoyang and put to death more than 2000 eunuchs in
retribution. The chief eunuch Zhang Rang took the teenaged Emperor
Shao and the Dowager He and fled northward toward the Yellow River.
But after being surrounded by his enemies, Zhang Rang jumped into the
river and drowned himself, while his patron and protector the Dowager
He was forced to take poison. The Emperor Shao was then deposed and
succeeded by his eight-year-old half-brother, the Emperor Xian. But that
was also the end of the Eastern Han dynasty. A strong man named Cao
Cao who would hold sway of China during the next turbulent decades
was actually an adopted grandson of a court eunuch. As a consequence,
orthodox Chinese historians almost universally attribute the downfall of
most of the dynasties to the lascivious conduct and insolent power of the
eunuchs, a power derived from their intimacy with the young monarch
and the empress dowager, from access to offices inside and outside the
palace, and from a passive government beset with corruption, fear, and
inept leadership. A typical example was the last Emperor of Chen dynasty
(582-9), during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, who lived in
seclusion in his harem and seldom received his officials. He authorized
his chief eunuchs Cai Tuoer and Li Shanchang to deliberate on state
documents. And frequently his favourite concubine Zhang was sitting
on his lap when he discussed state affairs with eunuchs Cai and Li and
gave the imperial sanctions. 5 It is clear that the historian Yao Shilian, who
compiled the official history of the Chen dynasty, wanted this politically
charged cliche- the weak and lazy emperor, the sly and cynical eunuchs
- to be embedded in Chinese historiography. '
The next dynasty that was to be constantly plagued with eunuch
problems was the prosperous and culturally brilliant Tang dynasty
(618-906). During the early years of the Tang, power centred on the
emperor and three to seven chancellors. Mter the mid-eighth century,
however, the eunuchs began to undermine the integrity of the chancellery,
as many of them were appointed commanders of the army. According to
the Old Tang History, one of China's twenty-three official histories, the
Tang court generally maintained over 4600 ranked eunuchs who owned
60% of the property and land in the capital city and directly participated
in the decision-making process. 6 And because there were so many court
intrigues and bloody coup d' etats, a handful of daring eunuchs, who
sided with the winners, often received rewards and were subsequently
entrusted with more power. A case in point was Gao Lishi, who in 713
helped Emperor Ming Huang get rid of his great aunt, the Grand Princess
Taiping, effectively removing a real threat to Ming Huang's regime. The
224
Eunuch power in imperial China
death of the Grand Princess Taiping signalled not only the end of half
a century of women's domination of the Tang court, but also the rise of
the eunuch powers. Gao Lishi was ultimately invested as the Duke of Qi-
hence the beginning of the tradition in Chinese history oflavishly granting
noble titles to castrated men. All told, the Tang emperors invested one
eunuch prince, twenty-seven eunuch dukes, four eunuch marquises, two
eunuch earls, four eunuch viscounts, and seven eunuch barons?
During the decade of 745-55, Emperor Ming Huang, then in his
late sixties and early seventies, became infatuated with his legendary
imperial consort Yang Guifei who, at the prime age of thirty-something,
encouraged the ageing monarch to indulge in music, dancing, and opera.
As Emperor Ming Huang lost interest in the management of the state,
the chief eunuch Gao Lishi literally became the de facto ruler of the Tang
court. Even the great minister Li Linfu, who directed the empire from
737 until his death in 752, and the commander of the Northern Army,
An Lushan (of Sogdian and Turkish stock), sought favour with Gao
Lishi. Other high officials of the central government in Xian and the
provinces were reduced to ingratiating themselves with the favourites
of Gao to maintain their power and position. Princes and dukes alike
called him 'Master Gao', officials high and low considered him their
real boss, and Emperor Ming Huang himself affectionately called Gao
'My Commander'. Old Tang History gives us the following biographical
sketch of Gao:
Gao Lishi owned immense property and wealth, far surpassing those of
the princes and the nobles. He gave money to construct Buddha statues
and the famous Treasure-Longevity Monastery, as well as a gigantic Daoist
temple ... At the northwestern corner of the capital, he built a five-wheeled
water mill that could grind 300 bushels of wheat daily. Mter the bell at the
Treasure-Longevity Monastery was cast and was ready for use, the entire
court came to the monastery to take part in the ceremony. Courtiers took
turns to hit the bell, each hitting it from ten to twenty times. 8
225
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
226
Eunuch power in imperial China
years later, Tong was again promoted to head the Bureau of Military
Mfairs, or Shumiyuan. Moreover, he was also named the 'Grand Preceptor
of the Heir Apparent', an unprecedented honour for a eunuch. During the
two decades when Tong Guan took part in policy-making, he consistently
advocated a detente with Song's powerful northern neighbour, the Liao
empire - founded by a Mongol people called Qidan. But in 1125 the
Jurched, a Tungusic people from whom the Manchus later descended,
dismantled the Liao and immediately announced their intention to take
on the Song Chinese. Tong Guan was then despatched to Taiyuan, but
when he failed to stop the enemies from entering the capital city of
Kaifeng, faculty and students from the Imperial University repeatedly
requested the removal of all of the eunuchs. When the situation finally
got out of control, Emperor Huizong abdicated and fled with Tong Guan
southward to Yangzi. However, in order to satisfY the demands of the anti-
establishment elements, the new Emperor Qinzong ordered the execution
of Tong Guan in the summer of 1126. Within only a few months,
however, the Jurched captured not only the new Emperor Qinzong but
also the retired Emperor Huizong, sending both of them to Manchuria,
never to return. 10
Tong Guan was forever blamed for causing the downfall of the Northern
Song dynasty and ever since, no other Song emperors, who continued the
dynasty as Southern Song in Hangzhou, would dare to appoint eunuchs to
any militarily responsible positions. When China was under Mongol rule
(1279-1368) eunuchs were rarely active in the political or military arena.
Nevertheless, in 1348, Jia Lu was appointed a Taijian, or grand eunuch,
to manage flood control and maintain China's hydraulic infrastructure.
Taijian, a unique eunuch title in China's officialdom, was thus created and
henceforth became an important element in China's imperial history.
When Zhu Yuanzhang (known as Emperor Hongwu) founded the Ming
dynasty in 1368, he was also keenly aware of the potentially pernicious
eunuch problem and decided to limit the number of court eunuchs to
fewer than 100. Even though he was later to increase the number of palace
servants to more than 400, he reportedly also decreed that no eunuch be
permitted to learn books or to give advice on political matters. 11 Even
the few eunuchs with whom Emperor Hongwu might chat were kept
dutifully awed and never allowed to discuss politics. In 1384, he had the
following inscription engraved on an iron tablet in front of his Nanjing
palace: 'Eunuchs are forbidden to interfere with government affairs. Those
who attempt to do so will be subjected to capital punishment.' 12 Shortly
before his death he ordered that eunuchs should no longer be allowed to
wear the uniform of government officials and that their rank should not
227
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
228
Eunuch power in imperial China
all Ming historical discourse. As Lenin once said, quantity has a certain
quality of its own. And indeed, there were many skilled, intelligent, and
capable grand eunuchs who distinguished themselves as commanders of
the army, admirals, ambassadors, architects, engineers, financiers, and
superintendents of various agencies.
The Ming eunuchs were not just household servants hewing wood and
drawing water- they actually made up a third administrative hierarchy,
participating in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. They
exercised their power in all areas of government, frequently challenging
and surpassing those of scholar-bureaucrats and the military establishment.
Among the most powerful and notorious eunuch bosses were Wang Zhen
in the 1440s, Wang Zhi in the 1470s, LiuJin in the early 1500s, and Wei
Zhongxian (jl. 1620-7) near the end of the Ming dynasty. On the other
hand, there were exemplary eunuchs who left remarkable careers behind
them. Nguyen An, a castrato sent from Vietnam as tribute to the Ming
emperor, designed and constructed the fabulous Forbidden City during
1410-22. Feng Bao, serving both as the Director of the Eastern Depot
(Ming's espionage agency) and as the Director of the Ceremonial - the
Ming emperor's general chief of staff- helped to guide the statecraft of
the Ming during the 1570s. But the Ming eunuch who is best known
to the Western World is Admiral Zheng He, who led seven maritime
expeditions, between 1405 and 1433, to some thirty states in south-east
Asia and along the Indian Ocean, reaching as far as Hormus in the Persian
Gulf and Somaliland in Mrica. Each of these pre-Columbian voyages
involved tens of thousands of government troops and employed more
than sixty-five ocean-going vessels that travelled several thousand miles.
Such phenomena ultimately inspired Levathes to write a lively account
of Ming's naval reconnaissance entitled When China Ruled the Seas. 15
The influence of the eunuchs was so pervasive that one might even call
the Ming government a government of half-men. Such a designation of
imperial China will assuredly irritate male chauvinist Chinese scholars.
But when the peasant rebels, led by Li Zicheng, entered the Forbidden
City through its back door during the late spring of 1644, and after almost
all of the officials had fled their posts, it was the eunuch commandant
Wang Chengen who stayed with the last Ming Emperor Chongzhen,
helping His Majesty to commit suicide in the Coal Hill. Afterwards, the
eunuch Wang took his own life.
During the Qing dynasty, the last of China's imperial dynasties, there
would be no more eunuch admirals or commandants, even though there
were a few influential eunuchs, such as An Dehai and Li Lianying, both of
whom served the Empress Dowager Cixi near the end of the dynasty. The
229
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Manchu rulers placed severe restrictions on the court eunuchs: for example,
they were not allowed to leave the Beijing city gates; those who broke the
rule were always executed. Normally, the Qing emperor would only accept
castrated boys who were under fifteen years of age and unmarried. Before
entering palace service, these emotionally scarred and physically deformed
castrati were thoroughly examined by the palace head eunuch who made
sure that their 'treasure parts' had been permanently severed from their
bodies. Castrati who were fifteen years and older and those who had been
married were given to the princes and princesses. A Manchu prince, rank
7a, could keep as many as forty castrati under a eunuch supervisor, while an
8a rank prince was allowed to have thirty castrati plus a eunuch supervisor.
Decades later as the number of members of the imperial family grew at
an exponential rate, there was also an increasing number of palace women
who needed the service of eunuchs. Beginning with Emperor Qianlong
(1736-96), middle-aged castrati (some of whom had been previously
married) were recruited from the princely establishments to work in the
Forbidden City. And this is how Li Lianying, a handsome hairdresser in his
late twenties, was brought to serve the vivacious Empress Dowager.
A native of Hejian, some sixty miles south of Beijing, Li Lianying
became an orphan when he was still very young. Constantly struggling
just for mere subsistence, Li held all kinds of odd jobs, including as
a leathersmith and a hairdresser. Through the influence of another eunuch
named Shen Yulan from Hejian district, Li decided to make a radical
change in his life - by voluntarily having himself emasculated so that he
could enter the palace service. At the outset, he worked in various inner
court storehouses and held no office. But Li Lianying's talents were soon
discovered. When the Empress Dowager was looking for a hairdresser
to make a fashionable hairdo for her, Li was recommended. With this
stroke ofluck and because Li Lianying was very clever with his tongue, he
soon became Her Majesty's favourite eunuch. Also because the Empress
Dowager was an avid opera fan, the jack-of-all-trades Li Lianying decided
to learn how to act on the stage so that he could entertain his imperial
patron. He was gifted enough to play not only a male role, but also
a female role, and even the role of a clown. By the time Li was forty years
old, he had become Her Majesty's trusted confidant and daily companion.
His power was equal to a 1a grand councillor, and many of the high
officials, including the highly respected governor-general Li Hongzhang,
had started to ingratiate themselves with him.
In 1886, Li Lianying accompanied I-huan, the Prip.ce of Chun and also
the grandfather of Qing's last emperor Henry Pu-yi, for an inspection of
the new navy in Tianjin. In the course of the tour, a censor reprimanded
230
Eunuch power in imperial China
231
Shih-shan Henry Tsai
Notes
I Only 305 poems were selected in the Book of Odes. The eunuch Meng Zi's
rankling in his heart was well expressed in a xia ya folk song style. See Guo
Shaoyu et al. (eds.) 1979, 7-10.
2 Sima Qian 1964, juan 6 on 'Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin',
102-5.
3 Fan Ye et al. (eds.) 1979, juan 78, 2518.
4 Fan Ye et al. (eds.) 1979, juan 78, 2534-6.
5 Yao Shilian 1980, juan 7, 132.
6 Liu Xu et al. (eds.) 1979, juan 184, 4753-5.
I 3 Hongzhi Veritable Record, 70, 12th moon of 5th year, Hongzhi reign;
Zhengde Veritable Record, 11, 3rd moon of 1st year, Zhengde reign.
I 4 Wanli Veritable Record, 11, 3rd moon of 1st year; 205, lith moon of 16th
year, and 358, 4th moon of 29th year, Wanli reign.
I 5 Levathes 1994.
I 6 Hummel (ed.) 1943, 298, 385.
Bibliography
Anderson, M.M.
1990 Hidden Power: The palace eunuchs ofimperial China, Buffalo, N.Y.
Crawford, R. C. '
1966 'Eunuch power in the Ming dynasty', T'oung Pao 49, 115-48.
Fan Ye et al. (eds.)
1979 Hou Han shu [History of the Later Han Dynasty], Taiwan reprint.
Gardner, C.S.
1961 Chinese Traditional Historiography, Cambridge, Mass.
Gu Rong and Ge Jingang
1992 Wuheng weiqiang: Gudai huanguan qunti de wenhua kaocha [Fog across
the Curtain Wall: An examination of the collective culture of eunuchs
in ancient times], Xian.
Guo Shaoyu et al. (eds.)
1979 Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan [Selected Literary Essays throughout China's
Dynasties], Shanghai.
Hummel, A.W (ed.)
1943 Eminent Chinese ofthe Ch'ing Period, Washing~on D.C.
Jurgel, U.
1976 Politische Funktion und Soziale Stellung der Eunuchen zur Spiiteren
Hanzeit (25-220 n. Chr.), Wiesbaden.
232
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Kuwabara, ].
1936 'Shina no kangan' [The eunuchs m China], Toyo shi setsuen 22,
344-58.
Leng, D.
1990 Bei yange de shouhu shen: huanguan yu Zhongguo zhengzhi [Castrated
Eunuchs and Chinese Politics], Changchun.
Levathes, L.E.
1994 When China Ruled the Seas: The treasure fleet of the Dragon Throne,
1405-1433, Oxford.
Liu Xu et al. (eds.)
1979 Qju Tang shu [History of the Old Tang Dynasty], Taiwan reprint.
Millant, R.
1908 Les eunuques: atravers les ages, Paris.
Mitamura, T.
1963 Kangan: sokkin seiji no kozo [Chinese Eunuchs: The structure of intimate
politics], Tokyo.
Shimizu, T.
1932 'Jigu kangan no kenkyu' [A study of eunuch's self-castration], Shigaku
zasshi 43, 82-128.
SimaQian
1964 Shi]i [Historical Records], Taiwan reprint.
Stent, G.C.
1877 'Chinese eunuchs' ,journal ofthe North China Branch ofthe RoyalAsiatic
Society n.s. 10, 166.
Tsai, S.H.
1996 The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty, Albany, N.Y.
Tuotuo et al. (eds.)
1979 Song shi [History of the Song Dynasty], Taiwan reprint.
Yang Lien-sheng
1960-61 'Female rulers in Chinese history', Harvard journal ofAsiatic Studies
23,47-61.
Yao Shilian
1980 Chen Shu [Book of the Chen Dynasty], Taiwan reprint.
Zhang Tingyu et al. (eds.)
1979 Ming shi [History of the Ming Dynasty], Taiwan reprint.
233
13
Richard Witt
Musical aesthetics
The quality of the eunuch voice perhaps varied with the age at which
emasculation occurred. 9 In Ottoman Turkey 'amputative' emasculation,
removing the whole genital system, might be done shortly after puberty,
when the vocal cords had already enlarged and the voice had deepened.
Thus Osmin, an Ottoman harem overseer in Mozart's Die EntjUhrung
aus dem Serail, has basso profondo arias, not male soprano coloratura.
But in China, where the operation was done very early in life, the
voice characteristically remained high-pitched, landing eunuchs with the
unflattering nickname 'crows' .10
In the case of the castrati, who were produced by 'excisive' or 'partial'
emasculation, with the testicles, and no more, surgically disconnected
or removed, there was an 'optimal' age: not below seven and not above
twelve, and usually between eight and ten. 11 With the large proviso that
the testicles were excised completely without botching, the voice, instead
235
Richard Witt
This is the 'incomparable softnesse and sweetnesse' that John Evelyn found
in the castrato voice; that emasculation has always sought to conserve; 29 and
236
The other castrati
237
Richard Wz'tt
238
The other castrati
Historical distribution
Castrato singers-and-dancers, like other eunuchs, belong to the 'high
civilizations' of Far Eastern Asia and Western Asia. In China, where court
eunuchs date from at least the eighth century BC, 78 castrati sometimes
enjoyed high social status. Particularly celebrated, in the secondary Han
capital, Luoyang, were the 'Palace Attendants of the Yellow Gates', a cadre
of castrati aged from 10 to 12, who led the chu yi ('banishment of
pestilence') ceremony, surviving under the Tang, for the passing of the Old
Year.7 9 Holding twirl-drums, twelve teams of ten boys in animal costumes
sang a simple leader-and-chorus chant to ward off evil. A very similar
fertility-cum-longevity ritual took place in Korea on the Night of the
Twelfth Moon (New Year's Eve), three hundred palace eunuchs chanting
prayers and swinging blazing brands. 80
In about AD 1500, on imperial orders, the Chinese eunuch Dai Yi
taught at least one other eunuch- Huang Xian, from Guangxi province-
the country music repertoire xumen zengchuan; this presumably included
songs. Fifty years later, Huang compiled a tablature (Wugang qinpu),
one of many such, for the seven-stringed zither qin. 81 In his own words,
'this clearly shows that there was an orderly lineage among teachers and
friends': a long, solid tradition of eunuch dilettanti versed in music.
A quite different eunuch identity emerged when K'un-ch'i art theatre
became popular in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Professional castrati
established a monopoly of stage vocal music, and most court actors were
palace eunuchs: seven hundred or so at any given time. 82
239
Richard Witt
240
The other castrati
identity by being given new, Assyrian names and clothes; Daniel finds
'tender-compassion' 101 from the king's own sa resi. Were they regendered,
as well as renamed and reclothed? Jews took it for granted that the three
companions - and, presumably, Daniel himself- had been eunuchs. 102
Daniel's text twice hints at eunuch singing: in the Soliloquy of Daniel
himself (2.20-3), and in the second Miracle Tale (3.1-30) of his three
companions. The Soliloquy, accepted as canonical, comprises a blessing
(2.20-2) in psalm metre, therefore sung, and a freer verse of thanksgiv-
ing (2.23), declaimed. In the Aramaic original of the Miracle Tale,
the companions in the oven do not sing. But in the Greek Septuagint
translation, with its own dating problems, there is a triple 'apocryphal'
addition between lines 3.23 and 3.24 of the original: the 'Prayer of Azariah'
(apocr.add. 1-22), declaimed; a short prose narrative; then a long paean
of blessing (apocr.add. 26-68) by all three companions in unison, in an
antiphonal style resembling certain Psalms. (Under its Latin incipit of
Benedicite, the Song of the Three Children became part of the Gallican
Mass, 103 sung by a deacon or by young trebles, leaving a rich legacy to
European music). It must remain an open question whether there were
Jewish castrati outside or inside Israel, and whether or not the Benedicite
was a later invention.
For ancient Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, and for the axial capitals of
Rome and Constantinople, evidence remains sparse. With one exception,
Timotheos' Persae, 104 no classical text prepares us for Euripides' coup de
theatre (lines 1369-1502) in Orestes- the climax, musically speaking,
not only of this play, but of its poet's lifelong efforts to escape from the
normative Greek male timbre and explore the singing voice of single non-
standard characters, 105 effectively inaugurating the operatic aria. 106 He is
already experimenting with this technique of monody when introducing
a 'fledgling' voice a third of the way through Alkestis. 107 By Orestes, he
has developed it beyond recognition, into a long, brilliant aria 108 (in
lieu of a messenger speech) articulated, just as in Timotheos, through
complex lyric metres. This 'showstopper' is sung by a character who
appears nowhere else in the play, and who all but outrages the Hellenic
proprieties. Established, even before his arrival, as Phrygian, he quickly
identifies himself as a minor Persian court official, a punkah-wallah. If
modern commentators are undecided whether to regard him as a eunuch or
simply a slave, Euripides himselfleft his audience small margin for doubt.
The mere mention ofPhrygia was enough to induce a knee-jerk association
with castration for some viewers. 109 Even if the new character had never
opened his mouth, his dress language gives him away. Euripides explicitly
tells us he had slip-on deerskin shoes, and an official fan - a notorious
241
Richard Witt
242
The other castrati
Catullus 63, the 'Attis ode' in galliambic rhythm, 127 makes an interesting
foil to the music from Orestes. Declaimed, not sung, 128 it too was designed
in aria sections, had a ferocious mood-swing from ecstasy to despair -
furioso to maestoso, in the poet's own dynamic markings 129 - and was
spiced with references to Asiatic music. 130 The illusion of actual music
was maintained by percussive play with the letters d (or t), s, and 1,
imitating respectively the pattering frame-drum, the sibilant sistrum, and
the glottal trill of ululation. Catullus went one better than Euripides in
representing the worshippers' psychic state by obsessive repetition; and
added a Roman touch of his own, a spate of elisions building up to and
away from a climax.
Catullus would have been in his early twenties at the date of the 'Bona
Dea' scandal, when the young Clodius 'lowered his virility and heightened
his voice'. 131 As the Greek biographer tells it, 132 'there were no males
present'; Clodius, cross-dressing as a professional woman harpist, was
'a beardless youth'; and one of the maids spotted the difference of his
vocal timbre from that of a biological woman. The next generation but
one saw an extended vogue for light, high voices among public speakers,
particularly actors. 133 The light, high delivery, which Cicero himself had
experimented with, to his contemporaries' annoyance, was classed as
an 'Asiatic' fashion. Adjectives chosen to pin it down were 'soft(ish)'
(mollis, mollior), 'womanish' (muliebris, ejfeminata), 'slender' (gracilis),
'broken' ifracta), and even 'running riot' (exultans), recalling descriptions
of western castrato timbre. Quintilian, fascinated as well as appalled,
wrote of'a transparent, shot-silk style' that tended to emasculate whatever
it dealt with. 134
It is from the dying days of this 'Asiatic' fashion that Juvenal's sixth
Satire dates. His savage twelve lines attacking some Roman matrons'
preferences for gelded males is famous, but it has gone unnoticed that
the subsequent six-line coda, dripping with innuendo, can and should be
read as referring to a castrato:
If music's what she fancies, where is the pop singer who'll be able to keep
his cock-pin stiff for long? She's always got an organ or two in her hands;
a swathe of jewels glitters across the sound-chest; the strings throb to the
curly plectrum her soft Hedymeles gets to work with: it's him she hugs, him
she treats herself to, lavishing kisses on his ingratiating plectrum. 135
The language here is sexually charged, especially 'curly', 'plectrum', and
'gets to work' .136 For anyone knowing Greek, 'Hedymeles' would have
evoked not only upmarket literary models - Sappho, Anacreon - but
smooth skin and caressing melodies, a good advertising ploy. 137 If the
243
Richard Witt
244
The other castrati
and there was certainly a male name ApxuA.O<;, also accented on the final
syllable. Was this 'girl from Phrygia' a Proustian Albertine, a regendered
boy -like the singing Attis, or like Euripides' singingpunkah-wallah? Was
'she' yet another castrato (or 'born eunuch') singer? 147
A wholly unexpected transcultural parallel to the Phrygian cult is the
music of the Skoptsi, the secret sect that spread across Russia, from about
1770 onwards, surviving even into the first Stalinist years. 148 Skoptsi
ritual included hymn singing, exhortations, and frenzied dancing which
culminated in spontaneous castrations. 149
It is worth asking why the castrato singer did not flourish in the
sophisticated, 'para-Byzantine' climate of the Caliphate. Certainly Islam
had, like China, eunuch (khisiyan) scholars knowledgeable about singers
and singing, as witness an anecdote of the famous Abbasid musician ibn
Jami'. 150 Incognito, he played a composition of his in the palace music
salon at Baghdad, with its partitioning veil. Hardly had he finished, than
half a dozen eunuchs emerged from behind the veil. They had been sent
to ask what the piece was and who it was by. By me, said the composer,
whereupon back they went, and out came the Head Eunuch, shouting
'Liar! It's by ibn Jami'!' Nevertheless, the 'praiseworthy voice' was firm,
pure and bleached of timbre 151 - thus excluding vox tremula - and was
not on any account to be soft and effeminate 'like that of a young married
woman', 152 so that the elegant gentleman troubadours of the Arab courts
had no time for eunuchs. Artistic taste was secondary anyway, for the
great barrier was ideological. Mohammed - intermittently - viewed all
music as 'of the Devil'; 153 he had expressly forbidden mutilation of the
human body; 154 and eunuchs were included in his formal curse upon 'men
who imitate women' .155
In the Young Rome at Constantinople, by contrast, true castrato singers
were well dug in by the end of the fourth century at the latest. The
first we hear of them is the empress Eudoxia's court favourite, Brison,
staunch opponent of Arians and close friend of John Chrysostom. 156 The
Arians had been staging weekend late-night protests with music, drawing
on a repertoire of hymns with ideological content (Arian theology)
and ideological form (Antioch-style antiphony). Brison had to organize
a competing all-night sing-in, as leader of the Homoousians' UllVCflOOL 157
In the upshot, the emperor banned public performance of the evidently
contagious Arian hymns. Profiting by experience, Chrysostom now com-
manded Brison to see to it that Brison's own singers- including castrati
like himself? 158 -were trained in antiphony, so that their Salvation Army
should steal the enemy's thunder. Antiphony may have been a Syrian
speciality, like metrical sermons; and we should also reckon with the
245
Richard W'itt
musical politics ofEdessa. This was a city with, like Nisan, a great tradition
of singing, harping, and drumming. It was home to the musical settings of
those 'bittersweet' songs of Bar Daisan which St Ephrem failed to drown
out with Christian canticles and responds sung by his own choir. 159 At its
celebrated spring festival, the old heathen tales were sung all night long by
citizen vigil-keepers. No eunuchs they (or at least not after about the year
AD 200, when with king Abgar's conversion to Christianity the penalty for
self-emasculation in Syria and Urhai was the loss of a hand). 160 However
they bared their genitals, like Attis, and followed their leader, the Dancer,
with 'singing, shouting' (i.e. ululation), and 'lewd behaviour'. 161
Were castrati singers like Brison the rule, or the exception, in the first
four centuries of Christian Byzantium? Perhaps to start with they were
perceived, like chanting nuns in Greek Orthodoxy today, as a necessary,
but controversial and uncomfortable innovation. In the long run, they
contributed creatively to the evolution of church music, 162 developed
into a guild of cantors jealously guarding its secrets; 163 and provided
an acceptable solution to the logistic problems caused by muting the
female voice in church. Moreover, of the 'philanthropic' orphanages
and monasteries founded at Constantinople, particularly during the
Macedonian dynasty (867-1056), one or two were eunuch training
centres. 164 The Lazarus monastery was reserved for eunuchs by Leo
VI, 165 himself no mean church musician, 166 and was visited officially by
emperors. A sixth-century foundation, the Orphanage of St Paul with
its choir school, was given a new lease of life by Alexios I Komnenos
(I 081-1118), 167 foreshadowing the Naples orphanages, those first
European conservatoires. 168 On the Feast of Lights its choristers sang
for the court: the music was simple, an antiphonal melody chanted
three times. 169 The teaching communities of eunuch mbnks organized at
Thessalonike by the 'sweet, witty, thrifty' abbot Symeon surely lost no
opportunity to perfect their 'kalophonic' chanting. 170 Eunuch bishops,
too, inevitably shaped musical practice when they intoned the liturgy:
notably in Thessalonike-Ochrid; 171 on Leukas and throughout tenth-
century Greece; 172 and at Constantinople itself, where Germanos I, the
first of a series of eunuch Patriarchs, 173 was not only a hymnographer of
distinction, but a practical musician who 'used melodies and canticles
(qaf.La·ta) to soften the rigours of all-night fasting'.
Conditions thus favoured the rise of a school of castrati cantors. A key
text is Theophylact of Ochrid's brief treatment of music in his In Defence
of Eunuchs. 174 'What is so criminal', asked Theophylact broadmindedly,
'about castrati in church chirping up with a brothel tune sanctified
by Christian lyrics?' This passage attests eunuch singers' experimental
246
The other castrati
247
Richard Witt
of women as well as men, with the two sexes singing in antiphony. 185
Castrato singers are missing from the archives of Ragusa, and, still more
significantly, Venice. The castrati - or falsettisti - of the Papal choir were
almost certainly due to political contacts with Spain, where a fashion for
falsettisti dimly seems to have evolved out of the late eleventh-century
Mozarabic liturgy. 186
Notes
1 Especially Habock 1927; Heriot 1956; Walker 1980; Barbier 1996.
2 Der Neue Pauly 1998, 4.256-8, ignores eunuch musicians.
3 Guyot 1980, 57: 'Bei den musikalischen, tanzlerischen und schauspielerischen
7 For Xavier Bichet (1771-1802), 'whereas the eunuch enjoys less vital energy,
the phenomenon of life develops in him with more fullness' (Oster 1990,
#8547).
8 The 'impolite', non-Attic, term was crmHirov. At Naples the young castrati
13 This skill reached its zenith with the 18th-century castrati, whose mean
range was something like g or a (bottom of the bass stave) to between f" and d'"
(top of the treble stave and above).
14 Babr. 103.5; c£ Hesych. s.v. t£p£'ttcrJla'ta.
15 Dio Chrys. Or. 62.6; cf. Guyot 1980, 58 n. 58.
16 'Certain notes he called his "fourth voice" - strange, sexless, superhuman,
248
The other castrati
19 Though lying close to the octave d-d', well above the modern bass register, the
21 Arist. [Pr.] 11.62; c£ Quint. Inst. 11.3.91. Actually the eunuch has 'the
larynx of a youth with the chest and lungs and force of expiration of a man':
Raguenet, in Walker 1980. Farinelli's victorious duel of stamina and articulation
with a virtuoso trumpeter is famous: Bergeron 1996, 181.
22 Manniche 1991, 14, discusses possible tremolo and humming on the letter
n in Egypt.
23 Hippoc. [Ep.] 19.
24 Aent6~: Arist. [Pr.] 11.16. The Latin equivalent is tenuis (Pomponius, apud
Macr. Sat. 6.4.12; Quint. Inst. 11.3.32) or exilis (Quint. Inst. 1.11.1, 11.3.15;
Plin. NH 11.51.270), associated with the (undifferentiated) female voice, and
with elderly men. Stated positively, the singer 'uses less of the voice'. o~u~: Arist.
[Pr.] 11.34; 11.62. But at Pl. Resp. 398e the 'effeminate' harmonia is the 'slack'
(i.e. lowish in tessitura?) Auouni.
25 Philostr. VS 8.
26 Arist. [Pr.] 11.58, 11.62; [De audib.] 801a9-10.
27 al-Hasan, in Shiloah (ed.) 1972, ch. 127; c£ ch. 201.
28 Lucian, Essays in portraiture 13.
33 Layard 1854, 79. Kuipers 1999 calls it 'a widespread but poorly described
form of vocalization'.
34 Catull. 63.24.
35 New Grove Dictionary of Music, London 1980, 'Iraq' §3; c£ Catull. 63.28
Hel. 1352, mentioning drum and double pipe) and female ululation (oA.oA:ul;etV:
e.g. Hom. Od. 3.450; Aesch. Eum. 1043). The shift from a too may represent
the physiological difference between male and female voices.
249
Richard Wttt
38 e.g. Rhianos, Anth. Pal. 6.173.3. On the galli see also the contributions of
Hales and Lightfoot in this volume.
39 See below, and also Thomson 1997, 373.
4o Catull. 63.24, cueing line 28.
41 Ov. Met. 4.333.
42 e.g. Ov. Met. 4.353.
44 In war: Pind. Dithyrambs fr. 61.10; in worship: Ov. Met.1l.l7, and Ap.
Rhod.Argon. 3.1218.
45 Layard 1854, 79-80.
46 C£ Turcan 1996, 64.
47 Kilmer 2000.
57 Maas and Snyder 1989, 147-55; Michaelides 1978, 264; West 1992,
70-80.
58 Poll. Onom. 4.59.
59 Sophronios of Jerusalem Vita Cyri et Joannis 4, PG 87.3385b; c£ Psalm
144.9.
60 mollities: Cic. Har. resp. 21.
61 Maas and Snyder 1989, 150.
62 Orff Carmina Burana, 22, 19; c£ Bergeron 1996, 173, 'yodelling vocals'.
note 134.
65 Amos 6.4-5.
250
The other castrati
77 In the 'refined' style, the voice copies the sostenuto and delicate embellish-
79 Text in the Treatise on Ritual section of the Han Hou su: Bodde 1975, 153.
80 Dolby 1976.
82 Dolby 1976.
101 Non-sexual, and on its own not nearly enough to place Daniel as a eunuch
103 See Hughes (ed.) 1955, 74-6. The legacy includes: the Daniel Plays; St
251
Richard Wt'tt
112 Codex Vaticanus lat. 3864, fol. 24, 25, 33; with Ter. Eun. 609, 847, 905-7,
1015-6. See also Barton 1935, 32; Leclercq 1922, 744; West 1987, 39.
113 Dindorf (ed.) 1843, 297, 301.
114 Pl. Prt. 314c. Eunuchs were familiar enough at Athens to be part of
119 Pohlmann 1970, 78-82; Landels 1999, 248; Mathiesen 1999, 70 and
120-2.
120 See Decharme 1906, 362. Farinelli favoured a straightforward A-B-A aria
1475, 1495-8) down to the painterly detail of Helen's golden slippers against
Orestes' jackboots (1468-9).
124 1376-9/1381-4, 1395-7/1403-7, 1482-8; Decharme 1906, 362.
128 Mart. Ep. 2.86; and all modern commentators, e.g. Quinn 1973, 284.
133 Krenkel1947.
137 Italian audiences had emotive pet names for their castrati: Barbier 1996,
83-6.
138 Cass. Dio 76.14.4-5.
252
The other castrati
155 Hadtth of the imam Ahmad abu Huraira; Hadtth of al-Kaba'ir Lith-thahabi:,
157 This was the post later known as maistor: see Wellesz 1960, 208.
158 Hopfner 1938, 1.1.399, thinks so. Browe 1936, 85, says not, and Guyot
160 [Bar Daisan], Book ofthe Laws ofthe Countries (early 3rd cent.), ch. 45.
128-30.
176 Cf. Heriot 1956, 10.
177 Balsamon PG 137.532. 'Not such': 'Mlj tow\hot', a very early instance of
182 Or so claims our source, the suspect Chronicle ofjakim Uoachim]. Palikarova
253
Richard \Vitt
186 The proof text is a Bull of Pope Sixtus V (1545-90): cf. Walker 1980.
inferences from many different grossly incommensurable sources, and must learn
to live with the inevitable uncertainty' (van der Velde, of Moreschi's 1902-3
gramophone recording).
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260
INDEX
261
Index
262
Index
263
Index
264
Index
265
Index
266
Index
267
Index
268
Index
Verdun 149 Xian 222, 225-6
Vietnam 229 Xian, Emperor of Eastern Han
viper 206 Dynasty 224
Vision ofthe Monk Kosmas 167-8 Xianyang 222
Xuande 228
Wang Chengen 229
Wang Zhen 229 Yang Guifei, consort of Ming
WangZhi 229 Huang 225
Wanli 228 Yao Shilian 224
Wei: YongQu 222
duke of 222 Yongle 228
state of 222
Wei Zhongxian 229,231 Zhang, concubine 224
women: Zhang Rang 223--4, 231
Biblical 104-5 Zhao Gao 222-3, 231
Byzantine aristocratic 200, 204-5, Zhao Kuanyi 226
209 Zhao Kuanyin 226
Chinese ch. 12 passim Zheng He, Admiral 229
Clytemnestra ch. 3 passim Zhongchangshi, eunuch agency 222-3
Persian ch. 2 passim Zhou Dynasty 221-2
Zhu Quanzhong, Warlord 226
Xenophon, Cyropaedia 5-6, 24, 38, Zoe Karbonopsina 149
145 Zuo Qiuming 222
Xerxes 6, 31-2,41, 51, 146
269