Eunuchs In The Roman World: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know

So recently, I made a short out of my video on an introduction to the Gallae, where I talked about Rome’s complicated relationship with eunuchs.

One particularly morbidly curious viewer in the comments asked this question:

But what WAS the process? I mean, I understand the result but presumably there was more to it than just lobbing off the slave’s junk.

After I read this, I realized I didn’t actually know.

So I did some quick research and realized there might be enough for a short video here, but if you’re looking at the status bar below you know this isn’t going to actually be a short video because apparently I’m incapable of brevity, but also there’s a lot to know about the topic, so heck, whatever, here we go again. 

Alan Plum, you have no idea the events you have set forth this day. 

It turns out there’s a lot to eunuchs in the Roman world. The Gallae were a lot of fun, because they’re the most blatantly trans, but they weren’t the only people who were eunuchs. 

RELATED: The Gallae: The Transgender Priestesses of Kybele

RELATED: The Rituals of the Gallae Priestesses

First off, we know who the Gallae were, why they castrated themselves, and how they did the deed. Check out the video that I’m probably going to link around here at some point for more details. But we also know not all eunuchs were Gallae. 

There were Christian eunuchs as well, but I’ve got a whole other video about that coming up, so stay tuned. 

RELATED: Gender Transgression in Early Christianity

Today, we’ll talk about eunuch slaves, and why the deed was done. From there, we’ll take a look at the Romans’ complicated relationship with eunuchs over the years and then explore the ghastly specifics of how the deed was done. 

Let’s get into it. 

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Chapter I: Eunuch Slaves

Good times, good times. Nice light subject, this one. Relaxing, peaceful, sweet. Yeah, all good stuff. 

So, slavery. 

It was a big thing in the ancient world. It still is in the modern world too even though it’s de jure illegal in every nation on Earth, but if I start getting into the US prison industrial complex or the tens of thousands of people living in slavery in Qatar who prepared the country for the World Cup while FIFA just shrugged it off, or the people labouring in sweatshops cranking out cheap crummy clothing to satisfy the West’s nonstop lust for new consumer goods, I’m probably going to fall apart and weep at the absolute cruelty and injustices of this miserable goddamn world. 

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Anyway, yeah, slavery was a big thing in the ancient world. The first time I read Homer, one of the passages that stuck out to me the most was the description of being dragged off into slavery. I’ve spent hours poring through my copies and I can’t find the specific passage, but to paraphrase: their hands were bound and their mouths gagged, so all they could do was raise their eyes in supplication to the gods to deliver them from the horrible fate that awaited them. 

Yeah, this part’s a bit of a drag, sorry gang. 

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Anyway, the Romans quite liked their slaves to be eunuchs. As I mentioned in the YT short that led me to put this whole video together, the Romans thought eunuch slaves were more likely to be obedient, and less likely to sleep with your wife. So if you wanted a teacher, a messenger, or a personal servant, and you had the dough for it, you’d prefer a eunuch slave over the alternative. 

But they weren’t cheap. In fact, there was a whole complex legal system in place governing slavery, eunuch’ry, and eunuch slaves. 

But before we get any further, you might be asking yourself what this has to do with transgender history. 

And yes, it is a bit of a tangent, it’s true. In fact, this whole video is a tangent, so it might meander a bit more than usual. It’s not strictly transgender history in the modern sense, but I thought it was interesting enough to spend dozens of hours of my life reading, researching, and writing about it. And look, if Mia Mulder can call herself a historian while doing videos about whatever strikes her fancy, I can call myself a transgender historian and do the occasional video that’s a slight venn diagram outside the purview of this channel. 

Besides, remember what we looked at with the gallae – Roman legal precedent stated that eunuchs were neither men, nor women, but a secret third thing.

So when we revisit Susan Stryker’s definition of transgender in a historical sense – “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth” – this sort of fits the bill. Though it might be more accurate to call them “people who were moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth”, but it’s still close enough, right?

No? 

Well whatever, I’ve already written the damn thing. We’re too deep already. And you’re already watching the damn thing, so you have no choice but to continue. You could navigate away, but then you’d miss out on learning about the oddly specific and creepy as hell laws around slavery and eunuchs.

Chapter II: The Oddly Specific and Creepy as Hell Laws Around Slavery and Eunuchs

The Corpus Juris Civilis, or Body of Civil Law, is what we now call a collection of laws issued by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I between 529 and 534 CE. But hold up – who were the Byzantines? I thought this was a video about the Romans!

The Roman Empire split in half permanently in 395 CE, becoming known as the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire. This was to make the whole thing easier to manage, not because of a rebellion or anything – they both considered themselves to be thoroughly Roman. 

When we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, we’re usually talking about the Western Empire, which fell in 476 or 480 CE, depending on who you ask. Julius Nepos was emperor in 474, deposed in 475, and retreated to the province of Dalmatia, which is modern day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, and parts of Albania and Croatia where he continued to call himself emperor. Meanwhile, Romulus Augustus sat as emperor in Rome itself, but he was a meaningless boy king who was very quickly deposed by the Germanic general Odoacer when he conquered the city of Rome, in 476. Some historians say that’s when the Western Empire was done, but even though Rome the city was still the capital of the empire, it hadn’t been particularly important for decades at that point. 

Meanwhile, Julius Nepos stuck around, continuing to be recognized as Western emperor by the east, until 480 when he was assassinated. He didn’t have a successor, and the east didn’t bother to appoint a new emperor of the west, since there really wasn’t anything to be emperor over at that point. So he was the last western Roman emperor, and that’s why I think the Western Roman Empire ended in 480 CE. 

So, okay, who were the Byzantines? 

The Byzantine Empire is the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople. The name is an invention by later historians, though – the Byzantines always thought of themselves as Romans. They stuck around for nearly another thousand years after the Western Empire fell, finally ending in 1453 CE when the city of Constantinople fell and the final emperor, Constantine XI, was killed trying to defend it against the Ottoman conquerors, and the light of the Roman Empire was snuffed out forever. 

My primary historical interest is classical antiquity – the 8^th century BCE to around the 5^th century CE. So I don’t know as much about the Byzantines as I do the western Romans. But they carried a lot of Roman traditions with them, and their system of law was based on Roman law and built on Roman precedents, so we can at least make inferences about how the western Romans would have done things based on how the Byzantines did it. 

Okay. So. 

The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 or 480 CE, and the Corpus Juris Civilis was written at some point between 529 and 534 CE, so this is about half a century later, and just a few years before the emperor Justinian’s troops, led by the general Belisarius, reconquered a significant amount of former Western Roman territory, including the city of Rome itself. They weren’t able to hold it for long, but yeah. Still Romans. 

Anyway, the Corpus Juris Civilis goes into a lot of detail on how to deal with slaves. It’s almost creepy how complex these laws become. People will literally devote years of their lives to setting out the very specific rules governing slavery, rather than just not letting people own other people. I guess it’s because those in power benefited from the situation too much. Financially incentivized cruelty, gotta love it. 

Book VI, title XLIII (43) focuses on inheritance law, but it actually reveals the market value for slaves as well. An adult with no particular trade was worth 20 solidi, but if they were skilled artisans they were worth 30 solidi, unless they were physicians or lawyers – then they were worth 50 solidi, and kids ten years old or younger were worth 10 solidi. But these were all non-eunuchs. 

Eunuch slaves started at 30 solidi if they were 10 years old or younger, adults were 50 solidi, and if they were skilled tradespeople they were worth 70 solidi. 

They were considered more desirable for the reasons mentioned before, but their value was further increased by the fact that not all of them survived the procedure. So as messed up as it might sound, the slave owner was taking a risk, financially speaking, by eunuching his slaves, so he needed to recoup that cost by selling them for a higher amount. 

Good lord that last part was depressing to write…

Chapter III: Making Sense of This in Modern Terms

A solidus was a mostly pure gold coin that replaced the aureus. It was introduced by the western emperor Diocletian in the early 4^th century CE, and weighed 4.5 grams. It’s a complicated question to answer when looking at how much a solidus was worth at the time and I don’t want to get too into the thick of it here, but one way to look at it might be to consider the price of grains. 

Around Justinian’s time, they sold grain by the modius, which is similar to the modern “peck”, a unit of measurement for dry goods. It’s about two dry gallons, and a modius is roughly equivalent. Ever heard that song, “I love you, a bushel and a peck”? Or the old tongue twister Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers? That’s what a peck means. 

Around Justinian’s time, you could buy 100 modii of barley with a solidus. But that probably doesn’t give you much of an idea of what that would have been worth. So now, despite this being a transgender history channel, we’re now going to get into Roman culinary history, what a wild journey. I told you this was going to be full of tangents… 

Anyway, we don’t have any actual Roman bread recipes, but what we do have is an actual loaf of Roman bread, preserved from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

Weird to think about I know, but it’s true, and it’s one of the reasons why the Romans are so fascinating to me.

Walking through what we call the House of the Stags in Herculaneum, which is where this loaf of bread was found, we get an incredibly detailed view into what daily life was like for the Roman people. This loaf was stamped with the name of the person who cooked it.

His name was Celer, by the way, and he was a slave owned by Quintus Granius Verus, a merchant who owned the House of the Stags.

We know the type of oven this bread was baked in, we know some of the other kitchen tools they would have had at the time, and we even know the ingredients they would have used to bake the bread.

We know Roman bread was designed to be pulled apart, based on its shape, which gives us insight on what it might have looked like for the Romans to sit down and have a meal.

We also know the name of a slave, and at least a bit of his life, who almost certainly would have otherwise been forgotten to history. These little moments remind me of the environmental storytelling you see in games like Fallout: New Vegas, except instead of fiction, it’s a real person’s life you’re peering into, frozen in time at the moment the apocalypse happened.

It helps to humanize these stories as the experiences of real people, no less emotionally or intellectually complex than you or I. For all the tales of combat, of conquests, of clashing empires and dueling gladiators, of seduction, religious persecution, political intrigue, and assassinations, in many ways the life of a Roman was just as boring as yours or mine, and just as easily cut short by a cataclysmic event. 

So we don’t have any ancient sources giving us a recipe, but based on analysis of this loaf, we can roughly figure it out.

Max Miller over at the channel Tasting History actually baked it, which is a lot of fun. Check it out.

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His recipe calls for 1 kg of flour, and while they probably made this particular loaf out of wheat, they likely sometimes used barley as well since it was pretty common in Rome too. 

1 modius of barley will weigh about 5.5kg (rounding up), so you could use 2 modii to make about 11 loaves of bread. 

So, if 1 solidus could buy 100 modii, it could buy the material you need to make about 550 loaves of bread, with maybe a bit left over. That gives us everything we need to figure out how much a literal human life was worth using the cost of materials to bake loaves of bread, wow does it not feel great to type that.

So, here we go.

• Child younger than ten – 5500 loaves of bread (10 solidi)
• Unskilled adult – 11,000 loaves of bread (20 solidi)
• Skilled adult – 16,500 loaves of bread (30 solidi)
• Doctor/lawyer adult – 27,500 loaves of bread (50 solidi)
• Eunuch child younger than 10 – 16,500 loaves of bread (30 solidi)
• Eunuch unskilled adult – 27,500 loaves of bread (50 solidi)
• Eunuch skilled adult – 38,450 loaves of bread (70 solidi)

Obviously this is a huge oversimplification – it doesn’t account for the variance in grain prices over time, or the other ingredients you’d need to make bread, like salt, herbs, and sourdough starter. But hopefully it gives you an idea of the scale we’re talking about here. 

So yeah, slaves weren’t cheap, and eunuch slaves even moreso. But while they did commonly use eunuch slaves, the Romans weren’t fans of the practice of making eunuchs in the first place. 

Chapter IV: The Romans Weren’t Fans of the Practice of Making Eunuchs in the First Place

We see this as far back as the life of the emperor Vespasian, as told to us by the writer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, or just Suetonius. He published his Lives Of The Caesars at some point between 117 and 138 CE, during the reign of Hadrian. It was a collection of biographies starting with Julius Caesar, and ending with Domitian. Vespasian was Domitian’s father, so his reign came first. 

Suetonius tells us that during Nero’s reign, Vespasian was made governor of Africa, which obviously isn’t all of Africa, but the Roman province of Africa, which includes the northern coast of modern day Tunisia, as well as the eastern coast of Algeria and the western coast of Libya. Suetonius tells us about his time there, quote:

He was then allotted Africa as his province, which he governed with marked integrity and not a little honour… Certainly he came back not at all richer, for his credit was so near collapse that he mortgaged his properties to his brother and was obliged to lower himself to trading in mules in order to keep up his position.

– Suetonius, The Deified Vespasian, IV.III

Mules, of course, refers to eunuchs – a mule being the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, which is typically infertile. 

Another translation of that passage says he “had to resort to” trading in eunuchs, so clearly the Romans didn’t look too highly on the guys who were part of this practice. 

Side note, at one point Vespasian introduced a tax on public street washrooms, which wasn’t terribly popular, especially in Gaul, modern day France. That’s why, to this day, public street urinals in France are called Vespasiennes. Don’t upset the French, they have a long memory. 

After Vespasian’s death in 79 CE, his son Titus became emperor. At first, the senate was worried they had another Nero on their hands, since he apparently had some debauched habits. But against expectations, he seems to have done a good job of ruling the empire. He’s best known for completing construction of the Colosseum, for the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum during his rule, and for dying just over 2 years after he became emperor. He was succeeded by his brother, Domitian. 

And Domitian’s historical reputation is… not as great as his brother’s. He’s known for being a cruel, tyrannical, and authoritarian leader, driven as much by paranoia as a desire to lead. That paranoia might have come from the fact that he’d been openly conspiring against his brother, and may even have poisoned the guy so he could succeed him. Great guy. Great guy. 

But again, how much of this is historical slander and how much a genuine portrayal of what happened? We don’t know. 

But back to the topic – he had an interesting relationship with eunuchs. 

On one hand, he banned the act of castration within the empire. According to Cassius Dio – remember him? He was one of our sources on the Roman Emperor Elagabalus. He was extremely biased when reporting on our gal Ellie, but otherwise he’s considered a pretty reliable source. Anyway, according to Cassius Dio, his brother Titus had a particular affinity for eunuch boys, which – I mean, look how many powerful people took a trip to Epstein’s island, rich powerful people giving in to their basest, most depraved instincts seems to have a long history.

It was gross then, it’s gross now, and it’s one of the big reasons why anarchism is so appealing to me. If powerful people have been behaving this way for literal millennia, maybe the solution isn’t to just get a different powerful guy, but to get rid of the ability for guys to become powerful in the first place. 

Sigh. 

Anyway, Titus was into young boys, and evidently Domitian had a problem with this, so he banned the act of castration within the empire. 

Not the act of f*cking young boys, mind you. It was the eunuching that was the problem. 

Whynotboth.jpg?

However, Domitian also had his own eunuch slave boy he quite liked, named Earinus. We actually know a fair amount about Earinus, thanks in large part to the writings of Martial and Statius. 

From what we can tell, Earinus grew up in Pergamum, which is pretty close to Mt. Ida where Hermaphroditus was mythologically born, and also pretty close to Pessinus, where the Kybele stone was before it was brought to Rome, and where the Gallae came from before the Kybele cult moved to Rome. 

Why does so much ancient gender nonconformity come from Asia Minor? 

Anyway, Earinus was brought to Rome as a very young boy, assumingly during the Domitian’s reign. Upon arrival, he was castrated, in order to preserve his, er, boyish beauty (yikes).

Once delivered to the emperor, Earinus’ job was to be his cup bearer. And if you know your mythology, this one might be setting off some alarm bells. Ganymede, the young boy about whose beauty a tremendous amount of ancient ink was spilled, was taken by Zeus to be his cup bearer as well, which is pretty universally recognized as shorthand for being there to satisfy Zeus’ sexual needs. Martial noticed this too, and alludes to Ganymede when writing about Earinus.

Anyway, Earinus stayed with Domitian for some time, wearing his hair past his shoulders, which was common for Roman boys. Eventually, Domitian freed Earinus and let him cut his hair, likely when he was in his late teens. 

I assume all this happens before Domitian’s anti castration laws, otherwise that would make him pretty hypocritical, wouldn’t it? And it’s hard to imagine an autocratic authoritarian being hypocritical about anything. Especially one who has extreme social conservative views. 

Having appointed himself to the position of censor in the year 85, a government position that oversaw, among other things, Roman morals, he banned the act of castration, and imposed a limit on the amount slave dealers could charge for eunuch slaves. This was widely considered a positive thing, even though, again, the Romans liked their slaves to be eunuchs. We don’t know if he made an exception for the Gallae, but considering how devoted he was to the Roman state religion, it seems likely. 

Domitian wasn’t the only emperor to pass laws around castration, but he seems to have been the first. But it’s funny, the more the Roman state restricted the creation and existence of eunuchs, the more they tended to make use of them. 

It’s worth noting that while Suetonius says Domitian passed the castration ban, it might have actually happened under his successor, Nerva.

The Digest of Justinian, another collection of Roman laws from the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, says the punishment for eunuching was to forfeit half of all your property. It says this law was first created in the year 97, the year after Domitian’s death. 

Fast forward a few years, and the emperor Hadrian passes another law banning castration. At least, we think he did – there’s some controversy there that I don’t care to get into. But with Hadrian’s law, the punishment becomes much more severe – it’s the same as homicide. It also punishes the eunuch as well as the person doing the eunuching, unless of course it was involuntary, though I’m not sure how you’d go about proving that. Constantine would also pass a eunuch ban around 200 years later, which suggests that either Domitian’s and Hadrian’s laws weren’t terribly effective, or an emperor between Hadrian and Constantine reversed the ban in an act whose memory doesn’t survive today. 

But people still got their eunuchs. Of course, if you already had the means to buy eunuch slaves, you could travel outside the empire to acquire them.

The Historia Augusta – remember, super unreliable – also tells us there were eunuchs in the court of Elagabalus, but later emperors liked to have eunuchs as servants in their courts as well. But these eunuchs were increasingly less likely to be slaves – one eunuch, Eutropius, even served as a consul under the emperor Honorius in the year 399, the highest position in the Romann government after the emperor. 

But okay, the Romans weren’t big on the process of eunuching people, and the emperors at least tried to restrict the practice, with varying results. What about the attitudes toward eunuchs in general?

We talked about this a bit in the gallae video – broadly speaking, they found people who eunuch’d themselves to be weird, and they wanted the gallae kept away from Roman society at large. But we’ll put them aside, because we’ve already got a full video on them. 

But other than that, Roman writers didn’t really seem to care much about eunuchs one way or another. Up until the third century CE, Roman writers seemed to report on eunuchs in a sort of matter-of-fact way. But from the fourth century CE on – coinciding with the Christianization of the empire – writers started to refer to “eunuchism” as a problem. 

The Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, wrote about this in the late fourth century. His work covered Roman history from the time of Nerva to the death of the emperor Valens in 378, though most of it is lost. What does survive covers the period from 353 to 378, and since histories of the late empire are relatively rare, this is great to have. He’s generally considered reliable and mostly impartial, though he very clearly has his own prejudices and moralizing attitudes. In particular, he looked down on eunuchism in the imperial court, seeing it as a moral decay that accompanied the structural decay of the empire. He was very negative toward any eunuch he wrote about, seeing them as by definition scornful people. 

As an empire decays, as society’s institutions begin to show signs of fracture, those of the upper class become desperate to pin the blame on something. As a result, they find a small minority of people, at best curiosities and not well understood by the masses, and project all the pain, all the confusion, all the insecurity of their slowly splintering society onto them. 

Sound familiar? 

The more things change…

Chapter V: How Did They Do It?

Alright, so, back to the original question. 

How were non Gallae eunuchs created?

Believe it or not, we have a pretty detailed description of how the act was done, at least in the Byzantine empire. 

Our Byzantine source is Paulus Aegineta, or Paul of Aegina. We don’t know much about his life, but here’s what we do know. He was born on Aegina, an island between Athens and Argos. He mentions Alexandria quite a bit, so it seems like he travelled there as well. He wrote in Greek, which was common for Byzantine scholars. And we know he practised as a physician. Based on who he quotes, and who quotes him, we think he lived during the 7^th century CE. And that’s about it. 

He wrote a few different books, but his one extant work is commonly referred to as Epitomes Iatrikes Biblio Hepta, or Medical Compendium In Seven Books, though we don’t know what he himself called it. 

It’s an incredible resource when it comes to the history of medicine in the west – it includes just about everything the ancients knew. 

He talks about a lot of different subjects, and I’m definitely not going to list them all here but among many other things, he talked about:

• How to treat injuries like burns, sprains, contusions, nerve injuries, and dozens of different types of fractures and dislocations
• How to treat several different types of ulcers
• How to treat dog bites, bee stings, spider bites, scorpion stings, and other poisonous and venomous injuries
• How to recognize the signs of poisoning from lead, mercury, and toxic mushrooms
• How to perform a bunch of different surgeries on eyes
• How to perform a mastectomy on “male breasts resembling the female”
• How to recognize four different types of intersex conditions
• And a whole lot more

He also has a separate chapter on how to perform a castration. We find that in section LXVIII (68) of Book VI. It reads thusly:

The object of our art being to restore those parts which are in a preternatural state to their natural, the operation of castration professes just the reverse. But since we are sometimes compelled against our will by persons of high rank to perform the operation, we shall briefly describe the mode of doing it.

It’s clear from how Paul writes this section that he doesn’t like performing castrations. After all, it’s the act of destroying healthy tissue, and he’d rather help people heal their injuries than cause new ones. But sometimes, the aristocracy forces him to do it, so he has to do it. 

Since it seems like the vast majority of castrations were involuntary, that makes a lot of sense. Considering he had a section on top surgery for gynecomastia, which also involved destroying healthy tissue, one imagines he might not feel the same way about voluntary castration. 

He continues, 

There are two ways of performing it, the one by compression and the other by excision. That by compression is thus performed: children, still of a tender age, are placed in a vessel of hot water, and then when the parts are softened in the bath, the testicles are to be squeezed with the fingers until they disappear, and, being dissolved, can no longer be felt.

And, just, good lord. 

The method by excision is as follows: let the person to be castrated be placed upon a bench, and the scrotum with the testicles grasped by the fingers of the left hand, and stretched; two straight incisions are then to be made with a scalpel, one in each testicle; and when the testicles start up they are to be dissected around and cut out, having merely left the very thin bond of connection between the vessels in their natural state. This method is preferred to that by compression; for those who have had them squeezed sometimes have venereal desires, a certain part, as it would appear, of the testicles having escaped the compression.

So, there you have it. Either you crush the bits into dust in a hot bath, or you make incisions where necessary to remove them.

That’s how they did it. Ta daaa!

Chapter VI: Why Were The Romans So Weird About Eunuchs?

So, walking away from all of this, what do we have?

The Romans found the act of castration quite disturbing, but they wanted their slaves to be eunuchs. They wanted to eat their cake and have it too, essentially. 

But while they were legislating castration out of existence with one hand, they were writing manuals on how to perform castration with the other. They forbade castration within the empire, but gave eunuchs high ranking positions in the imperial court. 

This seems so wonderfully contradictory that you at first might think at some point I misread something, or one of our ancient sources is misreporting things, until you remember that a dozen or so centuries later, guys who owned slaves proclaimed the beginning of a new republic based on freedom and liberty. So yeah, history is kind of stupid sometimes. 

But some historians argue it actually makes a lot of sense logically, if you view it as a way for the imperial court to funnel eunuchs toward itself for its own benefit, while depriving others of it. 

After all, what greater sign is there of domination over the people in your empire than to hold a monopoly over emasculation? They’re your slaves, but you still don’t get to choose what happens to them. We can, but you can’t. 

To draw another parallel to the United States, consider slavery. It never ended, not really. It still exists today, in the form of the prison industrial complex. You, a private citizen, aren’t allowed to own slaves. But the government is allowed to take away nearly all its people’s civil rights, and force them to work, all the while creating all sorts of absurd victimless crimes that disproportionately target ethnic minorities. 

It’s not that different, philosophically speaking. 

But putting that aside, it’s not like government hypocrisy is unheard of. 

In 2021, Alabama state senator Tom Whatley was found liking trans porn on Twitter just a week after voting for a bill banning trans health care. 

Alex Jones, noted yelly angry man known for being anti trans and like 10,000 other awful things, showed his phone on video, and he was clearly watching trans porn. Ditto with hateful vespasienne Nick Fuentes. 

Utah state Republican John Stanard, who ran on a family values platform, was found to have hired a Salt Lake City sex worker at least twice, despite having voted in favour of harsher restrictions on sex work. 

And oh yeah, there’s this guy – a twice divorced serial philanderer, convicted r****t, and best buds with the most high profile pedophile in modern history, or the literal messiah, depending on who you ask. 

I could go on, and there are plenty of liberal examples too, but the further right you go the more of a hypocrite you tend to be. 

When it comes to making sense of the Romans’ contradictory attitudes toward eunuchs, maybe we don’t need to look any deeper than that. 

Ancient Sources:

►Aurelius Victor. “De Caesaribus”. Translated with an introduction and commentary by H. W. Bird. Glasgow, Liverpool University Press, 1994.
►Dio Cassius. “Roman History, Volume I: Books 1-11”. Translated by Earnest Cary, Herbert B. Foster. Loeb Classical Library 32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
►“Corpus Juris Civilis” Translated by Samuel P. Scott. Central Trust Company, 1932.
►“Digest of Justinian Vol I”. Translated by Theodor Mommsen & Paul Krueger, edited by Alan Watson. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
►Martial. “Epigrams”. Bohn’s Classical Library translation. New York, The MacMillan Company, 1897.
►Pausanias. “Description of Greece, Volume I: Books 1-2”. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 93. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918.
►Paulus Aegineta. “Epitomes Iatrikes Biblio Hepta”. Translated by Francis Adams. London, The Sydenham Society, 1847.
►Suetonius. “Lives of the Caesars”. Translated by Catharine Edwards. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Modern Sources:

►Bollinger, Alex. “Alabama Republican Busted Looking At Trans Adult Pics Online”. LGBTQ Nation, 9 March 2021.
►Davidson, Lee, and Taylor W. Anderson. “Utah Rep. Jon Stannard Resigned After Meeting Call Girl Twice For Sex”. The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 February 2018.
►Duffy, Nick. “InfoWars Host Alex Jones Caught Looking At Transgender Porn Despite Anti-Trans Rants”. Pink News, 27 August, 2018.
►Henriksén, C. “Earinus: An Imperial Eunuch in the Light of the Poems of Martial and Statius.” Mnemosyne, vol. 50, no. 3, 1997, pp. 281–94. JSTOR.
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