ABSTRACT
Eunuchs have been a source of fascination for centuries, if not millennia. One only has to consider the reaction in Britain to the discovery of the skeleton of a ‘eunuch’ on the site of late Roman Catterick in north Yorkshire to appreciate the effect that the idea of a castrated male can have on a modern audience. In a brilliant piece of PR to launch the publication of their report in 2002 on the excavations at Catterick, which had been ongoing since 1958, archaeologists chose to highlight the discovery of the skeleton of a young man who had been buried at Bainesse near Catterick wearing several items of jewellery: a jet necklace and bracelets, and an expanding anklet. They suggested that this unusual instance could be explained by the fact that the man was a gallus, one of the cross-dressing selfcastrating devotees of the eastern mother goddess Cybele.1 The British press, from The Daily Mail to The Guardian, had a field day. Television also got in on the act; an item on the supposed Yorkshire transvestite, and eunuchs in general, was featured on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy. It is clear, then, that eunuchs capture the imagination.
