and so under the Romans amputation of the “peccant part” was frequent:  others trace the Greek “invalid,” i.e., impotent man, to marital jealousy, and not a few to the wife who wished to use the sexless for hard work in the house without danger to the slave-girls.  The origin of the mutilation is referred by Ammianus Marcellinus (lib. iv. chap. 17), and the Classics generally, to Semiramis, an “ancient queen” of decidedly doubtful epoch, who thus prevented the propagation of weaklings.  But in Genesis (xxxvii. 36; xxxix. 1, margin) we find Potiphar termed a “Sarim” (castrato), an “extenuating circumstance” for Mrs. P. Herodotus (iii. chap. 48) tells us that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent three hundred Corcyrean boys to Alyattes for castration , and that Panionios of Chios sold caponised lads for high prices (viii. 105):  he notices (viii. 104 and other places) that eunuchs “of the Sun, of Heaven, of the hand of God,” were looked upon as honourable men amongst the Persians whom Stephanus and Brissonius charge with having invented the name (Dabistan i. 171).  Ctesias also declares that the Persian kings were under the influence of eunuchs.  In the debauched ages of Rome the women found a new use for these effeminates, who had lost only the testes or testiculi=the witnesses (of generative force):  it is noticed by Juvenal (i. 22; ii. 365-379; vi. 366)

—­sunt quos imbelles et mollia semper Oscula delectant.

So Martial,

—­vult futui Gallia, non parere,

And Mirabeau knew (see Kadisah) “qu’ils mordent les femmes et les liment avec une precieuse continuite.” (Compare my vol. ii. 90; v. 46.) The men also used them as catamites (Horace i.  Od. xxxvii.).

“Contaminato cum grege turpium,
Morbo virorum.”

In religion the intestabilis or intestatus was held ill-omened, and not permitted to become a priest (Seneca Controv. ii. 4), a practice perpetuated in the various Christian churches.  The manufacture was forbidden, to the satisfaction of Martial, by Domitian, whose edict Nero confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm.  The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediaeval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys’ voices.  Isaiah mentions the custom (Ivi. 3-6).  Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), “such men as attend women and have no need of women,” i.e., “have no natural force,” expressly forbade (iv. 118), “changing Allah’s creatures,” referring, say the commentators, to superstitious earcropping of cattle, tattooing, teeth-sharpening, sodomy, tribadism, and slave-gelding.  See also the “Hidayah,” vol. iv. 121; and the famous divine Ai-Siyuti, the last of his school, wrote a tractate Fi ’I-Tahrimi Khidmati ’I-Khisyan=on the illegality of using eunuchs.  Yet the Harem perpetuated the practice throughout Ai-Islam