Eunuchs in Politics in the Later Roman Empire

Abstract

Why Eunuchs? Primarily because they were important. No-one who has waded through the church histories of the fourth and fifth centuries or the numerous later Byzantine chronicles, or those lives of the saints which touch upon court life, can have failed to be struck by die frequent imputation that, in the Eastern Empire especially, the real power lay in the hands not of the emperor nor of his aristocrats, but of his chief eunuch; or alternatively that the corps of eunuchs as a group wielded considerable if not predominant power at court. Yet the eunuchs were barbarians by birth and slaves into the bargain. The purpose of this paper is to explain why eunuchs held so much power in the imperial and aristocratic society of Eastern Rome, to put this power in the context of the socio-political developments of the later Empire, and to analyse some of the social functions of this power. Yet here, right at the beginning, the objection might be raised that we are faced with nothing but a problem in historiography. Eunuchs might have been to Byzantine historians nothing more than women and gods were to Herodotus, convenient personal pegs to hang historical causes on.