ABSTRACT
The Mediterranean in late antiquity fairly teemed with eunuchs. The presence of eunuchs in royal households in the eastern Mediterranean has a much older history, and it was likely their usefulness in a variety of servile functions. Eunuchs also regularly served women. Eunuchs in the imperial household attended empresses. Eunuchs also guarded a woman's safety and her reputation in her home, and that is also doubtless why they proliferated in the later imperial period. In the countryside, late-ancient eunuchs wandered about as itinerant devotees of a popular fertility goddess, Cybele. The author of the book of Isaiah offered the opinion that eunuchs who keep the commandments of God will enjoy "a monument and a name better than sons and daughters". In late Roman antiquity, some eunuchs exercised authority as bureaucratic participants in a growing imperial administration. Others found a semblance of power as attendants to wealthy aristocratic women.
