How Were Eunuchs Perceived in the Ancient Mediterranean World?

Eunuchs in the ancient world have become something of a major topic of interest for me over the past few years. The perception of eunuchs in various cultures throughout history has varied drastically, depending on the culture, the time period, and the kind of eunuch in question. In this post, I will describe the perception of eunuchs in the ancient Mediterranean world, which is my area of historical specialization.

In general, in the ancient Mediterranean world, eunuchs were heavily socially marginalized. They were often of enslaved status and, because of their castration, they were commonly seen as no longer men, but rather lesser, inferior creatures. Eunuchs, women, and children were commonly seen as belonging to the same essential category and eunuchs were often seen as more similar to women than to non-castrated men. In the highly misogynistic ancient world, this made them seen as inferior and, in some cases, even outright disgusting and debased.

Eunuchs in the ancient Near East

In the ancient Near East, young men who were being sold into slavery were often forcibly castrated. Enslaved eunuchs were highly valued because they were incapable of fathering children and they were commonly thought to lack sexual desire. They were seen as ideal for serving in royal and wealthy households, because it was assumed that they would not have sexual relations with the wives and/or daughters of the king or wealthy person who owned them. (In reality, as we will see later, eunuchs do not always completely lack sexual desire and there are many attested stories of eunuchs enjoying sexual activities.)

In the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid Empires, eunuchs commonly served as (among other things) custodians of the king’s wives and children, royal bodyguards, and trusted messengers and ambassadors. The Greek word εὐνοῦχος (eunoûchos), from which the English word eunuch is derived, literally means “bed-keeper.” As a result of their trusted positions and close proximity to the throne, certain eunuchs could become very powerful and influential within royal courts.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Assyrian limestone relief carving from the Central Palace at Nimrud, dating to between 744 and 727 BCE, depicting a beardless eunuch with eunuchoid facial features

The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records a famous story in his Histories 8.105-106 about a man named Hermotimos of Pedasa who he says was sold into slavery and forcibly castrated, but later went on to become the favorite eunuch of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I (ruled 486 – 465 BCE) and used his position of authority at the Achaemenid court to wreak poetically just vengeance against the very man who had castrated him many years earlier. Herodotos writes, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“Hermotimos, who came from Pedasa, had achieved a fuller vengeance for wrong done to him than had any man whom we know. When he had been taken captive by enemies and put up for sale, he was bought by one Panionios of Chios, a man who had set himself to earn a livelihood out of most wicked practices.”

“He would procure beautiful boys and castrate and take them to Sardis and Ephesos where he sold them for a great price, for the barbarians value eunuchs more than perfect men, by reason of the full trust that they have in them. Now among the many whom Panionios had castrated was Hermotimos, who was not entirely unfortunate; he was brought from Sardis together with other gifts to the king, and as time went on, he stood higher in Xerxes’ favor than any other eunuch.”

“Now while the king was at Sardis and preparing to lead his Persian army against Athens, Hermotimos came for some business down to the part of Mysia which is inhabited by Chians and called Atarneus. There he found Panionios. Perceiving who he was, he held long and friendly converse with him, telling him that it was to him that he owed all this prosperity and promising that he would make him prosperous in return if he were to bring his household and dwell there. Panionios accepted his offer gladly, and brought his children and his wife.”

“When Hermotimus had gotten the man and all his household into his power, he said to him: ‘Tell me, you who have made a livelihood out of the wickedest trade on earth, what harm had I or any of my forefathers done to you or yours, that you made me to be no man, but a thing of nought? You no doubt thought that the gods would have no knowledge of your former practices, but their just law has brought you for your wicked deeds into my hands. Now you will be well content with the fullness of that justice which I will execute upon you.'”

“With these words of reproach, he brought Panionios’ sons before him and compelled him to castrate all four of them—his own children; this Panionios was compelled to do. When he had done this, the sons were compelled to castrate their father in turn. This, then, was the way in which Panionios was overtaken by vengeance at the hands of Hermotimos.”

Regardless of whether this specific story is historically true, it neatly illustrates the way some eunuchs could go from the slave market to relatively privileged positions within the royal court.

Nehemiah, a Jewish man who served as a cupbearer to the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes I (ruled 465 – 424 BCE) and later served as the Achaemenid governor of Judah, is possibly implied in the Book of Nehemiah 2:6 to have been a eunuch, since he is described as standing in the queen’s presence.

The Septuagint, the translation of the writings of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek made in the third and second centuries BCE, explicitly describes Nehemiah as a eunuch. Whether he actually was a eunuch historically is an open question, but it certainly would not have been unusual for someone in his position to have been a eunuch.

The majority of enslaved eunuchs probably never attained this kind of privilege, but it was possible for a lucky few.

ABOVE: Illustration from the book The Story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, published in 1873, depicting Nehemiah serving as a cupbearer to Artaxerxes I

Eunuchs and gender in ancient Greece and Rome

Eunuchs were also present in the Greek and Roman cultural spheres. Notably, some wealthy Greek aristocrats apparently kept enslaved eunuchs, much like the kings and nobles of the ancient Near East. The Greek philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) in his dialogue Protagoras 314c portrays the ultrawealthy Athenian aristocrat Kallias as owning an enslaved eunuch, who serves as his doorkeeper.

For the Greeks and Romans, eunuchs occupied a position of gender ambiguity. Although assigned male at birth, they lacked testicles, a body part that the Greeks and Romans regarded as integral to manhood. Additionally, those who were castrated before puberty never developed male secondary sex characteristics, such as a deep voice and male-pattern body and facial hair.

Even those who were castrated after having already gone through male puberty typically lost muscle mass and body hair, developed a body fat distribution similar to that of post-menopausal women, and never saw the progression of male pattern scalp hair loss beyond what they had already lost before being castrated.

Many Greek authors seem to have believed that eunuchs were not men and that they were actually closer to women than to non-castrated men. The Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) actually lumps women, children, and eunuchs together as belonging to the same essential category. For instance, he writes in his treatise On the Generation of Animals 5.3, as translated by Arthur Platt:

“Women do not go bald because their nature is like that of children, both alike being incapable of producing seminal secretion. Eunuchs do not become bald, because they change into the female condition. And as to the hair that comes later in life, eunuchs either do not grow it at all, or lose it if they happen to have it, with the exception of the pubic hair; for women also grow that though they have not the other, and this mutilation is a change from the male to the female condition.”

The trope of a reproductively intact man disguising himself as a eunuch for comedic effect became something of a cliché in Greek New Comedy. Most famously, the Athenian comic playwright Menandros (lived c. 342 – c. 290 BCE) wrote a comedy about a man who disguises himself as an enslaved eunuch in order to get close to the woman he sexually desires without raising suspicion so that he can rape her.

Menandros’s original comedy in Greek has not survived. Several generations after his death, though, a man named Publius Terentius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BCE)—who was originally born in what is now Tunisia, but was captured as a slave and brought to Rome, where he eventually gained his freedom and became a playwright—wrote an adaptation of the comedy in the Latin language titled Eunuchus or The Eunuch, which has survived and is considered a classic work of Roman comedy.

ABOVE: Woodcut illustration by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (lived 1471 – 1528) showing a scene from Terentius’s Eunuchus with the character Chaerea disguised as a eunuch

The Galloi of Kybele

Perhaps the most notorious group of eunuchs in the Greek and Roman sources are the Galloi (known in Latin as Galli), an order of priests of the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele who are first definitively attested in Hellenistic Greek sources starting the third century BCE. They are said to have deliberately castrated themselves, presumably as part of their initiation, and they lived as itinerant mendicants, regularly traveling and living primarily through begging.

I wrote about the Galloi fairly extensively in this blog post I wrote back in August 2020. I also wrote a massive paper (which is not published and may never be published) last semester about how the Galloi are perceived in the surviving Hellenistic Greek sources. I don’t want to say too much about my research on this forum, given that it is unpublished and I don’t want anyone stealing it in case I try to publish it, but I will say a little bit about the general Greek and Roman perception of the Galloi.

Ancient Greek and Roman sources describe the Galloi as openly feminine, wearing traditionally female clothing, makeup, and perfume, wearing their hair in long feminine curls, and apparently speaking in high-pitched voices. These descriptions are not just canards meant to deride the Galloi as unmanly; that some followers of Kybele really did present themselves in a feminine manner is confirmed by the existence of a large number of surviving funerary reliefs and statues depicting cult functionaries of Kybele (some of whom might be Galloi) that they either commissioned themselves or people close to them.

For reference, Anja Klöckner discusses some noteworthy examples of such depictions from Rome and Ostia in her chapter “Tertium genus?: Representations of religious practitioners in the cult of Magna Mater,” published in the book Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire (pp. 343–384), edited by Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, and Jörg Rüpke, published by Walter de Gruyter in 2017.

Klöckner explicitly argues that none of the individuals depicted in the artworks she analyzes are Galli, but other scholars disagree. In any case, all of the male individuals whose depictions she analyzes are shown with some unusual iconographic features that, for traditionalist Greek and Romans, would have marked them as feminine.

The Galloi are also associated with certain musical instruments, particularly the tympanon, castanets, and the aulos. They would perform ecstatic dances to the music of these instruments and toss their heads in a circular motion. They were known for supposedly having prophetic gifts. Sources from the Roman period also describe them as flagellating themselves with whips strung with knucklebones and lacerating themselves with knives.

ABOVE: Photograph from Lynn E. Roller’s paper “The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest,” published in Gender & History 9, no. 3 (1997), pages 542–559, showing a votive relief from the site of Kyzikos in Asia Minor dating to the year 46 BCE, depicting a Gallus worshipping Kybele while wearing women’s clothing

The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in the third century CE, writes in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 4.6.43 that the Greek philosopher Arkesilaos of Pitane (lived c. 315 – c. 240 BCE) once spoke a saying which implies a stark distinction between “men” on the one hand and Galloi on the other: “ἐκ μὲν γὰρ ἀνδρῶν γάλλοι γίνονται, ἐκ δὲ γάλλων ἄνδρες οὐ γίνονται” (“From men they become Galloi, but from Galloi they cannot become men”).

A series of Hellenistic epigrams in the Greek language attributed to different poets dating to the third and second centuries BCE that have been preserved through inclusion in the Palatine Anthology 6.217–220 all tell similar stories about a Gallos who encounters a lion. In all the poems, the Gallos is terrified, but they manage to scare the lion away (or, in the poem by Alkaios of Messene, tame it) by beating their tympanon and giving a wild shriek. All the poems portray the Gallos as feminine and cowardly and two of them specifically mention that the Gallos is castrated.

In 205 BCE, during the Second Punic War, the Romans concluded from consulting the Sibylline books that Kybele would aid them in the war against the Carthaginians, so they officially adopted her into their pantheon. The Galli were subsequently introduced to Rome, becoming part of Roman state religion.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a funerary relief of an Archigallus from Lavinium dated to the second century CE on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

After this, Roman authors portray the Galli as foreign and feminine—the absolute antithesis of Roman masculinity. For instance, the Roman satirist Decius Iunius Iuvenalis, who flourished in around the late first or early second century CE, mocks certain priests who are not Galli in his Satires 2.111-116 by calling them Galli and asking them:

“quid tamen expectant, Phrygio quos tempus erat iam
more supervacuam cultris abrumpere carnem?”

Or, in my own translation:

“Why, then, are they waiting? Was it not now the time for them in the Phrygian manner to cut off with knives the superfluous flesh?”

He is, in other words, implying that the men he is mocking are so unmanly that they might as well just go castrate themselves to become eunuchs.

The North African author Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who was born in Madauros in what is now Algeria at the time when it was ruled by the Roman Empire, wrote a famous satirical novel in the Latin language titled The Golden Ass, which is about a man named Lucius who, through a magic spell gone horribly wrong, happens to get turned into a donkey and goes on various misadventures as a result. In Book Eight, Lucius is sold to a Gallus who takes him to join a group of itinerant mendicant Galli, giving him an inside look at what their lives are like.

Apuleius portrays the Galli in a starkly unfavorable light, mocking them especially for their effeminacy. He portrays them as sexually passive and obsessed with men with big penises, such that, when the other Galli see the Gallus who has bought the donkey Lucius, they marvel at the size of the donkey’s penis and ask whether the Gallus has bought him as a beast of burden or as a sex partner. He also portrays them as calling each other “puellae,” which means “girls” in Latin.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of another bust of an Archigallus in the Capitoline Museums

“Eunuchs from birth”

In addition to recognizing people who had been castrated as eunuchs, the Greeks and Romans also recognized certain people as “eunuchs from birth.” This term seems to have been applied to people born with intersex genitalia who were considered male.

The most famous “eunuch from birth” who is attested in the historical sources is the orator Favorinus of Arelate (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE), who was a Gaul by ethnicity, born in Gaul after it had already been under Roman rule for well over a century. He nonetheless managed to overcome both his provincial background and the social stigma surrounding his intersex condition to become a very successful and respected orator in the Greek language during the height of the Roman Empire.

Polemon of Laodikeia (lived c. 90 – c. 144 CE), a younger contemporary and rival of Favorinus, attacks him for his feminine appearance in a surviving fragment (F.1.160, 6-162, 21), which reads as follows, as translated by Tamsyn Barton:

“. . . a eunuch born without testicles, rather than castrated. I doubt whether you could find anyone of this type apart from the one who was from the land known as that of the Celts. He was lustful and dissolute beyond all measure, for his eyes were those of the worst type of man . . . he had a puffy forehead, soft cheeks, a wide mouth, a long, thin neck, thick legs and fleshy feet.”

“His voice was just like a woman’s, and all the rest of his limbs and extremities were soft; and he did not walk upright, but with slack joints and limbs. He took great care of his person, [by nourishing] his thick hair, and by rubbing medicaments into his body, in short, using anything to arouse desire for sex and coitus. He had a voice like a woman’s, and thin lips. In the whole human race, I never saw anything like him or his eyes.”

The later biographer Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) describes Favorinus in his Lives of the Sophists 1.8 as follows, as translated by Wilmer C. Wright for the Loeb Classical Library, with a few edits of my own to make the translation more accurately reflect the Greek:

“He was born double-sexed, a hermaphrodite [ἀνδρόθηλυς (andróthēlys)], and this was plainly shown in his appearance; for even when he grew old he had no beard; it was evident too from his voice which sounded thin, shrill, and high-pitched, with the modulations that nature bestows on eunuchs also.”

“Yet he was so ardent in erotic matters that he was actually charged with adultery by a man of consular rank. Though he quarrelled with the Emperor Hadrian, he suffered no ill consequences. Hence he used to say in the ambiguous style of an oracle, that there were in the story of his life these three paradoxes: Though he was a Gaul he led the life of a Hellene; a eunuch, he had been tried for adultery; he had quarrelled with an Emperor and was still alive.”

Based on these descriptions, some modern experts believe that Favorinus may have had Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (PAIS), also known as Reifenstein Syndrome, an intersex condition in which a person’s cells are partially unable to respond to androgens (i.e., male hormones), causing a person who is genetically male to have a less masculine and more feminine appearance.

Like those who had been castrated, Favorinus seems to have faced mockery for being intersex. For instance, Philostratos also records the following anecdote in his biography of Polemon in Lives of the Sophists 1.25, in Wright’s translation:

“When Timokrates the philosopher remarked to him that Favorinus had become a chatterbox, Polemon said wittily: ‘And so is every old woman,’ thus making fun of him for being like a eunuch.”

Sadly, although Favorinus was a prolific author, little of what he wrote has survived to the present day.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust dating to around 140 CE, found in the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, believed to depict Polemon of Laodikeia, a contemporary and rival of Favorinus who wrote about him

Early Christianity and eunuchs

Early Christians had a complicated relationship with eunuchs and castration on many levels. On one level, there was disagreement over whether eunuchs could be Christians. The Gospel of Matthew 19:12 portrays Jesus as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

Various authors, going at least as far back as John J. McNeill in his book The Church and the Homosexual, published in 1976, have tried to claim that the “eunuchs who have been so from birth” mentioned in this passage might include reproductively intact gay men.

This is certainly incorrect, since gay men who have functioning testicles are not in any sense eunuchs, nor would they have been considered eunuchs in the first century CE. Moreover, as we have already explored, people like Favorinus who were born with intersex genitalia were sometimes labeled as congenital “eunuchs.” These are almost certainly the people Jesus is talking about when he says “eunuchs who have been so from birth.”

In any case, the above-quoted passage makes it sound like it is not only acceptable for a Christian to be a eunuch, but actually admirable, if they have made themself a eunuch “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Meanwhile, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 8:26-40 describes the apostle Philip as baptizing an Aithiopian eunuch, which obviously indicates that the author of Luke-Acts considered eunuchs eligible for baptism.

ABOVE: The Baptism of Queen Candace’s Eunuch, painted at some point between c. 1625 and c. 1630, attributed to Jan Brueghel the Younger and Hendrick van Balen

In accordance with these traditions, some early Christian sources not only allow that eunuchs may be Christians, but even portray them as models for Christians to imitate. For instance, the early Christian apologist Ioustinos Martys (lived c. 100 – c. 165 CE) in his First Apologia 29.1–2, which he wrote between c. 155 and c. 157 CE, attempts to refute the canard that Christians engage in licentious orgies by telling the story of a young Christian man in Alexandria who supposedly begged Felix, the Roman governor of Egypt, to grant a surgeon permission to castrate him so that he could be free from sexual desire. Ioustinos tells the story as follows, as translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith:

“And that you may understand that promiscuous intercourse is not one of our mysteries, one of our number a short time ago presented to Felix the governor in Alexandria a petition, craving that permission might be given to a surgeon to make him an eunuch. For the surgeons there said that they were forbidden to do this without the permission of the governor.”

“And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the youth remained single, and was satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did. And it is not out of place, we think, to mention here Antinous, who was alive but lately, and whom all were prompt, through fear, to worship as a god, though they knew both who he was and what was his origin.”

Ioustinos portrays the young man’s desire for castration as admirable and as proof of his extraordinary chastity. Ioustinos Martys’s contemporary and fellow apologist Athenagoras of Athens (lived c. 133 – c. 190 CE) seems to have held a similar opinion, because he positively describes Christians in his Appeal for the Christians 34.1–2 as “εὐνούχους καὶ μονογάμους” (“eunuchs and once-married men”), contrasting them with non-Christians, whom he portrays as lustful and depraved.

It is unclear whether Athenagoras is using the word “eunuchs” literally or figuratively. He may be saying that some Christians are literally eunuchs because they have castrated themselves for the faith. Alternatively, he may be figuratively describing Christian men who are merely celibate and not literally castrated as “eunuchs” to emphasize their chastity, which rivals that of eunuchs. In either case, he clearly presents eunuchs as models for Christians to imitate.

Of course, not all early Christians agreed with this view. The Apostolic Tradition 16.11, a church order written in the third century CE, categorically forbids Christian communities from accepting eunuchs, instead grouping eunuchs together with prostitutes and people who are irredeemably sexually immoral. The text reads as follows, as translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes:

“A prostitute or wastrel or any who has been castrated, or any who has performed any other unspeakable deed, should be rejected, for they are impure.”

Nonetheless, later sources still report stories of Christians castrating themselves for their faith. The later Christian historian Eusebios of Kaisareia (lived c. 260 – c. 340 CE) claims in his Ecclesiastical History 6.8 that his hero, the scholar and theologian Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE), interpreted the above-quoted passage from gMatthew 19:12 literally and castrated himself in accordance with Jesus’s words. Eusebios portrays this alleged self-castration as a youthful mistake, but also a sign of Origenes’s extraordinary piety.

Historically speaking, it is unlikely that Origenes really did this, since he never mentions having castrated himself in any of his surviving writings and, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 15.1-5 concerning gMatthew 19:12, he interprets the verse allegorically, in line with his usual hermeneutic approach, with no indication that he ever interpreted it literally. A full translation of Origenes’s commentary on the verse is available here. Here is a crucial excerpt from 15.4:

“Eunuchs in the metaphorical sense might well now include those who live in sexual abstinence and who do not indulge in such debauchery [2 Corinthians 12:21] and impurities or similar things.”

Nonetheless, even if Origenes didn’t really castrate himself, there is some evidence to suggest that some other early Christians may have. The very first canon passed by the First Council of Nikaia in 325 CE was a prohibition against men who had deliberately castrated themselves serving as clergy.

The fact that the council felt that such a prohibition was necessary suggests that there were some Christian men who really were castrating themselves for their faith or, at the very least, that there was a genuine and widespread fear that Christian men might castrate themselves for their faith.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript depicting how the illustrator imagined it might have looked when Origenes of Alexandria supposedly castrated himself

Early Christians and the Galli specifically

Leaving aside all the other disputes early Christians had about eunuchs, they universally regarded the Galli of Kybele in particular with scorn and revulsion. They regarded them as sexually depraved and saw them as the epitome of everything that was evil and immoral about traditional polytheistic religions.

The Christian apologist Iulius Firmicus Maternus, who flourished during the reign of Constantine I (ruled 306 – 337 CE) and those of his sons, attacks the Galli at length in his apologetic treatise De Errore Profanarum Religionum (On the Error of Profane Religions) 4.2. He writes, as translated by Richard E. Oster, Jr.:

“Because air is placed between the seas and sky, they address it with effeminate voices of the priests. Tell me! Is this a divinity which searches for the female in the male? Is this a divinity to whom the chorus of his own priests is unable to serve him unless they make their own face like a woman, polish their skin and shame the masculine sex with female ornaments?”

“One is able to see wretched mockeries, with public lamentation, in these very temples. Men endure feminine things and uncover this stain of an impure and lewd body with a boastful display. They make public their own evil deeds and confess with the maximum stain of delight the crime of their defiled body. They fix their cared-for hair like that of a woman, and having dressed in delicate robes, it is with difficulty, with a tired neck, that they uphold their head.”

“And then when they have made themselves all together different from men, having been inspired with a song from the flutes, they call to their own goddess so that having been filled with a heinous spirit they predict the future, so to speak, to credulous men. What is this monster, or what is this beast? They deny that they are men, and they are not women. They wish that they were believed to be women, but a certain aspect of the body attests otherwise.”

Writing around a century later, the North African church father Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE) expresses horror and disgust at the Galli’s self-castration in De Civitate Dei (On the City of God) 7.24, writing: “. . . here a man is so mutilated that he is neither changed into a woman nor remains a man.” Later, in On the City of God 7.26, he denounces the existence of the Galli as the worst abomination in all of Roman polytheism, far worse than all the rapes of Iupiter combined. He writes, as translated by Marcus Dods:

“These effeminates, no later than yesterday, were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait, exacting from the people the means of maintaining their ignominious lives. Nothing has been said concerning them. Interpretation failed, reason blushed, speech was silent. The Great Mother has surpassed all her sons, not in greatness of deity, but of crime.”

“To this monster not even the monstrosity of Ianus is to be compared. His deformity was only in his image; hers was the deformity of cruelty in her sacred rites. He has a redundancy of members in stone images; she inflicts the loss of members on men. This abomination is not surpassed by the licentious deeds of Iupiter, so many and so great. He, with all his seductions of women, only disgraced heaven with one Ganymede; she, with so many avowed and public effeminates, has both defiled the earth and outraged heaven.”

The Galli ultimately died out along with the cult of Kybele due to the rise of Christianity in late antiquity.

ABOVE: Roman fresco dating to the sixth century CE, probably intended to represent the church father (and noted eunuchphobe) Augustinus of Hippo. This is probably the earliest surviving depiction of Augustine and it is from at least a century after his death.

Late antique eunuch jokes

Not all commentary on eunuchs in late antiquity took the form of invective diatribes like those from Firmicus Maternus and Augustinus quoted above; more lighthearted jokes about eunuchs were also apparently fairly common. The Philogelos, a jokebook written in the Greek language, most likely in around the fourth century CE, includes several jokes about eunuchs, most of them poking fun at their inability to produce offspring and their apparent reputation for developing hernias. For instance, joke 114 reads as follows, as translated by Charles Clinch Bubb (on page 51 of his translation of the Philogelos):

“A man of Abdera seeing a eunuch asked him how many children he had. Upon his saying that lacking manly parts he was not able to beget children, in answer he replied, ‘At least you must have many grandchildren.'”

Joke 115 reads as follows, in Bubb’s translation:

“A man of Abdera beholding a eunuch talking with a woman asked if she were his wife. The eunuch replied that he was not able to have a wife. ‘Perhaps she is your daughter?’ he persisted.”

You get the idea.

Conclusion

Obviously, this post is not meant to be comprehensive, since it attempts to cover many different cultures across the ancient Mediterranean over the course of a thousand years of ancient history, but I hope this gives some sense of how eunuchs were socially perceived in the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome.

(NOTE: I have also posted a version of this article as an answer in r/AskHistorians and another version as an answer to an identical question on Quora.)