Anthony Kaldellis says Roman families voluntarily castrated their sons to place them at the emperor's court

Families in the Roman and Byzantine empires sometimes castrated their own children on purpose. Not as punishment, not as an act of war. As a career plan. Anthony Kaldellis, one of the leading Byzantine historians alive, dropped this detail on the Lex Fridman Podcast almost in passing, the way you mention that parking is free after six, and it is the single most clarifying fact about how imperial power actually worked.

The conventional picture of eunuchs in ancient courts is one of victimhood: enslaved boys, castrated against their will, put to work in palaces. That picture is not wrong. But Kaldellis adds a layer that reframes the whole institution. From regions like Paphlagonia in northern Asia Minor, certain families treated the production of a court eunuch the way a modern family might treat getting a kid into a white-shoe law firm. You make a sacrifice, you get access.

We are pretty sure that this happened within the empire because there were some families that like really wanted to place a eunuch at the court. So they would, it was almost like a family’s strategy.

The Logic Is Airtight, Which Makes It More Unsettling

Kaldellis lays out the structural reason emperors loved eunuchs and it is genuinely elegant as a system of control. An emperor’s biggest threat is not an invading army. It is his own bureaucracy becoming self-sufficient, developing its own internal logic, its own loyalties, and eventually not needing him. The solution: install people who have no family networks, no hereditary claims, no reason to look after anyone but themselves and, by extension, you. Eunuchs, especially those from outside the empire or from slave backgrounds, were perfect circuit breakers. They could not pass power to children. They were structurally isolated.

Eunuchs were perfect for this reason because often their origin was from outside the empire or they were former slaves. They weren’t connected to like networks of powerful families. So, you knew that they would generally be loyal to you because they depended entirely on you, the emperor, for their position and their power.

This is why Justinian handed the general Narses, a eunuch, command of the army that defeated the Goths in Italy. The Goths apparently found this funny. They stopped laughing. Narses was, in Kaldellis’s words, a total hard ass, elderly and tiny, and he won anyway. The joke was always on the people who underestimated what a man with no political dynasty to protect was willing to do.

The Part That Should Make You Rethink the Word ‘Voluntary’

Kaldellis is careful, but the claim stands. The castration was sometimes carried out on children, by their families, for reasons that were rational at the household level and horrifying at the individual one. Whether you call that voluntary depends entirely on whose will you are measuring. The child’s? The parents’? The dynasty’s? The empire’s? Rome, as usual, does not resolve the contradiction. It just scales it up.

They can’t have their own family so they can’t be like looking out for their own offspring. They’re kind of isolated individuals who depend entirely on your favor.

Kaldellis also notes this was not a Byzantine invention. The senatorial class hated powerful eunuchs all the way back through the Julio-Claudians, the first Caesars. Two thousand years of aristocrats complaining about the chamberlain who has the emperor’s ear, and two thousand years of emperors keeping him there anyway. Some systems persist because they work.