Juvenal’s Eunuchs: Masculinity and Exclusion in the Sixth Satire

Christopher J. Nappa (University of Minnesota)

Eunuchs are one of Juvenal’s principal ways of exploring the problematic boundaries between the masculine and feminine, but the dynamics of this exploration are not always obvious. It is no surprise, for example, that Juvenal finds some eunuchs unmanly and effeminate. More surprising is the presence of eunuchs who still perform sexually with women.

This paper will examine the discussion of eunuchs at Satire 6.366-78, in which two kinds of eunuchs are contrasted. The one is castrated before sexual maturity; he retains childlike characteristics throughout life. The other is allowed to reach maturity before castration; he is characterized by large genitals and his conspicuous desirability to women. Scholars have focused on this passage largely for its role in the misogynistic rhetoric of the sixth satire: the speaker thinks that women are so depraved that they not only consent to sleep with eunuchs, but they even prefer to. Yet the description of the eunuchs here points to a set of issues that is perhaps even more troubling to the poem’s male speaker: the sexually desirable, well-endowed eunuch is not so much a feminized man as a woman’s version of a desirable man. We are told explicitly that such eunuchs are homegrown and sent out for castration by the woman of the house: the eunuch is a man made by and for a woman. As such he constitutes an alternative masculinity, like so many of the other men whom the women in this poem prefer to their husbands (e.g., gladiators and actors).

The masculine eunuch is a sign of the “normal” elite Roman man’s exclusion from a world that, in this text, is described as essentially female and alien. Elsewhere in the poem, women are seen as constantly involved in various kinds of foreignness, for instance, their constant use of Greek and their devotion to eastern cults. At the end of the eunuch passage, the speaker even advises his addressee to let the eunuch sleep with his wife but to keep him away from his puer delicatus. The usual explanation of this, going back as far as Lambinus, is that the eunuch’s excessively large genitals will hurt the boy during anal sex. Whether this is true or not, we should also see here a last ditch attempt on the part of the speaker to preserve some sexual dominance for men like himself and his addressee. Since the wife has created her own preferred lover—a hypermasculine and yet feminine creature—she is beyond her husband’s sexual domination. What the speaker fears in the case of the boy, I suggest, is not that he will be harmed but that he too will end up preferring the eunuch to the “real” man and thus completing the sexual exclusion of normal Roman men, especially husbands, from a world defined by women’s ideas of pleasure.