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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
For Romans, castration was a fact of life. Influenced by the Hellenistic East, the Roman Empire began to consume castrated slaves – eunuchs – from at least the first century bc. A rare account of the operation of castration is provided by a late antique source, the medical encyclopaedia of Paul of Aegina (himself a doctor) composed in the seventh century ad. In his Epitome of Medicine, Paul describes two methods of castration, one by compression and the other by excision. He writes:
compression is performed thus: children, still of a tender age, are placed in a vessel of hot water, and then when the bodily parts are softened in the bath, the testicles are to be squeezed with the fingers until they disappear, and, being dissolved can no longer be felt. The method by excision is as follows: let the person to be made a eunuch be placed upon a bench, and the scrotum with the testicles grasped by the fingers of the left hand, and stretched; two straight incisions are then to be made with a scalpel, one in each testicle; and when the testicles start up they are to be dissected around and cut out, having merely left the very thin bond of connexion [sic] between the vessels in their natural state.
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