...concept of number," writes the philosopher, "as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers." (1) In the essay that follows, I weave a single thread through a series of texts. The thread is twisted out of various fibers, overlapping with each other in many different ways. It is continuous, but as it runs, the stitch appears and disappears, vanishing beneath the fabric, then surfacing again to describe new patterns. The materials I pass through--which include New Comedy, Hellenistic oratory, biblical narrative, and Renaissance drama from England and the Netherlands--are dense, and I interlace rather than unravel them. Nor does the essay trace a straight line through the texts. Instead, it leads into dark corners and unexpected intersections: at best, it helps the reader map a labyrinth from the inside.

Wittgenstein provides a necessary caveat to this essay's topic, which, baldly stated, is a chronological account of a hitherto-un-remarked cultural trope: the pairing of a eunuch and a blackamoor. My termini are Terence's Eunuehus (The Eunuch) and a seventeenth-century Dutch adaptation of this epochal play by Gerbrand Bredero entitled Moortje (The Little Moor). Bredero replaces the eponymous castrate of Terence's comedy with the figure of a Moorish woman, an intriguing substitution that in fact derives from the source text: Terence's castrate first appears onstage in the company of a female slave from Ethiopia. Although the pairing of these figures in Eunuchus may seem incidental, a survey of ancient and early modern literature reveals the opposite to be true: wherever we find a eunuch, we nearly always find a black character as well. While its details may vary--the eunuch can be a foreigner or a native, his impotence real or feigned; the black character can be African or Indian, female or male, royalty or a slave--the dyad is so persistent that its manifestations in drama qualify it as a "theatergram of association," to use Louise George Clubb's neologism for a routinely linked couple of stage personae. (2) Yet this association is not limited to the theater. I locate it also in classical biography and holy scripture, and argue, for example, that Cleopatra and Mardian in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra belong to the same network as Favorinus and Autolecythus in Philostratus's Lives and the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles. The similarities among these texts do not converge but crisscross in ways both intricate and critically overlooked.

Before beginning my survey, however, I must note the broader context in which this pairing of eunuch and blackamoor recurs--the powerful and protean culture of empire, where these two figures share a political history grounded in two millennia of travel and conquest, enslavement and exile. What gives the texts discussed here their energy, and often their comedy, is also generally what marks them as imperial: the meeting of diverse or unequal cultures, unexpected breaches of group or individual boundaries, and attempts to resolve such ruptures by processes of exclusion, integration, or reform. Specifically, eunuch and black figures share the status of outsiders, sexual or racial strangers in the heart of empire; and in seeking greater autonomy and mobility, the characters employ tactics familiar to students of comedy: chief among these are strategies of impersonation, assimilation, and conversion. Such tactics may compromise the outsider's identity, but they also force accommodation at the center; neither the polity nor its subjects are left unchanged. My primary aim here is not to address these larger social formations, but alternating between local readings and contextual analysis is one way of asking to what extent this neglected motif of discourse and performance--which, adapting Clubb's term, we may tentatively call a culturegram--is engendered and sustained by Europe's vexed encounter with and, at times, willed embrace of its imperial outsiders.

I

Premiered in 161 BC, Eunuchus was Terence's most successful play in his own lifetime. It is the story of a foreign woman and a eunuch. The woman is Thais, a courtesan born in Rhodes and now living in Athens without friends, family, or the legal and political rights of citizenship. The eunuch is a gift sent to her by her young Athenian lover Phaedria. The gift is no simple matter. At the start of the play, Thais sends Phaedria to the country because she means to accept from another admirer, the braggart soldier Thraso, another gift, a slave called Pamphila whom she has recognized as her foster sister and a free citizen of Athens. Meanwhile Phaedria's younger brother Chaerea spots Pamphila on the street, falls in love with her, and contrives to follow her into Thais's house by disguising himself as the eunuch. Once inside, he rapes her, and the play must deal with the consequences.

As this summary reveals, Eunuchus doubles its foreign women and eunuchs; there is, to be precise, a true and a false one of each. Doubling is endemic to Terence's play, with its two Greek sources, two plot lines, two brothers, and so forth. Recent critics have elaborated this point and taken fresh interest in the status of foreigners and eunuchs in the play, but they have oddly passed over a signal intersection of these concerns. This occurs when a conversation between Thais and Thraso is interrupted by Phaedria's manservant, who explains that he has come to present her with his master's gifts. Yes, gifts, for there are two of them: two slaves, the first of whom is a young African woman. In Richard Bernard's first complete English translation of 1598 she is called on stage as follows: "Ho, bid those come forth adoores here quickly, which I commanded to be brought out. Come thou forward hither. This woman came as farre as/Ethiopia." (3) Of this presentation Thais says nothing, although Thraso and his parasite disparage the slave girl as a trifle. In contrast, the delivery of Phaedria's second gift is a coup de theatre: "Ho, Dorus, where art thou? come hither to me. Lo, Thais, what an Eunuch I have brought for you. See you not how well-favoured he is, and one in the flower of his youth?" (117). Thais is delighted and Thraso dumbstruck as Phaedria's servant boasts of the eunuch's accomplishment in letters, athletics, and music: "I present him to you as one skilfull in any point meet for a young man to know that is free-born" (117). The true eunuch is of course no citizen but a slave like the African woman, as the audience knows from the early scene in which Phaedria complains that his purchases for Thais are being repaid with scorn: "Did I not set all my other businesse apart, to fetch you a waiting maide out of Ethiopia, after you told mee once your minde? A little after you said you would have an Eunuch, for that women of great estate have of them: I have gotten one of them too. For which two, I payd yesterday 20 good pounds" (107). The joke in the delivery of these gifts is that the person praised as Dorus resembles a wellborn Athenian because he is one, and indeed that the false eunuch's skills include sexual conquest. Chaerea's secret is safe until the true eunuch turns up later, disheveled and confused, and is made to confess; but by then Pamphila's virginity is a thing of the past.

Another thing of the past, neither seen nor mentioned after the presentation, is the Ethiopian maid; she disappears from the play and has done likewise from modern criticism. A typical scholarly judgment holds that she "is decrepit and has no importance." (4) There is no evidence of her decrepitude, but it is true that her importance is far from obvious. Hers is a nameless and mute part, appearing in one scene, omitted from synopses and lists of characters up through early modernity. So what is this character doing in the play? That Thais wants first an African, then a eunuch, and that Phaedria buys her both suggests she is fickle and he generous, but her lapses of attention and his gift of Dorus prove that. Does Terence intend the Ethiopian as a double to Pamphila, the false foreigner bought as a slave in Rhodes whom Thais knows to be and finally reveals as an abducted Athenian? The juxtaposition is a dramatic opportunity exploited by later adaptors, but not by Terence, who simply contrasts the maid with Dorus (in fact the disguised Chaerea) as a workaday servant upstaged by a dazzling chamberlain. Is this all that can be said for her?

In his edition of Eunuchus, John Barsby glosses Thais's request for an ancillula ex Aethiopia in terms of the prestige of blackness. Acknowledging that Ethiopia was a rather vague designation in antiquity, he argues that the "point is not so much the geographical location as the color of the skin; dark-skinned slaves were fashionable in Greece from the time of Alexander's conquests and continued to be so in the Roman period." (5) The contrast in script and performance between this African and her eunuch partner could hardly be greater. Verbally, her origin is marked while his is left open; visually, her complexion is darkly saturated while his, to agree with ancient accounts of eunuchism, would appear bleached. The color difference is decisive: alongside Barsby's note on blackness we must set Augustine's description of a castrate's typical facies dealbata, a whitewashed face. (6) This whiteness makes it easy for Chaerea to impersonate Dorus. When the false eunuch is said to bear a facies liberalis, the "well-favoured" look of a free man, Terence is not only pointing out the imposter's citizen status but also juxtaposing the two slave characters in terms of freedom versus fixity, one's unmarked pallor and unverifiable eunuchism versus the other's evident and immutable blackness. Life may have followed art in the Roman theater, where many actors were foreigners, even former slaves, for while the man playing Dorus was probably not a real eunuch (though how could one be sure?), the woman playing the Ethiopian might in fact have been African. (7) On the other hand, art may have followed life: perhaps it was the availability of a black actor that brought the African character into being.

Terence was of course African also, though no ancient source describes him as black. His biography as written by Suetonius tells us only that Publius Terentius Afer was born in Carthage and became in Rome the slave of the senator Terentius Lucanus. (8) The young man's intelligence and good looks won him first a liberal education, then his freedom; he soon became a favorite among the literary nobility. Suetonius does not explain how a Carthaginian slave could rise to mastery of two foreign languages and literatures, but this hardly disqualifies his account of Terence's origins. It is entirely plausible that a gifted North African--whatever his ethnic provenance--upon whom all the advantages of citizenship had been bestowed could eventually surpass even the Roman elite in his accomplishments. (9) When we review Eunuchus in the light of this biography, moreover, Phaedria's two gifts to Thais begin in some respects to resemble avatars of the playwright himself. On the one hand is a mute and nameless African slave, at worst a household chattel, at best an exotic attendant for display. (As a foreign woman she is further marked, like her courtesan mistress, as an object of exchange among enfranchised men.) Her fate could, under other circumstances, have been that of Terence. Instead, he was destined to become the elegant young eunuch, or better still, his freeborn impersonator--a gifted and ambitious youth eager to shuck the guise of servitude and impotence and conquer the world of his dreams. O fortunatum istum eunuchum! exclaims Chaerea at the idea that Dorus will have easy access to the house of Thais; even luckier, we might add, is the man who goes where only slaves and eunuchs may, and without paying the price of entry.

Attending to Terence's pairing of Ethiopian girl and eunuch, as well as the multiple characters with whom each slave is associated, allows us to appreciate Eunuchus as enacting the limits of physical impersonation and cultural assimilation in the late republic. At the center of the play stands the indeterminate and transversal figure of the eunuch, which recent scholars of Terence have seen both as "a positive symbol for social change" that "opens up a space of possibility for an expanded definition of what is humanus" and as a uniquely successful theatrical motif that revives and paradoxically propagates castration as "a founding trope of comedy as dramatic genre." (10) Yet at the margin of the play we must also recognize the African woman, a figure whose dispossession is unredeemed and whose destiny is to be effaced. In our critical...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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