.) The Latin literature of the silver and bronze ages
contains many references to castration. Juvenal and Martial have
lavished bitter scorn upon this form of degradation, and Suetonius and
Statius inform us that Domitian prohibited the practice, but it is in the
"Amoures" attributed to Lucian that we find a passage so closely akin to
the one forming a basis of this note, that it is inserted in extenso:

"Some pushed their cruelty so far as to outrage Nature with the
sacrilegious knife, and, after depriving men of their virility, found in
them the height of pleasure. These miserable and unhappy creatures, that
they may the longer serve the purposes of boys, are stunted in their
manhood, and remain a doubtful riddle of a double sex, neither preserving
that boyhood in which they were born, nor possessing that manhood which
should be theirs. The bloom of their youth withers away in a premature
old age: while yet boys, they suddenly become old, without any interval
of manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising
one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into
unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust." The
jealous Roman husband's furious desire to prevent the consequences of his
wife's incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such
agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the
arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their
maids and hampered the sodomitical hankerings, active or otherwise, of
their husbands: Martial, xii, 54: but when the passions and suspicions of
both heads of the family were mutually aroused, the eunuchs fanned them
into flame and gained the ascendancy in the home. They even went so far
as to marry: Martial, xi, 82, and Juvenal, i, 22.

In the third century a certain Valesius formed a sect which, following
the example set by Origen, acted literally upon the text of Matthew, v,
28, 30, and Matthew, xix, 12. Of this sect, Augustine, De Heres. chap.
37, said: "the Valesians castrate themselves and those who partake of
their hospitality, thinking that after this manner, they ought to serve
God." That injustice was done upon the wrong member is very evident, yet
in an age so dark, so dominated by austere asceticism, this clean cut
perception of the best interests of suffering humanity, is only to be
rivalled by the French physician in the time of the black plague. He had
observed tha