Flaying, Blinding and Impaling: Royal Women and Court Eunuchs

In spite of these scenes of high drama, it is important to realise that the powerful court women of Herodotus and Ctesias do not dominate men in order to deceive them, nor do they subdue them for their own access to power.

Castrati could achieve positions of high authority at the Persian court. Ctesias (probably using authentic Iranian sources for his history) begins his examination of each successive Great King's reign with a kind of litany that lists the key eunuchs at court and implies that their names and deeds were remembered for generations after their deaths alongside the monarchs they served.

If we follow the fourth-century Greek sources then we are alerted to the preconception that from the end of the reign of Xerxes, eunuchs began to acquire increasing power at court and that they routinely entered into plots and even became involved in regicide. But it is noticeable in the sources that royal women often take responsibility for curbing the power of eunuchs or for putting an end to their careers completely. Artoxares the Paphlagonian ‘king-maker', the most powerful of Darius II's eunuchs, for instance, met his end on the direct orders of Queen Parysatis (Ctesias, Fragment 15, § 54) and similarly the powerful eunuch Petasakes was blinded, flayed alive and cruci­fied on the express commands of Amytis, the wife of Cyrus the Great (Fragment 9, § 6).

In Ctesias' Persica the gouging out of eyes is not infrequently cited as the punishment for treason: the rebellious eunuch Petisacas, for instance, has his eyes gouged out prior to his crucifixion (Fragment 9, § 6; Fragment 9a) and Ctesias recounts the cruel practice of pricking the eyeballs of tortured prison­ers (Fragment 26, § 4 = Plut. Art. 14-17); Xenophon too recalls that, as he marched through the Persian Empire, he often saw along the roads people who had their lost eyes because of some crime against the Great King's law (An. 1.9.11-12).

The Greek authors are correct to identify this particular form of punish­ment, for there is good evidence for this practice of blinding rebellious traitors from Persian sources too. In fact, successive Near Eastern monarchs regarded blindness as the lowest type of degradation that could be inflicted upon an individual, and the gouging out of the eyes of an enemy prisoner was a form of national retribution in warfare. Assyrian policy promoted the blinding or partial blinding of vassal kings, together with their troops, who had broken treaties. Thus, a text by Ashurnasirpal II recounts: ‘I captured many troops alive: I cut off some of their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops'.^[750] From the Hebrew Bible, too, there is evidence for the routine practice of destroying the sight of enemies: the Philistines famously bored out the eyes of Samson (Judg. 16:21), King Nebuchadnezzar blinded the captive Hebrew monarch Zedekiah (2 Kgs 25:7) and Nahash the Ammonite demanded as a condition of surrender that he should thrust out the right eye of every man of Jabesh-Gilead as a reproach to his Israelite enemies (2 Sam. 9:2). Of particular interest is the aforementioned Bisitun Inscription in which Darius reports that the mutilated and blinded rebellious prisoners were placed on public display.

It is clear that the cases of mutilation are built around the shifting discourse of power and status. Power, in fact, lies at the heart of mutilation's efficacy (as we have seen in the case of Maisistes' wife). The mutilation of eunuchs at the hands of royal women served to shame the victim and his community and it did this in two ways: by ensuring a change of status in the victim, and by transferring him to an increased state of ‘blemishment'. After all, castrati were already imperfect individuals and eunuchs were seen as a sub-status group, a third sex or even animalistic in nature. The blinding of eunuchs signalled an increase in the subjected status of the victim and/or his com­munity. When, on the orders of Parysatis, the braggart eunuch Mithridates of Caria was deprived of his eyes, a more exquisite form of punishment was doled out in order to kill him: molten lead was poured into his ears (Ctesias, Fragment 26, § 7). This punishment has its origins perhaps in ancient Zoroastrian practice, since a series of texts point to the use of molten lead in judicial ordeals to determine a person's guilt or innocence.^[751]

Some eunuchs, despite loyally obeying royal commands, also become the victims of torture and death. Thus, when the eunuch Bagapates was sent by Artaxerxes II to decapitate the corpse of his younger, traitorous, brother, Cyrus, after his defeat on the battlefield, the Queen Mother, Parysatis, flew into a rage and conspired to have the eunuch killed because Prince Cyrus had been her favourite son. Ctesias (Fragment 44a) recounts the story: ‘[Bagapates] at the order of the king cut the head from Cyrus [the Younger's] body... his mother played dice with the king and on winning [she] took Bagapates according to an agreement...

The king's eunuch, who had cut off the head and hand of Cyrus, remained alive as a mark of Parysatis's vengeance. But he was so circumspect that he gave no advantage against him, so she framed a trap for him. She was a very clever woman in other ways and was an excellent player of dice, and, before the war, had often played dice with the king. After the war, she also readily joined in all games with him, played at dice with him, was his confidant in love matters... And so once when Artaxerxes was at leisure, and inclined to divert himself, she challenged him to play dice with her for a thousand darics, and let him win on purpose... She pressed him to begin a new game for a eunuch, to which he consented. But first they agreed that each of them might except five of their most trusty eunuchs, and that out of the rest of them the loser should yield up any one of them the winner might choose. Upon these conditions they played... When she had got the game, she demanded Mastabates, who was not in the number of the five expected. Before the king could suspect anything, having delivered [the eunuch] to his tormentors, she ordered them to flay him alive, to put his body on three stakes, and to stretch his skin over the stakes.

Sancisi-Weerdenburg has seen this grotesque tale as having its origins in Indian epic tradition, where human sacrificial victims are selected by the throw of a dice, but the story stresses the point that the position of the eunuch was maintained purely on the goodwill of the king and his women.^[752] The story of Mastabates/Bagapates illustrates that the petty squabbles and wrangles within the royal family played out in the royal harem could have wider, and often cruel, consequences. When Artaxerxes II learned that his mother had executed his favourite eunuch, he became angry and threatened Parysatis with exile, but according to Plutarch, ‘she with... laughter told him, “You are a comfortable and happy man indeed, if you are so much disturbed for the sake of an old and rascally eunuch.”' Plutarch continues with his tale, however, and points out that Mastabates, even after death, continued to be the cause of domestic discontent: ‘[Artaxerxes' wife] Stateira opposed [Parysatis]... and was angry, for against all law and humanity, she had sacrificed to Cyrus's memory the king's faithful friend and eunuch'.