by León, Vicki
Section IV
Love Hurts. But Changing Gender Really Smarts
Eunuchs & Castrati:
Sensitive men, the hard way
By and large, Greek and Roman males scoffed at men who exhibited feminine qualities such as—ugh—sensitivity. Greek philosophers, Aristotle among them, affirmed that physically and mentally, females were a defective sort of male. Thus to be a man meant macho, and lots of it.
The thought of being born a female was distressing enough to male minds—equally dire was the idea of male castration. Nevertheless, eunuchs, some of them castrated forcibly and others, wince, by choice, were much in evidence in ancient societies, beginning with the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, and other cultures and becoming fairly commonplace among the Greeks and Romans.
Although we sometimes use the words eunuch and castrato interchangeably, they were not. Roman law, for example, made a clear distinction between eunuchs, defined as men who were impotent due to accident or birth circumstances, and/or indifferent to the female gender by nature; and castrati, who were unable to procreate because of genital mutilation.
The castration procedure, whether carried out before puberty or after, was grisly. It was also fatal to a shocking percentage of victims. Archaeologists excavating in Roman Britain sites found one of the tools used: a heavy, serrated bronze implement that clamped around the scrotum and removed the offending parts from their owner. Simpler tools, such as razors, shards of pottery, or pieces of obsidian, were also utilized in this agonizing operation. Some victims lost the whole package, while others, called spadones, were divested only of their testicles.
What motivated this bloody business? One was the perennial sex slave market for handsome sweet-voiced young boys with smooth hairless skin. (Fifteen centuries later, this would again create ajob market for castrati singers in Renaissance Italy.) Another driving force: to provide gelded workers for intimate settings, such as the harems and women’s quarters of rulers in regions of Persia, Egypt, and the Middle East.
A third reason was the illogical but firm folk belief that castrati and eunuchs made the most loyal and discreet employees. Because these men could produce no heirs, it was thought they were less apt to usurp power or throne-grab. Government bureaucracies around the ancient world had great need of such workers in middle management, and a mountain of evidence exists about the careers of thousands. In addition, a significant percentage became top advisers for a roll-call of Roman emperors, from Claudius and Nero to Gordians I and II.
During later imperial centuries, the growing demand for eunuch slaves impelled Emperor Hadrian to try to curb the market by passing laws; he failed, as did later emperors Nerva and Diocletian.
A fourth motive existed for male castration: the goal of religious chastity, which Egyptian priests had long exemplified. Around 204 B.C., the religious cult of the goddess Cybele came into being. Its persistent popularity spread from Asia Minor to Rome, where the deity was renamed Magna Mater. The cult literally created its membership of male disciples who, to show their devotion, castrated themselves in public. (You can read more about them and other ecstatic mystery religions elsewhere in this book.)
The goddess Cybele of Asia Minor demanded a lot from her male devotees. Worship wasn’t enough; she also required the DIY donation of their private parts.
Other sects around the Greco-Roman world had followers who emasculated themselves; in the second and third centuries A.D., the fast-growing Christian movement tried but also failed to keep its adherents from such extreme demonstrations of chastity.
The most notorious do-it-yourselfer? Theologian, teacher, and writer Origen of Alexandria. One account says that he was motivated to wield the knife upon reading the passage of Matthew 19:12 that says, “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Another reason: once castrated, he could teach female disciples without temptation. His castration around A.D. 200 led to a bizarre squabble among bishops as to whether such Christian activists could remain in the church. By 325, however, the Nicaean church council met to prohibit the practice of castrating oneself, so clearly Origen had imitators.
The abusive practice of making eunuchs and castrati out of men and boys flourished to an even greater extent after the Roman Empire lost traction to the Byzantines. During the thousand-year run of the Byzantine Empire, headquartered in Constantinople, eunuchs and castrati became even more visible as power players—and even more often, as tragic pawns in the sexual slave trade.
Eunuch Profiles:
Household names without heirs
Philaeterus became a eunuch in boyhood, the result of an accident. That did not stop him from becoming a shrewd and able officer who served in the armies of Antigonus and Lysimachus, two of the successor generals snarling over the conquests up for grabs after the death of Alexander the Great. In the succession wars, he was eventually promoted to commander of his hometown, the fortified city of Pergamum in Asia Minor (near Izmir in present-day Turkey). He took advantage of his plum assignment to switch sides—and declare his independence from the rest of the quarreling generals.
He ruled Pergamum for nearly forty years. Since it was a wealthy city, it had a fat treasury—and with these civic funds, Philaeterus made his hometown even more beautiful than it had been. He was also a generous benefactor to neighboring cities. Because he had no heirs, he adopted his nephew, Eumenes, to found the Attalid dynasty. After his death in 263 B.C., his successors continued to honor him on the city’s handsome coins.
Halotus, whose name is inextricably linked with Roman emperors Claudius and Nero, was a political survivor. In his post as the official food foretaster to the imperial family, the youthful eunuch guarded the health and welfare of Claudius until that disastrous October of A.D. 54, when his employer turned up dead of poisoning. The conspiracy must have included Halotus. That said, the major player was definitely Agrippina, Claudius’s niece and fourth wife, who’d likely become restive over her chronically ailing husband’s inexplicably long lifespan.
Once Agrippina’s evil cherub Nero reached his teens and got his official manhood toga, Emperor Claudius’s goose was cooked. Common sense would dictate that the goose of Halotus would be done for as well, since every conspiracy needs a fall guy.
Eunuch Philaeterus of Pergamum, an unsung success story, was a terrific general and city administrator who founded a dynasty despite his lack of progeny.
Apparently not in this instance: wily Halotus bounced back, even retaining his cushy foretaster job throughout the fourteen-year reign of Emperor Nero. As a further triumph, Halotus survived Nero’s downfall! He went on to become the gastronomic confidant of short-lived Emperor Galba in A.D. 69, called “the year of the revolving emperors.”
Bagoas, although not of the Persian nobility, became an excellent administrator and the number-two eunuch of Persia during the regimes of Artaxerxes III and IV. Thanks to his twin talents as poisoner and assassin, Bagoas did away with two generations of Persian despots, thus allowing the military forces of Philip II of Macedon (and later his son, Alexander the Great) to conquer the Persians and bring an end to the Achaemenid empire. According to some sources (and Mary Renault’s superb novel The Persian Boy), Bagoas may have had a petit dalliance with Alexander the Great during his time in Babylon.
This eunuch’s dazzling career finally came to a screeching halt when Persian king Darius III caught wind of Bagoas’s murderous plans for him— and Darius forced him to drink a fatal cup himself.
In late imperial times, Eutropius came to the fore. Although eunuchs and castrati won favor with rulers because of their loyalty and lack of ambition, Eutropius didn’t fit the mold. A mid-level official in the busy Byzantine bureaucracy, he came to the attention of Arcadius, the current emperor, by fielding the most attractive marriage candidate, Eudoxia by name. On the strength of that feat, he became the emperor’s top adviser.
Eutropius had other useful skills. In A.D. 398, he was able to pull off a m
ilitary triumph by thwarting the invasion of the Huns. The following year he was appointed consul—an achievement of such magnitude that the Roman senate, along with other patricians, went ballistic, demanding his removal. They probably admired his corporate ladder-climbing skills, but a eunuch consul? No way. Eudoxia, that ungrateful empress, gave him the thumbs-down. That was followed by a really bad omen: a major earthquake rocked Constantinople. Sent into exile on Cyprus, Eutropius was later beheaded on a specious charge.
Hermaphrodites:
Early warning signs from the gods
In Italy and surrounding lands, long-ago folks saw warning signs all around them, so many that they had to be organized into supernatural categories: portents, ostents, prodigies, and monstra. (These terms, used by soothsayers and augurs, meant tokens, acts, or events that offered clues to important or calamitous future happenings, acts so rare or extraordinary as to inspire wonder; monstra could be abnormal or simply wondrous. From ostent, we now have ostentatious; from portent we derive portentous; from prodigy we get prodigious; and from monstra, we get monster.)
These occurrences were interpreted as signals that something was amiss between heaven and earth, that something bad was about to happen. What kinds of omens seemed truly ominous two thousand years ago? The report of a shower of frogs, for instance. The sight of a statue of Jupiter sweating blood. Even the infrequent birth of triplets was an occasion for mass hysteria.
But the prodigy that really set teeth to chattering was the terrible news that a hermaphrodite had turned up somewhere. Ancient Greeks and Romans had a morbid fear of hermaphrodites, who today might be called transsexuals. They looked at sexuality as a spectrum of actions, but gender identity was different. A hermaphrodite, whose body mingled masculine and feminine equipment, or who self-identified as another gender, disturbed the social fabric. Alternatively, the neither-nor aspect of a hermaphrodite might represent divine displeasure.
The symbol for hermaphrodite, a frightening phenomenon in ancient times. Although the Greeks had a demigod named Hermaphrodite, when one appeared in human form, panic broke out.
Once an individual had been reported to the authorities and declared an official prodigy, that prompted an emergency meeting of the Decemviri, a group of ten bigwigs from the Roman senate. These old boys consulted the Sybilline prophesies, a collection of ancient oracles. These readings told Romans exactly what to do when such an unlucky creature showed up.
How had this phobia arisen in the first place? Early in Greek history, a modest cult had arisen to honor a demi-god named Hermaphrodite. As the myth went, this fifteen-year-old son of Hermes and Aphrodite (Mercury and Venus, among the Romans) was being stalked by a comely nymph named Salmacis. Although the teenager rejected her advances, she managed to wrap herself around him while bathing and persuaded a more powerful deity to grant her wish—that they would become inseparable. As the poet Ovid later put it, “Their bodies became one, no longer two, nor could you say it was a boy or a girl. They seemed neither—or both.”
The cult was not widely popular, but small images of the demi-god Hermaphrodite could be found in many households.
On a scientific level, a hermaphrodite of long ago, also called an androgyne or “man-woman” by the Greeks and Romans, could represent one of two possibilities: a woman who at some point, often explosively, turned into a man; or a person who visibly exhibited male and female sexual characteristics at the same time. (The next entry relates the fascinating case study of such a person.)
A person—even a small child—identified as a hermaphrodite often became a scapegoat. For instance, during a period in Italy that saw a stinging shower of stones occur, along with lightning bolts that scorched peoples’ clothes and struck the temple of Jupiter in Rome, a twelve-year-old hermaphrodite was discovered in Umbria. At the urging of priests and soothsayers, he/she was put to death. At other times, the putative hermaphrodite might be banished, or cast adrift in the sea.
From the Roman point of view, it seemed important to document as well as punish hermaphrodites, who showed up regularly in ancient accounts. (Any survivors unhappy with their gender kept low profiles.).
By good fortune, two of the Sybilline oracular poems about hermaphrodite appeasement have survived to our day. Given wide distribution by the Decemviri senators, these poetic commands were directed at the general public. A couple of examples from the verses: (i) Give the goddess Persephone the most beautiful thing in the world; (2) Sacrifice a black ox to Hades; (3) Make prayers to Apollo and be sure that everyone wears a garland.
Dealing with the threat of a hermaphrodite two thousand years ago has parallels to our own planetary dilemmas, as the mournful last lines of the Sybilline poem make clear: “If you perform the prescribed rites, the calamity will still come, but it will not come in your lifetime.” We would call that the “pass the problem along to your grandkids” solution.
No matter how the gods were placated, or to what degree, a number of fearsome hermaphrodite sightings did occur in Rome during the imperial centuries. Emperor Claudius—perhaps because he himself had a stammer, a limp, and other physical disabilities—displayed a more enlightened attitude toward human oddities. On one occasion, a thirteen-year-old from a distinguished family who turned from a maiden into a male on her wedding day was brought before him. Instead of banishment or worse, Claudius chose to look at the prodigy as a gift from the gods. Just to be on the safe side, however, he quickly built an altar on Capitoline Hill to a special cult dedicated to Jupiter, Averter of Evil.
Herais, aka Diophantos:
Close-up of a gender change
These days, it’s thought that many of those accused of being hermaphroditic in ancient times suffered from a medical condition called hypospadias or male pseudo-hermaphroditism. Initially identified as females, their true gender was male, often coming to light at puberty. Greco-Roman literature is littered with tabloid-style reports of newly married women who suddenly developed male organs, to the dismay of their bridegrooms.
Here is the real-life story of Herais, as told by Greek historian Diodoros of Sicily, whose invaluable account relied more on medical and social details than superstition.
She was born the daughter of an Arab woman and a Macedonian military man named Diophantos; after her dad retired, the family settled in a Greek-founded town called Abae on the Arabian peninsula.
At that time, a weak king called Alexander Balas ran their part of the world; he’d been handed Arabia and the throne of Syria, but his political strings were pulled by Egypt and Rome. Like everyone else, Balas liked to drop by his favorite oracle from time to time. At the one in Cilicia he was told, “Beware of the place that bore the two-formed one.” Just like fortune cookies today, oracles specialized in enigmatic phraseology, so Balas simply stored the ominous message away for future reference.
Meanwhile, Herais grew into womanhood. Her father did the expected, giving her a dowry and her hand in marriage to a gent named Samiades. About a year after they wed, her husband took an extended journey, while Herais remained at home.
While her husband was away, Herais fell ill with a disease no one could diagnose. A painful tumor developed in her lower abdomen. The feverish young wife got sicker and sicker until the darn thing burst open—whereupon a fully formed set of male genitalia emerged from her body. Instantly Herais felt better, aside from being horrified at her gender transformation.
Her parents were equally dumbfounded. And frightened. After Herais recovered, she (or rather, he) began wearing her normal women’s clothing again and went on being a housewife, for lack of a better idea.
Her anxious parents worried about their daughter; they knew that surprises like this were invariably unwelcome. Prior to this development, what kind of conjugal relations had she and her husband had? What on earth would they do now? Could this marriage be saved?
When Samiades returned, the situation grew even more tense. Herais refused to have intercourse and avoided him like the plague; so did Herais�
�s father whenever Samiades tried to talk to him about the weird female troubles he was having with his wife.
The in-the-dark husband finally got so enraged that he sued his father-in-law, which meant that Herais had to appear in court as well. When the jury or judge convicted Herais of failing to meet her marital obligations, the dual-gender witness had had enough. Lifting her gown in full frontal nudity, Herais spoke directly to those present, demanding, “Which of you would compel a man to have sex with another man?”
This display brought down the house, and Herais and her father were acquitted. Samiades was staggered. (He would later find that he greatly missed her; eventually he killed himself, naming Herais as his heir.)
Meanwhile, due to the traumatic nature of her transformation, Herais’s groin was frankly a mess. Surgery was undertaken, and as author Diodoros reported, “The male organ had been concealed in an egg-shaped portion of the female organ. Since a membrane had abnormally encased the organ, an aperture had formed, through which bodily secretions were discharged. In consequence, they [the doctors] found it necessary to scarify the perforated area and induce cicatrization [scarring]. Having thus brought the male organ into decent shape, they gained credit for applying such treatment as the case allowed.”
Now that Herais was well and truly outed as a male, she began dressing as a man, officially changing her name to Diophantos, like her dad’s. Not only that, she decided to pursue a more active career by joining the army of King Alexander Balas as a cavalry officer.
