one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into
unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust." The
jealous Roman husband's furious desire to prevent the consequences of his
wife's incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such
agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the
arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their
maids and hampered the sodomitical hankerings, active or otherwise, of
their husbands: Martial, xii, 54: but when the passions and suspicions of
both heads of the family were mutually aroused, the eunuchs fanned them
into flame and gained the ascendancy in the home. They even went so far
as to marry: Martial, xi, 82, and Juvenal, i, 22.

In the third century a certain Valesius formed a sect which, following
the example set by Origen, acted literally upon the text of Matthew, v,
28, 30, and Matthew, xix, 12. Of this sect, Augustine, De Heres. chap.
37, said: "the Valesians castrate themselves and those who partake of
their hospitality, thinking that after this manner, they ought to serve
God." That injustice was done upon the wrong member is very evident, yet
in an age so dark, so dominated by austere asceticism, this clean cut
perception of the best interests of suffering humanity, is only to be
rivalled by the French physician in the time of the black plague. He had
observed that sthenic patients, when bled, died: the superstition and
medical usage of the age prescribed bleeding, and when the fat abbots
came to be bled, he bled them freely and with satisfaction. Justinian
decreed that anyone guilty of performing the operation which deprived an
individual of virility should be subjected to a similar operation, and
this crime was later punished with death. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries we encounter another and even viler reason for this
practice: that "the voice of such a person" (one castrated in boyhood)
"after arriving at adult age, combines the high range and sweetness of