Download PDF | The Perfect Servant Eunuchs And The Social Construction Of Gender In Byzantium ( 2004)
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SPELLING CONVENTIONS FOR GREEK NAMES
This manuscript contains many Greek names and titles. Recent years have brought greater consistency in the use of spellings and an effort to use spellings that reflect Greek roots. Whenever possible, I have followed the spellings in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (ODB). The reader will note some inconsistencies. Most personal names have been spelled as transliterated Greek following the ODB; some have been left in their familiar English form. They are either names that are familiar (e.g., Constantine, Basil, Theodore) or names spelled in the English form by recent translators (eg., Andrew, Candace). Most of the new spellings are easily recognizable, but a few can cause confusion and have been listed in the appendix.
The most frequent inconsistency in the use of Greek, Latin, and English spellings involves the words cubiculum and koubikoularios. The ODB (s.v. “koiton,” “koitonities”) translates Latin cubiculum as Greek koiton (kovtev) but draws a distinction between the servants (koitonites, kovtwvitnc) of the imperial bedchamber (the koifor) and the servants of the cubiculum. The ODB tefers to the latter as the “corps of eunuchs of the palace,” using the Greek word koubikoularioi. This is “a general term to designate palace eunuchs who waited upon the emperor, the servants of the sacrum cubiculum” (ODB ii, 1154.). Since my concern is with the palace as a whole, I have used the Latin cubiculum and the Greek term koubikoularios,
hopefully avoiding confusion with the more intimate terms koiton and koitonites.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
his book has been in progress for many years and I owe its completion toa
wide range of friends, colleagues, and family members. I have been privileged to have financial support from the American Council for Learned Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. I am indebted to the library staffs at the University of California, San Diego; Dumbarton Oaks; and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for consistently answering my pleas for obscure materials. I remember with pleasure a year in Princeton where scholars both at the university and at the Institute for Advanced Studies helped me to formulate this project. I owe special thanks to Peter Brown, Giles Constable, Patrick Geary, Judith Herrin, Philip Rousseau, and Joan Scott for suggesting new avenues of research about eunuchs and pointing me toward rewarding theoretical and primary materials. That year in their company provided me with a wealth of intellectual riches.
I am indebted to many other friends and colleagues. Gilbert Herdt early on invited me to contribute to one of his publications. He provided a valuable critique of what became an early framework for many of the ideas in this book. I am indebted to Matina McGrath, who meticulously checked my Greek translations, and to my colleague Alden Mosshammer, who acted as a referee when Matina and I could not agree. Claudia Rapp and Aline Hornaday critiqued early drafts of the manuscript, and Chuck Allen helped me make the manuscript accessible for a general audience. David Goodblatt helped with Hebrew sources, and David Noel Freedman kept encouraging me, always with that mischievous twinkle in his eye.
My thanks to the University of Chicago Press and to Doug Mitchell my ever-patient editor and to the two anonymous press readers. I will never be able to suffciently thank “reader number two” who read the manuscript at least twice and offered a detailed critique that saved me from a number of serious errors. I owe a similar debt to Maia Rigas, whose painstaking editing improved the effectiveness of this book. Any remaining errors or omissions in the manuscript are, of course, my own.
In the winter of 2000—2001, as the manuscript was nearing completion, Ibegan to lose my sight. During the following year, while the skilled surgeons at the Shiley Eye Clinic of the University of California, San Diego, repaired my eyes, my husband, David, put aside his own historical scholarship, finished entering my revisions to the manuscript, and prepared the footnotes and bibliography. He became my eyes and acted as my secretary. Without his help the manuscript would never have been finished.
Finally, I offer a note of encouragement to the many other part-time and temporary faculty, the “lecturers,” who also labor in the undergraduate trenches, teaching too many students for too little pay and no benefits at institutions like the University of California. Organizations such as Independent Scholars and granting agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities have recognized that we are serious scholars with good training and scholarly potential.
Their support has made this book possible.
INTRODUCTION
EuNucHs oF BYZANTIUM: CONTEXT AND DEFINITION
ike most Byzantine historians I love to visit Constantinople, the great ByzanLe capital. Today it stands empty, robed in the modern buildings of Istanbul, peopled only by tourists. I can only see the real dwellers in this city in my imagination, an imagination honed by years of reading Byzantine texts. The tenth-century city bustles with men of all social ranks, and the markets are full of lower-class women. Upper-class women, if seen at all, are heavily veiled and carefully escorted. And then there are the eunuchs. We find them in the streets, carrying messages, escorting wealthy women, guarding young children.
They are beardless, carefully groomed, well dressed in expensive clothing, for they are the costly, elite agents and servants, the elegant adornments of a wealthy, urban aristocracy. Those who are still young might be mistaken for adolescent boys, albeit slightly unusual adolescent boys, with fine, fair skin, faces that are just a bit broad, and tall thin bodies with narrow shoulders and graceful carriage. Older eunuchs often show the signs of poor health. Their faces are prematurely lined, and youthful fairness has become pallor. Their bodies are stooped from osteoporosis. Even so, they sport a thick, luxuriant head of hair and present themselves as wealthy, cultured gentlemen. The most successful of these distinctive people live in the grand houses that surround the palace.
The great palace complex next to the hippodrome is now mostly gone, buried deep beneath the modern city. If we could enter the imperial palace of the tenth century, however, we would find it controlled by eunuchs. They guard the doorways, supervise access to the emperor, manage the servants who see to the everyday needs of the imperial family—the cooks, the bakers, and cleaning staff. Eunuchs serve as barbers, dressers, and doctors. They manage the imperial finances and record keeping. They guard and control the imperial regalia, packing crowns carefully in storage boxes, selecting ceremonial garments, and helping the emperor keep track of his daily round of ceremonial obligations. Eunuchs of the household serve in the imperial choir of singers. In the apartments of the empress a similar corps of eunuchs serves and guards her well-being. Each of the imperial heirs has his own staff of eunuchs, servants who will loyally serve him throughout his life. This pattern 1s repeated around the city in the mansions of the great aristocratic families.
The great church, Hagia Sophia, still remains. In the tenth century we would find many eunuchs there as well. Alongside “whole” or “bearded” men, eunuchs serve as priests, bishops, and even patriarchs, and are celebrated for their perfect celibacy. Such churchmen also have households staffed with eunuch servants and singers. As we move about the city we find eunuch monks and holy hermits. We encounter luxurious monasteries reserved especially for eunuchs, elite places of retirement or incarceration for powerful eunuchs who have grown too old or too bold in the imperial service. Eunuchs serve in hospitals and orphanages and convents; they dispense largess to widows, orphans, and the poor.
As we leave the elegant core of the city and move into its seamier neighborhoods we find eunuch entertainers, actors, and singers. We also find eunuch prostitutes, castrated children destined to serve men’s pleasures for their entire lives, and young men who have had themselves castrated as adults in order to enjoy a life of uncomplicated sexual pleasure with both men and women. As we wander through the city, we gradually develop a perception of these individuals. They are distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and often perform tasks that upper-class men and women are constrained from doing. This distinctiveness includes an element of ambiguity. Among the upper classes and in the centers of government power, the eunuch is a perfect servant of God or of his secular master, one from whom lifelong loyalty is expected. This master-servant relationship borders on the spiritual. Simultaneously, in the urban districts dedicated to sensory pleasures, the eunuch represents the material world; a world devoted to the pleasures of the flesh.
EuNucHs AND GENDER
This book is a study of the place of eunuchs in Byzantine society and culture, a study of an institution that was both very ancient and quite varied in its makeup.
It asks about Byzantine society's conscious perceptions of eunuchs, about its unconscious assumptions regarding eunuchs, and about the variety of gender subcategories that were encompassed by the term eunuch. It suggests that Byzantine society classed eunuchs as what modern analysis defines as a separate gender category, one that was neither male nor female, and that the nature of this gender category changed significantly over a thousand years of Late Antique and Byzantine history. In doing this, the book will explore the construction and perception of gender in the Byzantine world between the sixth and twelfth centuries. The analysis is based on the premise that Byzantine culture incorporated more than two well-defined gender categories as part of normal life in Byzantium, at least among the urban, courtly elite. The eunuchs of Byzantium thus offer an important example of an alternative gender category and of the need to understand how such categories function in society, past and present. Any phenomenon that is so different from modern sexual and gender norms and also so durable is worthy of closer examination and may challenge the assumptions of modern historians of gender.
Accepted for centuries as a functionally legitimate group, eunuchs were a feature of Byzantine society throughout its history, a history that traditionally extends more than a thousand years from the founding of Constantinople in 324 to its capture by the Turks in 1453. Within that long history, eunuchs were particularly prominent both at court and in the church from about 600 to 100. Although their political influence was seriously curtailed by the Komnenos dynasty in the twelfth century, the eunuchs of Byzantium constituted an institution that persisted and, in the social sense, reproduced itself, for an entire millennium. This distinctively gendered group of individuals flourished despite the fact that Roman and Byzantine law prohibited the making of eunuchs within the empire and that ecclesiastical traditions frowned on bodily mutilation. Eunuchism! could not have persisted unless castration was in some way condoned by Byzantine culture. This paradox calls out for closer investigation,
To those of us who have been raised in a Western tradition and reflexively find intermediate gender categories “abnormal” and “unnatural,” Byzantine society offers an opportunity to look at a very different culture. It is a culture in which certain individuals were intentionally changed into something that was neither male nor female as defined in Western culture. If, as I believe, gender was constructed in Byzantium in a way that differed significantly from its construction in modern Western society, this study will help us understand the social history of Byzantium.
Before we can begin to explore the topic of eunuchs, however, we must first clarify what we mean by the words sex and gender. In this book the term sex will be used to refer to the biological determinants that establish the difference between what modern society refers to as the male and the female. In the period covered by this book, sex is determined by the nature of the reproductive organs. In modern times, sex is also determined by the nature of the chromosomal structure of the individual. Nevertheless, in Byzantium, even though eunuchs’ genital organs had been removed and their physiology significantly altered, they were still considered to be men. After Late Antiquity there is little indication that eunuchs were believed to constitute a “third sex.”
The term gender refers to the patterns of behavior assumed to be appropriate toa gender group. As we will see, Byzantine society tolerated alternative gender groups that were acculturated into patterns of behavior considered to be appropriate to that group. Thus, eunuchs constituted a third gender within Byzantium, They were men, but a differently acculturated kind of men. In this context, the phrase “to gender” refers to a pattern in which eunuchs were consciously reared and trained to present themselves and act in ways considered appropriate for eunuchs.
In the past ten years a number of scholars concerned with gender theory have suggested that we look at the structure of gender in ancient Greece and Rome in new ways.” Perhaps these cultures, so basic to our own, did not perceive sexuality and gender in the same way that we do. Perhaps, for example, sexual object choice was not the salient determinant of gender category as it 1s in modern society.
This book relies heavily on the theoretical assumption that gender 1s a SOcially constructed category, and it is hoped that the following discussion will help to strengthen that proposition. Modern scholars who explore gender theory tend to separate male and female based either on biological differences or “gendered” attributes. Biological differences between men and women are assumed to be inherited, physiologically determined qualities and are reflected in genitalia, biological function in reproduction, and physical appearance as determined by hormonal function. There is also an ongoing discussion as to whether sexual object choice is genetically determined. It is often assumed that none of the above biological elements of the human body are subject to change, yet in fact many of them are subject to cultural construction in which medical or psychological intervention is deemed necessary to help an individual achieve a culturally defined “normality.” For example children born with both male and female genitalia are labeled “abnormal” and are reconstructed, usually as males. Male children who are deficient in male hormones are given medication so that they will develop into “normal” males. An adult may conclude that his /her inner being does not concur with the physiology of his /her body and arrange to undergo surgery to change the physiology of his/her genitalia. Our Western culture is so wedded to
a bipolar biological structure that we will go to great extremes to preserve the differences between male and female sexual categories and avoid intermediary categories.
In contrast, Byzantine society reared children born with ambiguous sexual organs as “natural eunuchs,” individuals especially honored by God because freed from sexual desire and offered them an honored place within society, It also castrated male children in order to create eunuchs, individuals who were also physiologically ambiguous. There is no question that, although these individuals were biologically different from men, this biological difference was socially constructed. Thus Byzantine society routinely gendered young eunuchs into patterns of behavior considered to be “normal” for what it determined would be their gender category. As we will see, this resulted in the creation of a group of individuals that had all the attributes of a third gender.*
The phase “social construction” implies that gender is made up of several building blocks, some of them consciously imposed and maintained by society, some of them deep-seated assumptions about individuals that are rarely challenged or even perceived. The image of construction also implies something like a foundation—some feature of the construct that 1s basic and around which the rest of the edifice is constructed. In Byzantium the basic aspects of maleness and femaleness seem pretty straightforward: men procreate, head households, and manage worldly affairs; women bear children, care for dependents, and manage affairs within the household. As we will see, the worlds inside and outside the household are sharply separate domains (a distinction that should not be confused with modern concepts of public and ptivate). Furthermore, Byzantine society included many sharply defined boundaries between social categories and genders.
I maintain that the fundamental features around which a gender was constructed for eunuchs were the separation of eunuchs from reproduction and family obligations and the aptness of eunuchs for what I will call “perfect service.” The idea of “perfect service’ as a focal point for the social construction of gender is not something I have found in other studies of the topic. Eunuchs existed outside of the dominant social values and institutions of family, offspring, and procreation. This made them ideally suited to serve as servants, agents, and proxies for their masters or employers, male or female. They moved freely across social and gender barriers and were not precluded from a wide range of roles often deemed unsuitable for the persons whom they served. Moreover, because they were generally castrated at a young age, eunuchs developed distinctive physiological traits, some of which were then combined with learned behaviors such as body language, speech patterns, dress, and affect, resulting in individuals who
were readily identifiable to their contemporaries.
This “otherness,” together with the ability to transcend important barriers, was combined with de facto celibacy. In a culture that saw celibacy, asceticism, and holiness as related and desirable traits and that firmly believed in spiritual realms that were not accessible to most men and women, people readily assumed that eunuchs had access to spiritual realms that were otherwise inaccessible. Before we look at specific aspects of this process of cultural construction, it will be useful to review some of the dimensions of this question of gender; both as seen from our perspective and as conceptualized in the Byzantine world.
The Byzantine world constructed a gender framework for eunuchs that involved two significant elements: eunuchs as a generalized social category with a range of assigned attributes and eunuchs as identifiable individuals who made the general patterns concrete and who played important historical roles in Byzantine life. These two elements are the topics of parts 1 and 2 of this book. As modern historians, we are able to trace the gradual change in the language, status, and perception of eunuchs over the course of several centuries of Byzantine history. This modern analysis provides a third major theme that runs through this book.
Modern gender theory distinguishes biological markers from gender markers. Gender markers include such elements as dress, body language, patterns of speech, and roles and types of activities that society allots to men and women. They extend to positions of subordination and dominance in social hierarchies, assumptions about physiological characteristics such as strength and intelligence, and assumptions about moral character and integrity. Such markers also include spatial constraints within the family and household and in the exercise of spiritual and secular office. These markers are socially constructed and imposed on men and women, publicly establishing them as members of a particular gender group. Until recently the complexity and strength of these constraints, the degree to which they were considered to be normal, also reflected the degree to which Western society has been wedded to a bipolar model for the organization of both sex and gender.
Assuming that the category “eunuch” and its later subcategories were socially constructed, what is the nature of this construction and how does it relate to other constructed categories that specifically reference men and women? Of particular interest here is the fact that all of the negative attributes in the category “eunuch” are derived from ones ascribed to women. Conversely, most positive attributes are shared with men. This offers insight into how gender categories were socially constructed in the Byzantine world and suggests that careful analysis of Byzantine assumptions about gender attributes may also offer insights into theoretical issues surrounding today’s gender constructs.
Surely eunuchs were the ultimate constructed gender category. Society changed the eunuch’s physiology and outward physical appearance, then reared him in a special environment and trained him for very specific roles. Eunuchs were easily recognizable in public as a result of their distinctive voices and beardless faces. Some even adopted particular mannerisms that identified them as members of this group. The “thirdness” of the eunuch is an important part of his gender construct.
Given both modern assumptions and the persistent ambiguity associated with eunuchs in our sources, it is hardly surprising that the question has been raised as to whether and, if so, in what ways, Byzantine eunuchs were marginal members of their society. In the course of this discussion three terms—liminality, marginality, and gender—tend to surface and interact. Eunuchs were certainly liminal if we use this term in its most literal sense, since they operated across thresholds or boundaries. In the course of this study we will see eunuchs cross social, spiritual, and gender boundaries. I would suggest, however, that despite first impressions, eunuchs were not marginal to society in economic, spiritual, or political terms. Rather, they were marginal in the sense that they did not fit easily into a bipolar gender structure. Their existence forced people to talk about them using a language that lacked a convenient vocabulary. They made their contemporaries uneasy because they were seen to move too readily between the worlds of men and women, between earthly sensuality and heavenly spirituality, between imperial presence and ordinary space, and between the church and the secular world.
Yet, despite this apparent marginality, eunuchs constituted a remarkably stable, durable institution in the eastern Mediterranean for more than a thousand years. Their ambiguous gender status allowed them to fill liminal roles, and it placed them ina marginal situation, in part because it was assumed that they did not (or ought not) hold power in their own right. Nevertheless, eunuchs were both powerful and offensive to political rivals. In a society that was working out the relationship between male reproductive organs, intellectual powers, and the “seat” of moral values, a society caught between a very old Eastern Mediterranean value system based on kin and family and a newer Christian one that emphasized asexual spirituality, eunuchs defied all attempts at conventional gender categorization. Their ambiguity allowed them to be identified simultaneously with the grossest of sexual excess and with the angels.
This study has two important dimensions. Ona general and theoretical level, it examines the possibility that a culture does not necessarily have to be organized around the bipolar gender model of the modern West. On a more particular historiographical plane, this book focuses on eunuchs because the surviving Byzantine sources seldom speak to issues of gender except in connection with eunuchs.
In doing so, however, these sources provide insights into the larger gender pat- terns of the culture, both as structural patterns and as dynamic, evolving phenomena.
The obvious questions concerning the study of the Byzantine eunuch are, Why did this institution persist, and why was it so important? This question has been asked by many scholars, most recently by the late Alexander Kazhdan, who observed: “It is not clear why eunuchs were so important in the Byzantine administration.”* What was it that made eunuchs so integral and even essential to the workings of Byzantine society? What rendered this specially gendered category so integral to the life of Byzantium that its social behavior persistently contradicted its own formal strictures by allowing castration and by placing cas-
trated men at the top of its most important administrative hierarchies?
HistoricaAL CONTEXT
While the primary emphasis in this book is on Byzantine eunuchs from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, the world of that era cannot be understood without a discussion of earlier and broader contexts. Historically, eunuchs can be found throughout much of the Old World. They can be divided into three categories. Often they were men castrated as adults, either as a punishment for crimes or as prisoners of war. This was often the source of court eunuchs. Many eunuchs were castrated as adults willingly to serve in priestly cults. Finally, some eunuchs were castrated as young slaves or as prepubescent boys by their own families in order to prepare them for careers as servants in royal courts and aristocratic homes or as prostitutes.
By the height of the Byzantine Empire in .D. 1000, eunuchs had been a feature of Middle Eastern and Asian court life for at least three millennia. They appear as court servants in Mesopotamian texts from 2000 B.c.,> in Egyptian texts from the nineteenth dynasty (ca. 1300 B.c.),° and in Chinese texts from 1100 B.C.” Eunuchs played a very visible role in Chinese history and could be found in China, usually in association with the imperial court, until the revolution of the twentieth century. We know that castration was practiced as a punishment in China and that some eunuchs at court achieved great power; we are less informed about the way eunuchs fitted into Chinese society. We also have evidence, admittedly disputed by some scholars, that eunuchs served as courtiers in the NeoAssyrian Empire (934—610 B.c.) and that their roles at court were analogous to those of later Byzantine court eunuchs.® There were certainly eunuchs in the Persian Empire.” The practice of having eunuchs was continued by Hellenistic and Roman rulers, by the Byzantines, and by the Muslims.!° In the Islamic world and those parts of North Africa, Spain, and Italy controlled by Islam, eunuchs served both at court and as servants at important religious shrines.!!
The category of men who castrate themselves in order to serve in priestly cults has been studied extensively, and the practice still survives in modern society.7 Castrated priests served the mother goddess Cybele, a very old cult the Greeks adopted from the Phrygians about 700 B.c. We do not know whether castration was originally a part of the cult, since the texts that refer to castrated priests and to the castrated god Attis date from the fourth and fifth centuries B.c. In this context, castration was sought by adult men who were called to the priesthood. The cult flourished in “holy cities” like Hierapolis in Asia Minor, where it had shrines guarded by eunuch priests. In 204 B.c. the cult was brought to Rome, along with its eunuch priests, who were called galli.!$ The cult has died out, but cultic castration reappears periodically. The Skoptsy, aradical Christian sect that practiced castration as a mark of special holiness, emerged in eighteenth-century Russia and was not suppressed until the twentieth century.’* Voluntary male castration appeared again with the Heaven's Gate cult in the 1990s.
A superficially similar cult known as the hijras has been known in India since the second century B.c. This is a group of self-castrated devotees of the goddess Kali who perform dances and songs at weddings.'® This group continues to exist in modern India; in fact, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal featured a hijra who was planning to run for political office.!® As with the galli, but unlike many Byzantine eunuchs, the hijras are castrated voluntarily as adults. The durability of such communities of castrated religious servants 1s suggested by the fact that, as of 1990, thirty-one elderly eunuch tomb guards from Mecca and Medina were still alive.!7
Thus the practice of making eunuchs who then filled established roles in society existed long before Byzantium, Eunuchs could be found throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean and across the Middle East, India, and China. It is an institution with a long history, one that extends even to the present day. In a certain sense this deep-seated cultural reality suggests that, instead of asking Why eunuchs? we should ask Why not eunuchs?—a question more logically directed toward Western Europe. That is a discussion for another book, but it remains that eunuchism was a time-honored feature of eastern Mediterranean life, nota debilitating, “oriental” intrusion. If we go beyond the situation created by castration, we find that pre-Columbian America also included intermediate gendering in the form of the berdache. As Richard Trexler defines it, “a berdache isa biological male who dressed, gestured, and spoke as an ‘effeminate, that is, as individual cultures said women did and expected women or effeminates to
act... .’ These gender intermediates were found from the lands of the Delaware Indians to the Aztec and Inca Empires.’® As foreign as eunuchism may appear to us, it is important to remember that for millennia eunuchs and other intermediate gender categories, like the berdache of North America, could be found in all urbanized regions of the world except northwest Europe and the British Isles.
Societies traditionally arrange sexual and gender groups in some sort of order. Modern U.S. society tends to take the position that such groups are arranged on a horizontal bipolar continuum. Men lie at one end of this continuum, and women, at the other; any deviation from this is highly suspect. Male infants eventually become men, molded into a form predetermined by society. The same is true of girls. Until recent advances in the study of sexuality and sexual orientation we have assumed that this was how the world was constructed and that this was the way it had always been perceived. Since much of the legal and cultural tradition of the United States and the British Commonwealth stems from northwest Europe and England, it is not surprising that those scholars from the English-speaking world who are firmly rooted in a bipolar sexual and gender framework find eunuchism offensive, “oriental,” and a cultural tradition that epitomizes an “other.” Even as we become more comfortable with the idea that gays and lesbians might, by biological destiny or by choice, occupy alternative gender categories, we still are repelled by the idea of deliberate human castration.
EuUNUCHS AND CHRISTIAN BYZANTIUM
By the reign of Constantine I (1. 324-337), the symbolic beginning of Byzantium, eunuchs were a normal feature of the eastern Mediterranean.!? Constantine himself had eunuchs at his palace, and the number and importance of eunuchs both at court and in aristocratic society continued to grow throughout the Byzantine era. As noted above, the power, though not the number, of eunuchs did not decline until the coming of the later Komnenoi in the middle of the twelfth century.
Eunuchs, like servants and slaves in many societies, were people without past or family. We shall see that as time went on in Byzantium, this topos of institutionalized “otherness” was often contradicted by reality. In Late Antiquity and early Byzantium, eunuchs appear to have been actual slaves, often selected for their beauty and drawn from tribal peoples located along the coast of the Black Sea and in the Caucasus Mountains. The most frequently mentioned source for these eunuchs was Abchasia, on the east coast of the Black Sea.?° Prokopios of Caesarea tells us that the ruler of the Abchasians selected beautiful boys to be castrated and sold to the Romans and then killed their fathers to avoid subse- quent repercussions. The emperor Justinian the Great supposedly sent one of his own most trusted eunuchs, an Abchasian by birth, to the Abchasian people in hopes of convincing them to end the trade.*! Prokopios implies that Justinian’s intervention ended the practice, yet over the centuries the number of eunuchs at court continued to increase. Although the convention that eunuchs came from outside the empire persisted, we will see that they were drawn from a growing number of sources that included freeborn citizens of the empire who had been intentionally castrated by their own parents.
The geographic origins of specific eunuchs are rarely mentioned in our sources. This silence is a basic part of their gender construct, which assumed separation from place of birth and family. This lack of perceptible or acknowledged social background facilitated a kind of personal anonymity that allowed a new personal self-definition based on the oikos of their patrons and reinforced the ethos of perfect service.2~ As we will see in chapter 9; by the ninth century the reality of this tradition of societal alienation and reintegration was fading, allowing us to glimpse the backgrounds and families of some eunuchs.
As Byzantium became a Christian society, the widespread presence of eunuchs was confronted by developing Christian attitudes about celibacy, reproduction, sexual pleasure, and bodily function.?° One facet of this study examines the way in which Christianity came to terms with eunuchism in the course of several centuries of Byzantine history. Christianity, or rather the Judaic tradition within Christianity, emphasizes the integrity of the physical body and is uncomfortable with bodily mutilation and its results. Jewish traditions exhibit a rigidly bipolar conception of gender, one that has little tolerance for intermediate categories and gender ambiguities. These traditions were continued in early Christian writings regarding the nature of eunuchs and castration. The male body must be preserved in its “natural” state, and castration gravely altered that state.
At the same time, however, the Christianity of Late Antiquity increasingly rejected sexuality and honored the celibate man. A man who could successfully suppress his own sexuality was a man particularly favored by God. This created an ambiguity regarding holiness where eunuchs were concerned. One tradition associated eunuchs with sexual license, lust and erotic behavior for its own sake, not for the sake of procreation. Another, the tradition of the perfect servant, assumed celibacy as a requirement for perfect service. Many eunuchs, and especially those castrated at a young age, lacked sexual desires and found it easy to remain celibate. Yet, in the eyes of the church, perhaps their sanctity came too easily—they “cheated” on the way to the ascetic life. Eventually a compromise was worked out. Intentional, self-inflicted removal of the genitalia and its attendant physiological changes were believed to be an insult to God's creation. At the
same time, according to the canons of the early church, aman who Was castrated accidentally or by another person could still achieve holiness as a priest, bishop, or cleric. Only those who castrated themselves or achieved celibacy with the aid of the surgeon's knife, were considered to be “homicides, hateful to God and unsuitable for church office.’?*#
The Late Antique and Byzantine worlds also inherited Roman patriarchal ideas that gave favored status to adult male heads of households and emphasized procreation and family formation. As a part of this self-presentation, the Romans passed serious legislation designed to protect the genitalia of the Roman citizen.?> Traditional Roman society also insisted upona rigid code of behavior intended to ensure that its male citizens were reared and conditioned to present themselves in accordance with a fixed model for masculinity. Men and women
26 Independent men of
were assumed to differ morally, mentally, and physically. substance, if properly trained and nurtured, were believed to rise above the level of women and children to become fully masculine heads of households. Laws protecting male genitalia were enshrined in legal, rhetorical and other writings, offering models that were adopted by pagan intellectuals and early church fathers alike in their writings about proper male appearance and behavior.*” For these authors the appearance and behavior of eunuchs represented the antithesis of appropriate male behavior. The eunuch was scorned as shameful, neither man nor woman, a monstrosity, an outsider, and pitifully womanlike.
In the context of these cultural currents, we will see that Byzantine attitudes about eunuchs were also influenced by the increasing importance of monasticism and the celibate life in the Byzantine world. As eunuchs gained status they became increasingly integral to Byzantine society. Perceptions of eunuchs as a distinct gender group also reflected societal ideas about the literal nature of the flesh and, more specifically, the nature of the flesh of prepubescent boys and men. This is important because the traditional thought patterns of Mediterranean culture emphasized external appearances. The appearance of an individual’s body informed the viewer of the quality of his soul and his moral integrity. A corrupt soul would eventually be revealed in a corrupt body. Similarly, the physical body, especially in the castrated individual, was believed to affect his personality and his inner being.
These “imported” Roman and Christian traditions were at odds with the realities of the structure of gender in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world of Antiquity and Late Antiquity. The “indigenous” attitude accepted the existence of eunuchs as essential to the operation of aristocratic households and royal courts. Within this cultural framework, the eunuch’s alternative gender status could be readily accommodated, sometimes with what seem to be glaring contradictions between formal constraints and actual practice.
It appears that for men of Late Antiquity castration was one of the markers that divided the civilized from the “barbarian” world. Thus the late Roman and Byzantine legal codes repeat earlier Roman injunctions against castration. Under the civil code those who practiced or arranged for castrations were to be punished with death, confiscation, exile, or fines. The law is very clear—in the Christian world no one was supposed to be made a eunuch. It was permissible, however, for barbarians to make each other into eunuchs who could then be sold in the empire.7® Ecclesiastical law from the time of the first council of Nicaea (325) echoes these regulations, observing that churchmen who castrate themselves or aid in the castration of others are to be deposed unless good medical reasons can be found for the surgery.??
As this passage implies, certain kinds of medical problems became a subterfuge that legalized castrations.°° Despite the censure of Jewish, Roman, and Christian tradition, therefore, Late Antique and Byzantine emperors and wealthy aristocrats continued to have eunuchs in their palaces. Many of these eunuchs came from territories outside the jurisdiction of Roman law, but as we move into the later Byzantine period there are signs that men were willing to wink at legislation that attempted to prevent castration.*!
In Late Antiquity actual practice seems to have had a rough correspondence with formal legal strictures. Prepubescent boys were usually castrated for economic reasons. They generally came from the outer reaches of the empire or beyond, were castrated, and were sent to Constantinople for sale in the slave markets. In the later Byzantine world, however, freeborn boys were often castrated to ensure their celibacy, save them from the snares of the devil, and permit them access to high positions in the administrations of both church and state. The rhetoric of official disapproval and outsider origins remained, but the growing reality illustrates the fluidity of cultural constructs surrounding the issue of
castration.
Eunucu: DEFINING THE TERM
While the preceding pages appear to assume a fairly clear-cut meaning for the term eunuch, it is in fact a very comprehensive word, at least in contrast to our modern usage. From the perspective of modern gender definitions, the range of people included in this category is remarkably wide, especially during the earlier centuries covered in this study. At one extreme was the “doubly castrated” boy (all of whose genitalia were removed) who was a deliberately created and marketed sex object. At the other were celibate monks who had not been castrated but were referred to as eunuchs, and even nuns whose celibacy caused some au-
thors to describe them as “eunuchs” ina complimentary way. Greek sources of Late Antiquity, at least in polite prose, used the term eunuch to encompass a diverse class of individuals without reference to the extent or nature of their castration, the age at which they were castrated, or their social or civil status. By the second century a.D., the term could refer to any nonreproductive man, whether he was castrated, born without adequate reproductive organs, or had suffered injury that rendered him sterile. Thus we encounter, for example, eunuchs “from birth” and eunuchs “by force” or “by necessity.” The word was also a blanket term covering a variety of genital mutilations, ranging from the cutting of the vas deferens (as in a modern vasectomy) to the removal of one or both testicles to the total removal of all male sexual organs. Although other terms came into use that referenced specific kinds of mutilation, eunuch remained the general ot omnibus term and was rarely further modified based on the appearance of the eunuch’s genitalia.
This offers a deep-seated definitional problem to the modern West. If modern Western culture were to define eunuch in the way that the Byzantines did, it would have to consider as eunuchs all men who have had vasectomies, men who have undergone testicular ablation as part of treatment for cancer or other diseases, men born without fully developed sexual organs, and men being treated for prostate cancer with drugs that destroy testosterone. This is something that it would never consider. The reason for this is that the term eunuch carries a powerful psychological charge in our society, just as it often did in the ancient and medieval world. It implies far more than sterility. It implies loss of masculine affect, effeminacy, transit from the masculine gender model to the feminine. Even more frightening from the point of view of Western culture is the assumption that in some times and places this transition is involuntary. Whether as punishment for a crime, something perpetrated ona child by a parent, revenge on prisoners of war or political enemies, Or imposed by a master ona slave, it registers as a violation of an individual’s body that is today considered cruel and unusual punishment, a barbaric act.
What stands out in the way that the term eunuch is used in a Byzantine context is that the underlying meaning embedded in the word is an association with the presence or absence of the generative function. In the Late Antique and Byzantine worlds procreation was of central importance in defining gender. Byzantine society, like Roman society from which it grew, was patriarchal in structure. The maintenance of the family was central to this society, and loss of the generative function placed an individual outside of the logic of conventional, family-derived social categories. All of our texts acknowledge this and set eunuchs apart from this patriarchal schema, citing eunuchs’ lack of procreative ability and their origins outside of the boundaries of aristocratic society. As will
be discussed in chapter 9, eunuchs may have come to be considered “special” in pter 9 'Y P part because they were thought to exist outside of earthly time and space. As a group, they also devised techniques for family advancement, a kind of procreation.
This relationship to procreation, rather than physical appearance or the specifics of genital mutilation, is another key observation about the eunuch viewed as a gender category. Within that generalization other terms appeared to supplement or replace the term when referring to specific groups of nonreproductive men. These included galli, an early term used for the eunuch priests of the Magna Mater, and “cut men” (topidc) or “cut out men” (€xtopiag), which referred to the technique of removing the testicles from the scrotum. These terms appear throughout the period covered here but seem to have become more common toward the end. In the eleventh century, Skylitzes, for example, uses “eunuch” (evvodxoc) and “cut man” (€«ktouiag) almost interchangeably. A related Latin term praecisus appears in Latin sources. The term crushed (@A1Biac) referred to eunuchs whose testicles had been crushed intentionally when they were still very small children. The term spado (onddov) appears occasionally. Athanasios uses eunuch and spado in the same sentence without distinction. Spado was usually used in legal texts to refer to “natural eunuchs,” males who were born without well-formed genitalia or who, presumably for physiological reasons, lacked sexual desire.*° In the tenth century, when doubly castrated eunuchs who lacked both testicles and penis were scarce and valuable in Constantinople, a specific term, curzinasus, appeats. This term, which enters late Greek as kuptivcovs, comes from the name Khwarizm, which refers to a region in Central Asia where physicians knew how to perform this complex and risky surgery.*4
By the twelfth century, although the Byzantines still often lumped all nonreproductive men under the single descriptive term, eunuch, they also used these other terms to make important distinctions. Understanding these distinctions will help sort out the seemingly contradictory good eunuch /bad eunuch language of the sources. Society distinguished between eunuchs castrated before puberty and men castrated as adults of their own volition. The first group was honored, and the obvious “otherness” of its members was often held in awe. The second was looked down upon. Prepubescent sexual and reproductive potential could readily be sacrificed to create an individual who was constructed by society to fulfilla particular set of social or religious needs. After puberty this option for creating a eunuch was far less acceptable.
Thus, the term eunuch was a very broad one that covered a wide range of individuals. Moreover, its definition developed and changed from the third to the twelfth centuries, and many of its variants became more specific. One important sign of its shifting content is the fact that the Byzantines changed their explanation for the etymological roots of the very word eunuch. Its original etymology reflects the oldest traditional role that eunuchs played in aristocratic society, that of guardians of the bedchamber (6 tiv ebvi €x@v) and derives from the Greek word for bed (évvy).3° By the twelfth century Byzantine authors claimed that the term eunuch came from the term well- or high-minded (ebvoog). This newer assumption about the derivation of the term eunuch, though mistaken, reflected the very different place that eunuchs occupied in later Byzantine society. By the twelfth century eunuchs were perceived to be perfect servants of God or of aristocratic men, highly educated and well trained. An etymology derived from terms like well-minded or high-minded seemed logical.
BioLocy, REPRODUCTION, SEXUALITY, ASCETICISM
In the Late Antique and Byzantine world, the specific nature of a eunuch’s biological loss, mutilation, or abnormality was rarely mentioned. Instead, a man was classed as a eunuch because he could not procreate. This fact excluded him from fatherhood within the traditional patriarchal world of the extended family. Yet that very exclusion allowed him to serve other important, integral roles within the cultural system, and the importance of these roles was recognized and even honored. We will see that in the Byzantine period eunuchs, especially eunuchs castrated before puberty whose physical attributes and acculturation publicly identified them as eunuchs, were assumed to possess distinctive and inherent attributes that were in fact constructed by society. These ranged from beauty and heightened sexual desirability to spirituality, special intellectual abilities, and even “magical” powers.
Eunuchs who were castrated before puberty had certain physical characteristics that were associated with eunuchism. They were beardless and developed distinctive stature, musculature, distribution of fat deposits, facial appearance, skin texture, and voice range. The degree to which these physical changes took place was, of course, affected by the age at which castration took place. These physical changes were important gender markers for eunuchs.
Aristotle, whose scientific ideas remained influential well into the Byzantine period, says that eunuchs are changed into women, or as he puts it, into a female state. He lacks the vocabulary to discuss eunuchs as a separate third category. Galen occasionally entertains the hypothesis that male or female animals, with the removal of the reproductive organs, might be changed into a third type of be-
ing that is neither male nor female and is different from either one.*°
In chapter
2, we will see that later Byzantine medical writers followed Aristotle and Galen in discussing eunuchs, using language that reflected sexual bipolarity while classify- ing eunuchs with women and children in a more nuanced hierarchy of human flesh.
All this suggests one important preliminary observation: modern society distinguishes, linguistically and in other ways, between men who are voluntarily celibate, men who are accidentally or naturally impotent, men who have had vasectomies, and men who have had all of their sexual organs removed. It does not, however, lump all of these categories into one large group or suggest that they have somehow moved outside of their classification as males. Late Antique and Byzantine society does not seem preoccupied with these same physiological distinctions. This may reflect a reluctance to discuss the physiological side of male sexuality. It is more likely, however, that it reflects a tendency to separate men from eunuchs in terms of generative function. This distinction and its gender implications, rather than the physical appearance of the genitals or causal circumstances surrounding castration, became a defining characteristic for eunuchs. This clearly allows the implication that the ability to continue the family line was more important than the ability to engage in what we consider normal sexuality or maintain the appearance of physical perfection.
At the same time there is reason to suggest that Byzantine society did not make a eunuch’s sexual activity or his choice of sexual object a salient feature of the construct “eunuch.” Thus eunuchs could not procreate, but some eunuchs could be sexually active. Eunuchs are portrayed as engaging in sexual activity with both men and women. They replaced either men or women as partners in the sex act, but partners devoid of procreative potential. Since procreation, rather than sexual activity, was the critical component of gender in this culture, the sexuality of eunuchs was a secondary factor in the social construction of their gender category.
Medical writers, following a classical, pre-Christian tradition, tended to define eunuchs in terms of the quality of their physical bodies. In contrast, as Late Antiquity absorbed Christianity, the philosophers and church fathers often classified men, women, and eunuchs in accordance with their generative powers. For Clement of Alexandria (born a.p. 150), for example, eunuchs encompassed a wide-ranging group of individuals, from men who were sterile or castrated to celibate whole men.°7 Fertility, like life, was essential to the definition of manliness; therefore, eunuchs were not fully men.
The early church admired men who could save their seed and avoid sexual temptation. This allowed such men to turn their vital life forces to more important things. Yet the early church did not admire eunuchs, since it considered that their control over their own sexuality was too ambiguous. On the one hand, they
could preserve their vital fluids and maintain an ascetic life style too easily, After all, the drama here lies in man’s battle with his physical passions. On the other, a eunuch was suspected of being able to use his condition to facilitate a life of secular debauchery. Thus, while eunuchs could not procreate, some of them were thought to be sexually active and while the church tolerated sexual activity for the sake of procreation, it was reluctant to condone sex for the sake of pleasure. Churchmen also engaged in deep soul-searching about whether celibate eunuchs could achieve holiness. Since the eunuch’s celibacy could not be tested, they were skeptical of his mastery of his own body and thus his claim to celibacy. What we see here are several intellectual traditions evolving side by side. In subsequent chapters we will look at these traditions and explore the ways they were accommodated into the long-term reality of eunuchs within Byzantine society. Within the ecclesiastical and philosophical worlds of Late Antiquity, one finds a great variety of opinions about eunuchs and the degree to which they are men, women, or some sort of “other.” Children, because they do not procreate, constituted an anomaly similar to that of eunuchs. For children, however, this condition was not permanent, and with proper societal conditioning boys became men and girls became women. Thus, while preadolescent boys were often seen as magically or spiritually distinct from adult men, at maturity they could be accommodated into the system and developed into full-fledged, sexually active males. Ultimately, the language and logic of polarity that was derived from pro-
creation left eunuchs in limbo.
BYZANTINE COUNTERPARTS TO MODERN GENDER THEORY
Before we can understand who and what eunuchs were we need to look briefly at the Byzantine counterparts to modern gender theory. Since our sources were written by individuals reared in the mental universe of medieval Byzantium, whatever they have to say is shaped and filtered by their own culture. Obviously, that is much of what this book is about, but before we can examine the topic ina serious way, it will be useful to sort through some of the definitions and characterizations that Byzantine authors themselves used when they talked about eunuchs.
Byzantine authors observed and commented on topics that we define as gender categories, though they did not identify them as such. These observations were recorded in written texts and in visual imagery that were absorbed into artistic traditions and into literary descriptions. The category of eunuch is particularly interesting because, while eunuchs were prominent in the empire fora thousand years, surviving references to them often carry a heavy load of negative
rhetorical tradition. It can be very challenging to separate the substance of the socially constructed category from the negative rhetoric that surrounds it at any given time. The very process of sorting through the variety of ways in which this gender category was presented offers interesting insights into Byzantine society itself. We must remember, however, that everything we find in the sources 1s part of asocial construction that was a dynamic and ongoing process, Since this society’s discourse regarding eunuchs evolved over time, we can trace changes in social attitudes about eunuchs and about gender construction in general.
The Byzantine world had a rather different concept of the arrangement of biological and gender groups than does the modern West. In the first place, these two classifications, biology and gender, were considered to be one. The biological nature of the physical body was assumed to be directly linked with a variety of other elements within the individual, elements that had little to do with either sex or gender: strength, courage, moral character, intelligence, to name only a few. Much of this structure of sexual and gender classifications in the Late Antique and Byzantine worlds was conditioned by earlier Greek medical beliefs about the composition of the body. While this is examined more carefully in chapter 2,a few points are worth introducing here.
Aristotle and Galen, while taking for granted that men and women constituted polar opposites, were inclined to see both sexuality and gender in terms of ascending ladders leading toward perfection. The rungs of these ladders, some of which were “biological” while others were socially determined, were based on the theory of humors prevalent in the medical thought of the Ancient World.*° This ladder image also relied on culturally determined ideal norms for the education and acculturation of young men and women, on ideas about appropriate social behavior for the sexes, and on unquestioned assumptions about the intellectual and moral potential of men and women.
At the bottom of the ladder were women and girls, who were associated with coolness and dampness. Partway up the ladder were boys and adolescent males who, having left the socialization of childhood in the women’s quarters, were learning to be complete or active men. At the top of the ladder were those men who possessed the ultimate masculine attributes: heat, dryness, activity, fertility, and traiming in male behavior. As they matured and were acculturated into appropriate male behavior, young males gradually moved up the ladder.*? In this model, males who were castrated before puberty were “stuck” in a kind of arrested development. They were more manly than women or young male children, but they could never reach the status of sexually mature men and thus could never attain the culturally defined attributes of full masculinity. As the engendering process evolved, they were placed on a different gender path altogether.
The ladder image implies both a hierarchy of gender anda polarity between
male and female. Thomas Laqueur argues in favor of a single sex model for an- tiquity in which gender was more important than biological sexuality; according to this model the female body was constructed relative to a male reference point.*° This argument has many merits, but in the Byzantine case it has to be reconciled with the fact that Byzantine society hada separate classification of individual, the eunuch, born male but then culturally and physiologically constituted into an individual who was referenced positively toward men and negatively toward women. When Byzantine sources wanted to speak well of eunuchs they did so in terms of positive attributes traditionally ascribed to men. When they wanted to be critical of eunuchs they did so in terms of negative values traditionally ascribed to women.
These definitional issues must also be seen within the hierarchically organized Byzantine society. Human beings—men, women, and children—were undefined, imperfect creatures until molded and perfected by society. Men were believed to be more suited, by nature, to perfection than women. Thus, out of the great mass of humanity, only physically whole men could achieve the highest peaks of physical and moral perfection. In an increasingly Christian world attracted to asceticism, these men fell into two gendered groups. One was made up of active, worldly men who lived, procreated, and often were the leaders of the material world. The other consisted of contemplative men who consciously rejected their sexual natures. Both worldly, procreative men of affairs and ascetic men were biologically or physiologically “male,” but they were perceived as distinctive gender groups because of their different relationships to sexuality and reproduction.
The ideal type of the ascetic male was the physically whole male who struggled to achieve holiness through denial of sexual urges and denial of the body. This type of holiness is presented as a trope in a variety of hagiographical sources and in cults associated with figures like St. Symeon the Stylite the Younger. This trope is important to an understanding of the Byzantine reconfiguration of such important Biblical figures as the prophet Daniel, a process that is examined more closely in chapter 5. The category of voluntarily celibate holy man, however, is distinct from the category of the castrated eunuch who served at court or in the church even though the individuals in all of these categories were sometimes referred to as eunuchs.
Individual eunuchs often shared gendered roles and attributes that were characteristic of either active men of family and public life or ascetics. Nevertheless, because of eunuchs’ mutilation and their inability to procreate, they remained part of a group that had been assigned a distinctive gender identity. They could not achieve the status of aristocratic men and were long denied the heights of ascetic achievement because of the presumption that they did not have to fight their own sexuality. As physiologically and biologically incomplete men, eunuchs also shared many of the attributes of prepubescent boys who were perceived to be in a state in which their gender status was still ambivalent. If we look at the Byzantine gender construct in this way, we see that eunuchs were not necessarily effeminate; rather, they lacked full masculine status. The standards for achieving perfection within one’s gender group were not based on opposing standards of masculinity and femininity but on aristocratic masculine standards alone. The perception of eunuchs as something like a third sex or third gender 1s fairly constant throughout Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world, but a shift in that perception 1s central to this book.
One recurrent theme raised in this context was the issue of whether eunuchs were perceived as artificially created beings and, if so, who was assumed to be responsible for their creation. This question 1s closely tied to society's perception of nature. In Late Antiquity castration was regularly condemned as “against nature,” and the eunuch himself was condemned as a creature whose very existence was “against nature.” Yet by the tenth century some authors had shifted the focus from “against nature” to “beyond nature.” This subtle change brings the implication of access to a world beyond the natural world, a significant shift in a profoundly religious society.
Another indicator of the complexity of the subject is the fact that, by the twelfth century, Byzantine sources used several terms to refer to eunuchs, and these terms referred specifically to the nature of each eunuch’s mutilation. This increasing specificity of definition and tendency to identify individuals by the nature of their mutilation reflects a subtle hierarchy evolving among several subgroups encompassed by the general term eunuch.
One of the more complicated topics that arises here is the question of the sexual preference of eunuchs. While Byzantine culture often saw eunuchs as involuntary celibates, it also assumed that some eunuchs were sexually active, but not in ways that were central to their gender construct. As eunuchs have become an increasingly acceptable subject of study, some scholars are making the assumption that eunuchs can be equated with modern male homosexuals and that eunuchs preferred men as sexual partners, playing a passive role in same-sex relationships. This idea probably grows out of studies of the galli in the ancient world and anthropological studies of the modern hijrain India.*! Among groups like the modern hijra, gender preference has been established prior to castration. In Byzantium, where it appears that castration was commonly done to children rather than to adult men, it took place before personal gender preference could possibly have been determined.
This brings us to thorny issues that modern biology is even now trying to deal with. Is what we call homosexual behavior an inherited trait, or is it learned
behavior? Our Byzantine sources often tell us that eunuchs were passive partners in same-sex relationships, yet these same authors pity eunuchs for desiring women and for being unable to act on their desires.
As Michel Foucault has so ably shown, we must not assume that other societies operate using our categories, no matter how obvious and basic they might appear to us.47 We must avoid the tendency to ascribe reflexively to the medieval world our modern assumptions about sexual categories and behaviors that seem familiar at first glance, or to make quick assumptions about the sexual nature of a society ina world that was very different from ours. Thus it would be anachronistic and illogical to assume that the Byzantine category of eunuch was in any way analogous to the modern category “gay,” despite the pejorative traditions shared by both. It is true that some Byzantine sources do refer to a category of eunuchs who are “eunuchs by nature.’44 For example, in the tenth-century Vita of St. Andrew the Fool we find that such a eunuch befriends the saint’s disciple, Epiphanios. This eunuch ts young, and the saint accuses him of being a sodomite.** In the Vita of St. Basil the Younger there is a long diatribe against the powerful court eunuch, Samonas. He is called a “eunuch by nature” (gvoet 6 Lopovac evvodyoc), and accused of engaging in acts of sodomy.*° In the Vita of St. Niphon of Constantiana, probably written some time after the tenth century, we find the demons debating over the soul of a eunuch who is called a sodomite. He too is a “eunuch by nature” (ovoet ebvodyog, both in “spirit” (yy) and in “body” (oda). In this case the saint saves the eunuch’s soul. Yet in the same vita we are told of another eunuch, a “eunuch by nature” (ti ovoet EvVODYOG), who loved money and beat his servants; even the Virgin could not save him.*°
Byzantine sources are likely to assume that eunuchs acted as passive partners in same-sex relationships without presenting it as a matter of personal sexual preference. In fact, the official lecture on duties that the chief court eunuch gave to eunuchs being inaugurated into service in the imperial private quarters states that a eunuch must not be friendly with or associate with “men of bad reputation or those who are innovative.’ Notice that sexual behavior that we would label homosexual is not forbidden, or even mentioned. This is not what is being prohibited. Instead, the eunuch ts being told to be careful with whom he has any kind of associations. I suspect that “eunuch by nature” may be a code phrase sometimes used to refer to those castrated men who actively seek out sexual relations with other men.*” While such references allude to sexual acts that we associate with male homosexuality, there 1s nothing to suggest that the gender construct for eunuchs can be usefully compared with modern concepts of homosexuality.
In a more general sense, there ts little evidence that individuals in the Byzan- tine world were placed in gender categories primarily because of sexual preference of any sort, an important way of assigning gender in some societies. [he presence or absence of genitalia also does not elicit much comment in our Byzantine sources. In Byzantine society, gender categories were determined in ways that remind one of some American Indian societies in the nineteenth century, in which the primary determinants of gender were social roles and conventions dictating external appearances, physical mannerisms, facial expressions, and manner of dress.4® While their inability to procreate was part of the construct, their sexual preferences, although sometimes discussed by innuendo, were not.
As with many of the generalizations that will emerge as we go along, it is 1mportant to remember that everything we find in the sources is part of a social construction that is a dynamic process. After the eighth century, when new eunuchs were increasingly drawn from free members of Byzantine society, they could no longer be classified as outsiders. In later chapters we will see that Byzantine society regularly reflected on eunuchs as a group, discussing the morality of castration, reviling eunuchs, honoring them, inventing roles and attributes for them, and even creating “historical” eunuchs and setting them in a fictional past that was an invention of the present.
Many of the attributes of eunuchs that we would consider socially assigned aspects of gender were considered by our Late Antique and Byzantine sources to be inherent and, in their minds, biological. For example, eunuchs were criticized because they cried easily, A modern observer might suggest that this was probably related to the way they were reared. A Byzantine observer, however, would say that eunuchs cried because they had lost the inherent masculine quality of emotional self-control, a loss that was assumed to be a biological or inherent
consequence of the loss of the testicles.
Tue Fitter oF LANGUAGE
The very longevity and evolution of the gender construct of Byzantine eunuchs often confuses our perceptions of it. The rhetorical repertoire available to Byzantine authors, who often had their own agendas, resulted in highly contradictory characterizations of eunuchs, even in the work of a given author. Inevitably, therefore, this book is also a study of the use of language. We know Byzantium only dimly, through incomplete documents written by people whose own rhetorical intentions are often veiled. One methodological premise of this book is that a close study of language can identify attitudes, cultural structures,
and gender assumptions that are never stated overtly. In the case of eunuchs,
these linguistic structures reflect a society that long tolerated ambiguities in gender assignment. In practice, eunuchs were consistently perceived to be ambiguous, at least in relationship to modern-day conventional male/female gender categories. As a result, their presence fostered the use of language and elicited comments in the sources that are remarkably revealing in ways their authors never anticipated.
While we saw above that the Byzantine gender construct for eunuchs is hierarchical and is referenced to an ideal masculinity—either that of the active secular man or the ascetic man—it is important to note that our Late Antique and Byzantine sources attempt to express the construct in language that reflects a bipolar, male/female, tradition. The structure of the Greek language identifies individuals as either masculine or feminine. Eunuchs were invariably treated grammatically as being of the masculine gender and were never associated with feminine or neuter grammatical forms. Thus the language reflexively placed individuals in fixed masculine or feminine categories and did not readily allow for a definition of individuals belonging to alternative or intermediate sexual categories. Whether the Byzantine conceptualization of gender was bipolar or singlesex in orientation, it remained difficult to articulate definitions of individuals who neither conformed to accepted polarities nor progressed along the ladder that led to the male ideal. Nevertheless, Byzantine culture developed a variety of ways of talking about eunuchs. As we will see in chapter 1, the language that evolved was often a language of ambiguity and negation.
After the ninth century, however, we find that many Byzantine sources move beyond earlier bipolar linguistic traditions and acknowledge this hierarchical arrangement of gender groups by defining eunuchs in terms of those masculine qualities they lacked rather than in terms of those feminine qualities they were perceived to possess. Increasingly, those desirable qualities that eunuchs lacked were exactly those qualities that define ideal masculinity, such as strength and courage. Yet despite the tidiness of this single-sex structure, it is clear that a bipolar model is also lurking in the language available to our sources.
We see elements of a bipolar model in the way that the bipolarity of the Greek language prevented the medical and scientific community from adequately expressing gender diversity even though its own tradition supported a vertical continuum that explained physiological differences between men, women, children, and eunuchs as a progression toward ideal masculinity. This medical tradition also offered a similar explanation for old age—elderly men moved down the physiological ladder in the direction of eunuchs, women, and children. Of course, all these interpretive problems are further compounded when we try to translate Greek into English.*?
THe Nature OF THE SOURCES
The primary sources for this study are, like most Byzantine sources, scattered and thin. Useful references can be found throughout the corpus of primary sources, often in asides and linguistic ot rhetorical devices used without conscious reflection by the author. Finding data is further complicated by the fact that eunuchs, and especially “good” eunuchs, often are not even identified as eunuchs. The collection of data has been made difficult by generations of editors who, until recently, often employed euphemisms or repressed references to eunuchs in texts and sometimes did not even include the term eunuch in indices.
Both Byzantine and modern medical sources yield valuable information about eunuchs. The teachings of Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates formed the basis for medical attitudes about eunuchs. Byzantine physicians like Paul of Aegina and Theophilos Protospatharios tend to rely on Galen, though their variants on Galenic teachings are often of great interest. Byzantine discussions of nutrition tend to be gender-specific and yield important information about gendered categories for types of flesh and its makeup and the way in which foods of different kinds reinforce gender categories. Recipes for ointments and medicines are often gendered, suggesting different kinds of treatments for different gender groups. These kinds of medical sources tend to be quite fixed in their vocabulary, even over a long time span.
In Byzantine historical narratives, with some exceptions that will be discussed, eunuchs frequently are objects of derision and are treated as scapegoats for imperial failures. Such narratives were almost inevitably written with a political agenda or were designed to justify particular outcomes. Authors who were wedded to a worldview in which masculine strength and values were dominant stressed the effeminacy of eunuchs and ascribed to them a whole set of negative stereotypes derived from those attributed to women. Ecclesiastical histories are less severe, probably because a great many high church officials, monks, and holy men were eunuchs. In these sources, eunuchs are often praised and valued for their celibacy.
Sermon literature has yielded little material. The only sermon I have found that directly deals with eunuchs is the first of St. John Chrysostom’s famous vanity of vanities sermons, which tradition says was delivered over the great eunuch Eutropios as he cowered under the altar in Hagia Sophia. John Chrysostom never tells us that the subject of his sermon is a eunuch.*° He doesn’t need to, for the sermon is filled with “eunuch speak” —specialized language routinely used to describe eunuchs. Random, interesting pieces of information have also been culled from sermons that deal with the eunuch of Queen Candace in the Book of Acts and with the “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” passage in Matthew. In general churchmen seem to have been reluctant to address the issue of eunuchs directly, for reasons that will be discussed later in this book. Sermon literature does, however, yield atich collection of materials regarding angels. As we will see, the connections between eunuchs and angels are numerous and intriguing, and the sermon literature has proved most useful in this regard.
Byzantine law codes sometimes discuss eunuchs, and the gradual improvement in the status of the eunuch can be traced in these documents. At the same time, legal codes are immensely conservative, and new laws did not necessarily cancel out older ones. Thus law codes often reiterated older, traditional legislation even though it was out of date. As a result, the law codes are seldom reliable guides about what constituted current practice. We get a hint of contemporary awareness of this phenomenon in the eleventh century. Theophylaktos of Ohrid observed that the old legislation of Justinian regarding the making of eunuchs was still on the books, but as far as Theophylaktos was concerned, these laws, both ecclesiastical and civil, “should be thrown away like the rotten soles of shoes, known to be useless and clearly unfit for service in either your monastic institutions or the church of God.”>!
There is an especially rich body of epistolary writings from the tenth century. Most of these letters focus on members of the court and other elite figures of Constantinople, many of whom were eunuchs. While some of the letters malign eunuchs in the usual way, others reflect a warm relationship between members of the elite and well-placed court eunuchs.
The hagiographical corpus, that is, the stories of the lives of the saints of the period, with its much wider range of stories and topo1, yields a surprising volume of interesting material about eunuchs. Again, some authors use traditional vindictive language, casting eunuchs as symbols of the material world and its evils, and even as tools of the devil. A surprising number of authors, however, present eunuchs as holy and righteous men. A single hagiographer will people his text with both bad and good eunuchs, further reflecting the ambivalence with which eunuchs were regarded. This kind of source provides many portrayals of the roles that eunuchs played in everyday life and especially of their important role as cultural and sometimes spiritual intermediaries.
The ninth and tenth centuries in Byzantium produced anumber of taktika or lists of officeholders and rules for protocol. These are extremely important for determining the offices and titles that eunuchs held within the state bureaucracy and their rank within the structure of government. This source has been extensively used in previous studies of eunuchs, most notably by Rodolphe Guilland.>? Thanks to his work we can effectively exploit information on the roles of eunuchs at court as displayed in the writings of Constantine VII Porphyrogen- netos, most notably in his De ceremoniis.
Eunuchs also appear in a number of miscellaneous sources. They are referred to ina number of monastic foundation documents (typikon), appear in travelers’ tales, are found in the Timarion, that wonderful romp through Hades,>* and in the oneirokritika or dream books. Changing attitudes about eunuchs and their role in society can also be found in evolving folk traditions about the city of Constantinople and its founder, the emperor Constantine, the legends surrounding the emperor Justinian, and in society's changing perceptions of the prophet Daniel. Artistic imagery yields interesting insights into discussions of eunuchs. To a limited extent this material will be used, though it will remain the task of an art historian to fully analyze its importance.
Finally, one of the most compelling texts used in this study is the Defense of Eunuchs of the eleventh-century bishop Theophylaktos of Ohrid. Composed by the author for his brother, a high-ranking eunuch on the episcopal staff of Hagia Sophia, it is written in the classical dialectical tradition and features a debate, which Theophylaktos claims to have heard as he hid behind a curtain, between a bearded monk and a eunuch over the merits of the recent castration of the eunuch’s young nephew. This setting allows Theophylaktos to lay out common perceptions, both good and bad, about eunuchs.
Theophylaktos’s treatise is unique in that it offers a systematic compendium of negative and positive observations about eunuchs and castration, and there is no other discussion of this kind in the corpus of Byzantine sources. It was written for important personal reasons, and thus its positive attitude may not reflect general attitudes in Theophylaktos’s world. Yet it is an enormously rich work, and its acceptance and humanity touches the reader.
Unfortunately we have almost no written works that can be securely attributed to eunuchs themselves. As a result, they have no voice of their own.~* If we could securely identify him as a eunuch, St. Symeon the New Theologian might provide us with such a voice, and his use of language might offer insights into a eunuch’s voice.°> The nearest approximation, and obviously a debatable one, is found in a number of passages in which authors speak as or for eunuchs.
The secondary literature on eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is not large and tends to be based on an institutional approach to history. The topic of eunuchs has long fascinated historians, and scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw it as an “oriental” element in Christian Byzantine culture and as an affront to Graeco-Roman classical traditions. This tradition persisted until recently and caused historians to treat the topic in a tentative fashion. Only in the 1950s did Rodolphe Guilland condense and publish his series of articles on eunuchs into a single volume.°° He was primarily interested in the study of the imperial administrative system and focused mainly on the eunuchs who held posi-tions at the imperial court and the nature of their offices and honors.
In 1978, Keith Hopkins devoted two chapters of his book Conquerors and Slaves toa sociological analysis of the eunuchs of the Byzantine court.°” His thoughtful analysis suggests that eunuchs exercised real power and were not simply scapegoats for incompetent emperors and hostile commentators. He dismisses the pejorative language used about eunuchs as “what we might expect,’ and notes the obvious comparison between Byzantine court eunuchs and court Jews in the German states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: both were reviled yet well rewarded and powerful. He points out the critical role that eunuchs played in mediating between ordinary people and an increasingly unapproachable emperor and between the aristocracy and a growing bureaucratic structure.
In the last few years several important studies that deal with eunuchs have appeared. In Eternal Victory Michael McCormick shows the ways in which the power of the eunuchs was illustrated in court ritual.5® More recently, Peter Brown has discussed eunuchs as part of his study of the body in early Christian society.>” The best introduction and survey of the roles of eunuchs in Late Antique aristocratic households, including the imperial household, is found in Peter Guyot, Eunuchen als Sklaven und Freigelassene in der griechisch-réimischen Antike.°° In the 1990s, Shaun Marmon published an excellent book entitled Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, which covers the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.° Marmon offers some useful ideas about eunuchs as beings who existed in part outside of normal space and time. More recently, Piotr Scholz has offered a sweeping but superficial essay on eunuchs that ranges from the Ancient Near East to China and the Vatican but says little about Byzantium. 62 An excellent new study of eunuchs in the Late Antique and medieval West has recently been written by Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity.
CONCLUSION
The Byzantine world did not have a single or necessarily negative perception of eunuchs. In some periods and in the eyes of some authors, eunuchs were hated and reviled; in other periods, as seen by other authors, eunuchs were honored and respected. Our sources are filled with ambivalence about eunuchs, about what sort of individuals they were, and about how they “fit” within the human race and the spiritual world. Whether eunuchs were placed in sexual or gender categories, these categories were fluid and, reflecting societal change, evolved over the centuries.
Part 1 of this book approaches the issue in terms of generalized problems of language and categorical perceptions, particularly the filter and framework of language, medical lore, and prevailing assumptions about physiology and routine forms of acculturation. Part 2 shifts the focus and analyzes the topic in terms of the depictions, careers, legends, and narratives that in one way or another talk about eunuchs as individuals or protagonists. These are not necessarily “historical” sources in the sense of “real-world” narratives about actual people. These sources often describe eunuchs that appear in dreams, miraculous visions, hagiographical tales, and foundation legends. These accounts of imagined eunuchs thus supplement the almost two hundred documented eunuchs who appear in chronicles and other narratives of the period. These individuals, real or imagined, show us both how eunuchs fit into Byzantine society and what sorts of functions and unique characteristics society assigned to them.
The conclusion addresses the most important issue that has emerged from this work: the basic function of eunuchs as a group in Byzantium, a function important enough for the institution to endure for a millennium just in this society. There is little question that in the Byzantine world eunuchs represented a distinct gender category, one that was defined by dress, assumed sexual behavior, work, physical appearance, quality of voice, and for some eunuchs, personal affect. It is clear that we are dealing witha culture that socially constructed a gender category with the aid of a form of physical mutilation that led to physiological change. Furthermore, if we look at this society in terms of our modern models for the organization of the categories of sex and gender, It is quickly apparent that both of these categories were fluid and socially dependent. The next step is to examine some of the conscious and unconscious patterns of language, medical thought, and cultural normalization that permeate our sources.
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