Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

So, you know, we find exactly the same thing in Persia.

That's interesting.

So Xerxes did use eunuchs in his court, and these are castrated men, of course.

And the importance of them, I suppose, is that, well, there are several things going on here.

First of all,

As castrates, they were thought of as being more loyal.

They didn't have families of their own.

So they weren't going to, you know, try to work for the betterment of their own family at all.

Yeah, precisely.

There's all this Greek philosophizing on Persian eunuchs.

The Greeks really find it very problematic.

So they say, oh, Cyrus the Great probably started this trend.

He didn't.

They were much, much older than that.

You know, eunuchs have been in the Near East since the fourth millennium BCE.

But the Greeks say, you know, oh, he castrated men to make them more like docile dogs.

If you castrate a dog, you know, or if you castrate a horse, it becomes more docile.

So it makes these men docile.

I don't think there's any necessary truth in that, but the Greeks try to justify it in that kind of way.

What it really meant is that these castrated individuals become really kind of like a third sex.