Two fragments of the Lydiaca attributed to Xanthus of Lydia (mid fifth century b.c.) preserve a curious claim that a king of Lydia (either the famous Gyges or the mythical Adramytes) was the first person to make eunuchs of women. In an attempt to make sense of these passages, it has been suggested that εὐνουχίζειν here refers not to castration, but rather to female genital cutting. If correct, this would provide our first evidence of this practice in Lydian culture or indeed anywhere in Anatolia. However, the assumption that what Xanthus describes somehow related to real practices is highly questionable. Instead, we should re-contextualize this story in terms of other fifth-century representations of luxury and eunuchs and in terms of Xanthus’ own exemplary portraits of other Lydian kings.

The first fragment is preserved in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus of Naucratis (c. a.d. 200) and forms part of a longer discussion of foreign τρυφή (12.515d-e):

Athenaeus uses this quotation to introduce the theme of Lydian extravagance, a discussion that he brackets with descriptions of Persian and Etruscan luxury.

The second fragment comes from the lemma for Xanthus in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda. This lemma is itself an epitome of a longer work by the sixth-century a.d. chronicler Hesychius of Miletus.Footnote ²

While Athenaeus and Hesychius differ in the name they give to the king and in Hesychius’ suggestion that this procedure produced an ever-youthful state, the similarities in phrasing, in particular the use of εὐνουχίζειν (LSJ: ‘castrate’), indicate that they were drawing on the same passage of Xanthus. Since elsewhere εὐνουχίζειν is only applied to men or male animals, its use in these fragments has been the source of some confusion.Footnote ⁴ Were we to understand it as meaning ‘to castrate’ we would have to imagine that Xanthus was referring to a form of oophorectomy, the destruction or the removal of the ovaries. As the ovaries were identified only by Herophilus in the third century b.c. (and even then their role in reproduction was not clearly understood), and given that such a procedure would almost certainly have proved fatal for the unfortunate woman, it is impossible that this is what Xanthus meant.Footnote ⁵

Since εὐνουχίζειν cannot be taken literally in this way, Sabine Huebner and Jane Rowlandson have instead suggested that it is a reference to an otherwise unknown practice of female circumcision in Lydia.Footnote ⁶ We have evidence for various ancient customs of female genital cutting: female circumcision is referred to in a papyrus from Ptolemaic Memphis; Hellenistic ethnographers describe male and female genital cutting amongst the Egyptians and the Troglodytes living along the Red Sea coast; and Strabo quite improbably imagines that Jewish women were circumcised.Footnote ⁷ We even find prescriptions for surgical clitoridectomy in Greco-Roman medical texts.Footnote ⁸

However, there are many reasons why the passages of Athenaeus and Hesychius cannot be understood as referring to female circumcision. Firstly, no ancient source uses εὐνουχίζειν to describe female genital cutting. Instead, they use words meaning to excise (ἐκτέμνειν) or to circumcise (περιτέμνειν).Footnote ⁹ Conversely, ἐκτέμνειν is used to mean ‘to castrate’.Footnote ¹⁰ The reason why this word is used of both female circumcision and male castration is clear: a verb meaning ‘to cut out’ accurately describes both castration and female circumcision, procedures that both involve anatomical excision. Εὐνουχίζειν lacks this precision, especially since Xanthus does not offer any more details apart from the fact that it allowed the women to be used sexually in place of male eunuchs and that this kept them young. Secondly, there is no reason to believe that εὐνουχίζειν was used by Athenaeus or Hesychius as a gloss for a different, more appropriate verb (such as ἐκτέμνειν) originally used by Xanthus to describe female circumcision. It is very unlikely that both Athenaeus and Hesychius would have independently chosen the same word, especially one that normally was not applied to women, had it not already been present in their source.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, given that Athenaeus’ literary project was concerned with the display of obscure lexicographical learning, it would be at odds with the purpose of his work to replace one piece of technical vocabulary with his own.Footnote ¹² Finally, there is the argument from silence that no other source attests a Lydian practice of female circumcision. In fact, despite the many descriptions we have of male circumcision in the ancient world, it is not even claimed that the Lydians practised this variety. For example, Herodotus, Xanthus’ contemporary, provides a list of the peoples known to have customs of male circumcision (2.104):

In both ancient and modern contexts no group practises female circumcision that does not also practise male circumcision.Footnote ¹⁴ This therefore suggests that, from an anthropological perspective, the probability that female circumcision was practised in Lydia is low: since we have no evidence that Lydian men were circumcised, it is very unlikely that Lydian women were cut in this way.

George Devereux has interpreted εὐνουχίζειν as referring to the cauterization and scarification of the external genitalia, with the aim being to sterilize the woman in question by making vaginal penetration impossible.Footnote ¹⁵ This argument rests on his interpretation of Adramytes’/Gyges’ stated motive (‘so that he might enjoy them in an ever-youthful state’) as a wish to ensure that they did not endure that process which ‘ages a woman's body most … pregnancy, birth and lactation’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, there is no need to invent an ancient form of surgical contraception to explain why eunuchization might be imagined as keeping women youthful. It is more likely instead that Xanthus had the example of male eunuchs in mind: if castrated as boys, the effects of puberty are much reduced in male eunuchs and so they retain many of the physical characteristics of early youth.Footnote ¹⁷ It is much more probable that Xanthus simply transferred the physical qualities of male eunuchs onto imagined female eunuchs.

All these interpretations err by assuming that, when Xanthus wrote about female eunuchs, he was attempting to describe an otherwise unknown, but nevertheless historical, practice of female circumcision or sterilization. This is based on the not unproblematic idea that he, as a native of Sardis and from a Lydian family, had specialist knowledge about Lydian customs that he faithfully recorded in his work. However, many of the details for Xanthus’ life are contradictory and seem to be later inventions. According to Hesychius of Miletus, Xanthus was the son of a Lydian named Candaules; he was born in Sardis, and was present there when the city fell to the Persians in 546 b.c. However, it is unlikely that Xanthus’ father was actually called Candaules, as this is now thought to be a throne name (similar to Caesar in Latin), which a Lydian ruler took when he became king.Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, in antiquity there was doubt as to whether Xanthus was in fact born in Sardis.Footnote ¹⁹ Hesychius, who has Xanthus present in Sardis for its fall in 546 b.c., is contradicted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who writes that Xanthus lived in the period shortly before the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.) and was a contemporary of Thucydides.Footnote ²⁰

Even if Xanthus was born in Sardis and his father did bear a Lydian name, this would not necessarily mean that we should privilege his Lydian identity over his Greek one. Movement between the cities of Ionia and Lydia seems to have been common and intermarriage between Greeks and Anatolians does not seem to have been unusual: Herodotus, for example, dismisses the idea that the Ionians were ethnically pure, pointing out that, according to their own foundation legends, Greek men took local Carian women as wives.Footnote ²¹ An inscription from Ephesus from the fourth century b.c. details the punishment of forty-five Sardians who had desecrated the rites of Ephesian Artemis at Sardis; in the inscription their names are frequently recorded along with those of their fathers, grandfathers and even great-grandfathers. Here we find men with Greek, Lydian and Persian names as members of the same family.Footnote ²² We therefore cannot assume that Xanthus provides a straightforwardly native Lydian perspective, or that his identity is necessarily that of a cultural outsider: he is not, as has been suggested, a Classical precursor of Manetho or Berossus.Footnote ²³

It is impossible to arrive at a precise date for Xanthus. The reference to him by Ephorus of Cyme gives us a terminus ante quem of the mid fourth century b.c., but Xanthus was probably writing well before this.Footnote ²⁴ Strabo praises Xanthus for his description of an inland area of Lydia where, though far from the sea, the fossilized remains of sea creatures could be found.Footnote ²⁵ On the basis of this evidence Xanthus was convinced of the truth of a story that had been told to him: this area had once been covered in water, but it had dried out during a drought in the reign of Artaxerxes. Andreas Mehl has used this fragment to date Xanthus to the reign of Artaxerxes I (465–424 b.c.), giving us a clear terminus post quem.Footnote ²⁶ But we can perhaps narrow this down still further. It would seem that enough time had elapsed since erroneous stories about how this area used to be covered by the sea had time to emerge and to be accepted as plausible. Therefore, even if the drought happened early in the reign of Artaxerxes, we should probably date Xanthus to the end of his reign, making him at least a contemporary of Herodotus.

Xanthus seems to have been familiar with the physical geography of Lydia, but it is difficult to say more than that, and it is likely that many of the Lydian details attached to his biography were invented later to fit the theme of his work. It is also unlikely that Xanthus was able to record real historical practices from the time of Adramytes or Gyges. Adramytes was almost certainly a mythical character, whose name was invented to etymologize Adramyttium in Aeolis, traditionally considered a Lydian foundation.Footnote ²⁷ Although Gyges is historical, his seventh-century date means that Xanthus will have had little access to authentic details of his reign, and we need only consider his portrayal in Herodotus to see how mythologized a figure he had become by the fifth century.Footnote ²⁸ We cannot depend on the idea of Xanthus as heir to a Lydian oral tradition that faithfully recorded details about the historical Gyges or Adramytes, nor can we assume that his access to the Lydian king lists (also known to Herodotus and mentioned by Nicolaus of Damascus) will have given him access to reliable information of this sort.Footnote ²⁹ As Walter Burkert has demonstrated, the Lydian kings produced these lists to provide a legitimating mythological genealogy for themselves.Footnote ³⁰ As such, they are a very unlikely source for Xanthus’ piquant and often damning biographical sketches of the kings. It is therefore best to think of Adramytes/Gyges as functioning as a mythologized blank canvas onto which Xanthus could project contemporary concerns, and the stories about what was done to female bodies at the Lydian court as reflecting the concerns of fifth-century Greek ethical thought rather than Iron-Age Anatolian realities.

We should not take εὐνουχίζειν in these fragments as a precise description of a specific procedure. Xanthus’ use of this verb (rather than ἐκτέμνειν) foregrounds the end result of castration rather than the process by which it occurs. It is eunuchs (albeit female ones) that concern him, not an obscure form of sterilization or circumcision. He is interested in the cultural category of ‘eunuchs’, not in the anatomical details of how one might make a female eunuch. This suggests that to understand what is at stake in this passage we first need to understand what eunuchs represented for Xanthus’ literary contemporaries.

Lydia was particularly associated with eunuchs by fifth-century authors. Herodotus explains that Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, sent the sons of Corcyra's elite to the Lydian king Alyattes at Sardis to be castrated; he later describes how Panionius, a Chian, sought out beautiful boys whom he would send to either Sardis or Ephesus to be castrated before selling them to the Persians.Footnote ³¹ However, we should be careful of reading these passages as straightforward evidence for an orientalized view of Lydia.Footnote ³² Although it is to Lydia that the Greek boys are sent to be made into eunuchs and sold, in both cases it is other Greeks that do this to them.

The image of Lydia as a land of eunuchs is closely tied to the popular theme of Lydian τρυφή. On the one hand, the wealth of Lydia and the refinement of its culture could be viewed in positive terms by Greek sources and, just as with the eunuchized Greek boys sent to Lydia by Periander or Panionius, Greek descriptions of Lydian customs and riches were not necessarily shaped according to a model of polarity whereby authors constructed Greekness in contrast to barbarian ‘Otherness’. Sappho, for example, makes frequent mention of the fineness of Lydian goods, its wealth, beauty and military might.Footnote ³³ However, especially in the wake of the Persian conquest of Sardis, this refinement was often interpreted as effeminate luxury. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570 – c. 475) claimed that the Colophonians had learnt ‘useless luxury’ (ἁβροσύνας … ἀνωφελέας) from the Lydians.Footnote ³⁴ The capture of Colophon by the Persians and the coming of ‘hateful tyranny’ (τυραννίης … στυγερῆς) in the year after the fall of Sardis were the consequences of these habits. We find evidence of both points of view in Herodotus. Lydian customs can be viewed positively: their νόμοι are like those of the Greeks (except that they prostitute their daughters), and they are the inventors of coinage, trade and dice games.Footnote ³⁵ However, they are also luxurious and feminine, and Herodotus links Lydian τρυφή with effeminacy at 1.155. Here, Croesus, attempting to save Sardis from destruction, explains to Cyrus that the conquered Lydians can be made docile and accepting of Persian rule if they are forbidden from possessing arms and are instead introduced to luxury: they will become ‘women instead of men’ by being made to wear tunics and long boots, dance and play the kithara, and partake in trade.Footnote ³⁶ These are at once innovations while also being typically Lydian. The customs that Croesus recommends are ambiguously gendered and they underscore Lydia's luxury as well as its effeminacy. In these examples, Lydia is imagined as a place where Greeks are sent to become eunuchs and its luxurious customs make eunuchs of the men who live there.

Eunuchs appear more generally in fifth-century literature as the attendants of eastern kings and nobles.Footnote ³⁷ In Herodotus they carry messages, serve as trusted functionaries who control access to the royal harem and form part of the entourage of cooks and concubines that Xerxes brings with him to Europe.Footnote ³⁸ However, it was probably not the case that all individuals called εὐνοῦχοι by Greek sources were in fact castrated men. Pierre Briant has argued that, while the Achaemenid court did include a class of castrated slaves, many of the ‘eunuchs’ that we encounter in literature were in fact high-ranking officials who were not castrated. He points out, for example, the ease with which οἰνοχόος (cup-bearer) and εὐνοῦχος may be confused, and suggests that, because of this, the Greeks conflated men who occupied positions of great prestige in the king's court with castrated slaves.Footnote ³⁹ This does not require us to dismiss the idea that there were castrated eunuchs serving, for example, Persian, Assyrian or Median kings, but it does mean that Greek literary descriptions of eunuchs are just as likely to tell us more about the Greek imagination than about actual court practices in Asia.

Stories about eunuchs could therefore be used to reflect on the specific qualities of those that they served or those who had made them eunuchs. The presence of eunuchs could thus be interpreted both positively and negatively. For example, Xenophon presents a complimentary picture of Cyrus’ eunuchs in the Cyropaedia: rather than signifying ‘the systematic feminization of Asia’ or embodying ‘simultaneously all the various threads of [Greek] orientalist discourse’, Cyrus’ eunuchs are unfailingly loyal and courageous in battle.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to Pierre Briant, Xenophon used the figure of the royal eunuch as a way of talking about the positive qualities of Cyrus’ kingship, most notably his generosity in response to loyalty and devotion.Footnote ⁴¹

A fragment of Hellanicus of Mytilene, a contemporary of both Xanthus and Herodotus, preserves another example of eunuchs as a symbol of a ruler's power (FGrHist 687a F7a = Anon. De mulieribus 7):

Just as Gyges/Adramytes invents female eunuchs, so Atossa is credited with inventing male eunuchs. In later traditions this innovation could also be attributed to the Assyrian queen Semiramis, and these women, along with Herodotus’ Nitocris, merged into a single literary type.Footnote ⁴³ Atossa's eunuchs embody the gender-bending quality of female rule—just as the queen becomes more masculine, so the men under her control become more feminine, and so both men and women become like eunuchs. Like the eunuchs that she creates, Atossa's gender status is not straightforwardly feminine or masculine: she is described as ἀνδρειοτάτη; she is raised as a man; she invents the use of trousers; and takes on male gender roles such as fighting and ruling. However, her ‘feminine mentality’ (τὴν τῶν γυναίων ἐπίνοιαν) persists, even though it is concealed. Semiramis, as she appears in Ctesias’ Persica (early fourth century b.c.), is also ambiguously gendered: she too is credited with enormous courage, waging war and inventing a type of dress that made it impossible to tell whether the wearer was male or female.Footnote ⁴⁴ The ambiguity that characterizes these women and their rule finds its physical expression in their invention of eunuchs, which serves as a metaphor for the character of their power.

A common theme in literary representations of eunuchs is the luxury and debauchery of the kings they serve. According to Ctesias, the legendary Assyrian king Ninyas, the son of Semiramis and Ninus, did not take after his mother, but instead lived the life of a debauchee. He remained secluded in the royal palace, seeing nobody except his concubines and eunuchs, seeking only luxury and leisure, and enjoying every sort of pleasure without restraint.Footnote ⁴⁵ These tropes are again evident in Ctesias’ portrait of another legendary Assyrian king, Sardanapallus, who reigned thirty generations after Semiramis.Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, the figures of Ninyas and Sardanapallus seem to have been conflated. Both Herodotus and Constantine Porphyrogenitus (in his epitome of Nicolaus of Damascus’ Universal History, which was in parts based on Ctesias’ Persica) make Sardanapallus, not Ninyas, the son of Ninus.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like Ninyas, Sardanapallus is accused of secluding himself inside the palace at Nineveh with his harem. He did not partake in the manly pursuits of hunting or war, but instead spent his time eating sumptuous food, spinning and weaving. He took to dressing like a woman, wearing make-up, affecting a feminine voice, having sex with both men and women and indulging in both kinds of intercourse without restraint.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his debauchery, Sardanapallus takes on the characteristics of the inhabitants of his harem. He starts dressing and looking like a concubine, but also like a eunuch. Whereas Xenophon did not use Cyrus’ eunuchs to signify luxury or sexual excess, but rather the generosity of the king to his loyal subjects, the eunuchs of Ninyas and the eunuch-like behaviour of Sardanapallus were emblematic of the luxury, effeminacy and weakness of their styles of kingship. It comes as no surprise in this context that the downfall of the Assyrian empire was blamed on Sardanapallus’ way of life.Footnote ⁴⁹

While we should not necessarily see the presence of eunuchs in a text as evidence for an orientalist vision of the East, aetiologies of eunuchization could be used to think about the consequences of bad kingship on the customs and bodies of the ruled. Xanthus’ tale about a Lydian king who invents eunuchs should therefore be read in the light of these tales. His Lydiaca included a series of portraits of rulers who were set up as paradigmatic examples of either good or bad kingship, a tradition similarly found in contemporary Greek sources.Footnote ⁵⁰ For example, Xanthus tells a fabulous tale about another mythical Lydian king, Cambles, who was gluttonous (γαστρίμαργος). His insatiable appetite drove him to cannibalism—he awoke one morning to discover his wife's hand in his mouth, and, realising that he had eaten her in his sleep, killed himself.Footnote ⁵¹ Likewise, the Lydian king Assaon was consumed by desire for his daughter, Niobe, and tried to make her his wife. When she resisted, he invited her children to a banquet where he burned them alive. As a consequence of this crime both Niobe and Assaon killed themselves.Footnote ⁵²

Contrasted with kings such as Gyges/Adramytes, Assaon and Cambles are kings such as Alcimus, whom the Suda mentions after Gyges in its entry on Xanthus. Xanthus explains that Alcimus was ‘exceedingly pious and gentle’ (εὐσεβέστατον καὶ πραότατον), that under him Lydia enjoyed ‘profound peace and great wealth’ (εἰρήνην βαθεῖαν καὶ πλοῦτον πολύν) and that the people lived ‘without fear or treachery’ (ἀδεῶς δὲ καὶ ἀνεπιβουλεύτως). The people offered public prayers that he should enjoy more years as their king and so the Lydians continued to enjoy ‘much good fortune and prosperity’ (καὶ ἐν εὐποτμίᾳ τε καὶ εὐδαιμονίᾳ πολλῇ διῆγον).Footnote ⁵³ Here Alcimus serves as an exemplum of good kingship—his piety and peaceful nature mean that he and his people lead happy and prosperous lives.Footnote ⁵⁴

In these fragments bad kings are characterized by their sexual debauchery and insatiable appetites, while good kings are moderate and peaceful, a theme that, as we have seen, is also evident in Ctesias’ depictions of Assyrian kings. Gyges/Adramytes, like Cambles and Assaon in Xanthus or Ninyas and Sardanapallus in Ctesias, is a creature of excessive and inappropriate desire. According to both Hesychius and Athenaeus, he created female eunuchs so that he could use them sexually in place of male eunuchs. It is no longer simply that eunuchs guard the harem, now they can also populate it. The implication is that a coterie of sexually available women and male eunuchs was not enough to satisfy Gyges’/Adramytes’ taste for luxury and sexual excess; therefore, he went a step further and invented female eunuchs. His eunuchization of women (a group that already possesses many of the physical and moral characteristics of male eunuchs) takes the theme of τρυφή to a fantastical extreme. Gyges’/Adramytes’ use of female eunuchs, rather than the usual male sort, is especially damning because it demonstrates that his taste for immoderate luxury is amplified beyond even that of other eunuch-owning kings. Added to this is the fact that this king is innovative in his lusts. He is not satisfied with the existing forms of pleasure and so seeks out new forms of corruption.

There is therefore no reason to believe that Xanthus was describing a real practice of either circumcision or sterilization. Rather, this story serves to illustrate what sort of king Gyges/Adramytes was. Xanthus is hardly unique amongst fifth-century writers in using stories about eunuchs in this way. The male eunuchs created by Hellanicus’ Atossa have a similar role: they demonstrate how female rule upsets naturally defined gender boundaries; neither women nor men are properly male or female. The great debauchee Sardanapallus disrupts the natural order of things by transforming himself into one of the inhabitants of his own harem. In the case of Gyges/Adramytes, female eunuchs embody the feminizing power of luxury. Here is a king who cannot control his desires, and so he makes what is already feminine and luxurious even more so.

If we do away with the idea that Xanthus was writing a native Lydian history for a Greek audience whose cultural perspective he did not share, should we then go to the other extreme and read his account, and especially the invention of female eunuchs, as an example of Greek orientalism? With so little of the Lydiaca surviving it is difficult to be sure. Fragments such as that in which Xanthus describes the Magi as practitioners of incest and free love would seem to suggest that this was indeed the case.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, we need to weigh these against passages where Xanthus finds common ground between Greeks and Anatolians. For example, he compares the linguistic differences between Lydians and Torebians to those of the Dorians and Ionians, and uses Greek mythology to explain the formation of the Catacecaumene.Footnote ⁵⁶ So, while it might be tempting to take stories about incest and female eunuchs as evidence that Xanthus was a broad-brushstrokes orientalist, it is equally possible to imagine that if only fragments of Herodotus survived we could come to the same false conclusion about his Histories. Both Xanthus and Herodotus are as capable of understanding other cultures in their own terms as they are of describing them in terms that emphasize their differences from the Greeks. For Xanthus, these were not mutually exclusive modes of thinking, and his female eunuchs are best understood as literary fictions that work alongside contemporary ideas about the luxury of eastern kingdoms and moralizing discourses of kingship.