Part 1. Homoeroticism, Male–Male Sexual Practices, and Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Catullus’ Poetry: A Survey

While defining limits to our study, we identified the following poems that refer to male–male erotic or sexual behaviours: 15, 16, 21, 24, 37, 48, 56, 61, 81, 99, 100, and 106.Footnote ¹⁴ We do not call this whole group ‘homoerotic’; some are violent rather than erotic, with threats of oral and anal rape from one male to another.Footnote ¹⁵ These poems each include one or more of the following elements: male sexual desire for other males; references to or depictions of actual sexual acts between males; threats of or acts of sexual violence by a man towards another male (or males).Footnote ¹⁶ Our preliminary research suggested that these poems often proved difficult or ‘objectionable’ for Anglophone translators, editors, adapters, and readers.

Six of the poems listed above form an intratextually linked cycle focusing on the love object, Juventius, with cc. 48 and 99 nestled at the centre.Footnote ¹⁷ In both, Catullus uses the first person, addressing Juventius. He solicits kisses in 48 and spends 99 lamenting his humiliation after his kisses are firmly rejected.Footnote ¹⁸ Poems 24 and 81 name Juventius but introduce a new trope: another man stands as Catullus’ rival.Footnote ¹⁹ Catullus’ rivalry with Juventius’ admirers occupies four poems (cc. 15, 21, 24, and 81). This overlaps with his poetry to Lesbia, which also thematises competition for the female love object.Footnote ²⁰ As Hexter writes: ‘Catullus presents himself in his poetry as loving males in all the same ways he loves Lesbia and other females’.Footnote ²¹

Catullus also wrote about other men who loved or lusted after young men, portraying a Roman social world in which certain kinds of homoerotic relationships received social approval.Footnote ²² In poem 61.119–41, Catullus illuminates the difficult situation of Manlius’ concubinus (‘kept man’, ‘sex-slave’, or ‘boy toy’). He instructs Manlius to move the puer into a non-sexual role in the household, while depicting the concubinus as sad to lose his place as favourite. Later in the corpus we find the playful epigram 100 to Caelius and Quintius, who were in love with Aufillenus and Aufillena respectively (brother and sister). After pondering which friend he should favour, the speaker decides to support Caelius’ homoerotic pursuit of Aufillenus. Taken collectively, these poems reveal a Roman man comfortable with male same-sex desire and relationships.

The poems also reflect specifically Roman (upper-class) attitudes to power, sex, and masculinity. We see this in the depiction of slaves. In poem 56 Catullus jovially recounts to his addressee ‘Cato’ a scene that he describes as funny, where he interrupts two slaves having sex and inserts himself into the scene by raping the male (line 7).Footnote ²³ The slaves’ sexual agency is short-lived and trumped by the speaker's power. The concubinus in c. 61 was likely a slave.Footnote ²⁴ Freeborn Catullus depicts him as emotionally invested in his sexual relationship with his master, casting an inherently unbalanced, problematic relationship as romantic.Footnote ²⁵ The ambiguous c. 106 makes sense as a scene where a (male) auctioneer of (male) slaves hinders the purchase of a slave because of his sexual interest in said slave. All these poems highlight the asymmetric power relations resulting from slavery in the Roman world, where some participants in sex had no ability to withhold consent or exercise agency.Footnote ²⁶ Other poems feature the threat of male-on-male rape from one citizen to another, primarily as a mode of exerting social control over the potential victim.Footnote ²⁷ Forced sexual activity (or its threat) consistently appears to demonstrate the priapic rapist's own virility.Footnote ²⁸ Such rape threats shape the dynamic of the Juventius cycle. In the current order of the collection, the first ‘love’ poem about a male (c. 15) ends in a graphic threat to the speaker's rival, Aurelius.Footnote ²⁹ Next the infamous c. 16 begins with a threat to anally and orally rape Aurelius and Furius.Footnote ³⁰ Throughout the collection Catullus links sexual violence with men and masculinity. All the actual and would-be rapists are men, and so are all the victims.Footnote ³¹

The wide variety of Catullus’ treatments of male–male sexual desire, acts, and violence is matched by variety in translators’ and adaptors’ responses to specific poems. The ribald Archilochean humour of c. 56, for example, is a far cry from the passionate and erotic hyperbole of c. 48. Likewise, the performative threats in c. 16 differ considerably from the scene of the male concubine in c. 61, who is sad that his master is marrying.Footnote ³² We examine the whole spectrum, however, since the male–male content in all these poems has been the focus of pressures to censor or obfuscate, whether a poem deals with sexual violence or erotic longing.

Moreover, we note that the structural position of homoerotic desire and behaviour in these vignettes differs wildly within individual poems. Some poems have been more ‘censorable’ than others, because of their length or the way in which the homoerotic content sits in the poem. For example, the wedding hymn c. 61 celebrates marriage between a man and a woman for the purpose of having legitimate children. Because the references to male–male sexual acts all appear within one section, it has been easy for translators and adaptors to excise the passage while retaining most of the lengthy poem. For example, Theodore Martin's Reference Martin1861 book, The Poems of Catullus Translated into English Verse, cut the homoerotic lines from c. 61 (erasing 119–49). In the notes, he writes: ‘several stanzas of the original have been omitted here for obvious reasons. Happily, they are of no value to the poem as a poem.’Footnote ³³ In contrast, a poem such as c. 15 is riddled with references to male-on-male eroticism and sexual violence, and, being only nineteen lines, has little other content. So Martin (with many others) simply omitted it.

As we will show, the poems dealing with sexual violence are more likely to have been omitted altogether. The range of expurgatory approaches taken to the Juventius poems and to c. 61 is more varied, their appeal perhaps foregrounded by the narrativising approach that focuses on the poems as a ‘record’ of Catullus’ affair with Lesbia, casting him as a poet of romance and soft-focus eroticism. Thus, we note that our discussion in part 2 is skewed somewhat towards the Juventius poems and c. 61, because they have been treated more frequently.

Part 2. A History

In England from roughly 1600 to 1795, responses to Catullus consisted mainly of poetic translations and adaptions of a small number of texts.Footnote ³⁴ Steering away from the obscene poems in which Catullus presented himself as hyper-masculine, and which had dominated the Italian response to Catullus,Footnote ³⁵ English poets tended to engage with the more romantic (and less obscene) Lesbia poems, such as the ‘kiss poems’, along with c. 61.Footnote ³⁶ Few early modern authors in English addressed the Juventius poems directly, but their responses to the ‘Lesbia’ kiss poems unintentionally allowed later readers to trace a thread back to Juventius, since the kiss poem to Juventius, c. 48, echoes c. 7, to Lesbia.Footnote ³⁷

Juventius first appeared in English in Richard Lovelace's Lucasta: Posthume Poems (Reference Lovelace1659), in a direct translation of c. 48:

This poem deserves note as a close translation that does not attempt to erase the homoeroticism.Footnote ³⁸ Lovelace also translated c. 106, with Latin and English that makes clear the subject of the erotic gaze was male:Footnote ³⁹

The use of Latin in the title suggests that Lovelace anticipated a reader versed in that language, and perhaps Roman history and culture more broadly, thereby restricting readership. Lovelace's Lucasta originally saw publication in 1649, without the Catullus translations. The 1659 edition, published posthumously, provides a wider selection of Lovelace's poetry. Interestingly, concealment of same-sex material does not seem to have been Lovelace's only motive (if motive it was) for not publishing his translations during his lifetime; other translations that appear only in the Posthume Poems are c. 13 and several Lesbia poems.Footnote ⁴⁰ The 1649 work was tightly focused on Lucasta, unlike the wider-ranging posthumous edition.

From what we can tell, Juventius next appeared in the Anglophone tradition in 1707's anonymous The Adventures of Catullus. This was an English translation of Jean de La Chapelle's French novelisation of Catullus’ life, Les Amours de Catulle (1680). La Chapelle's ‘biography’ is based on his poems, integrating French translations of many poems within the narrative.Footnote ⁴¹ The English translation stays close to the original French, so in the discussion to come we credit La Chapelle with the distinctive reception narrative that results. It is noteworthy that the English version was published anonymously, with the involvement of multiple people, and as Vance puts it, was ‘opportunistically dedicated’ to a young nobleman.Footnote ⁴²

The novel's focus is on the Lesbia poems, evident in the main text along with the introduction to the work, which outlines Catullus’ ‘biography’ without Juventius. In the main text, La Chapelle includes Juventius and the poems to him, but in a convoluted, feminised form that might surprise modern readers.Footnote ⁴³ Here is the English translation of La Chapelle's explanation of the Juventius poems. The narrator introduces a young woman called Crastinia:

In the next scene, Catullus writes c. 48 and passes it to Crastinia via Aurelius.Footnote ⁴⁶ The most romantic Juventius poem thus morphs into an example of this Catullus’ deeply amorous feelings for women, which La Chapelle focuses on throughout the novel.

Next, La Chapelle's Catullus tries to convince himself to fall in love with the uninterested Crastinia. This sets up Catullus’ clumsy attempt at a kiss, which Crastinia spurns, leading him to compose and send c. 99. Rather creatively, La Chapelle brings this event into the cultural context of the bona dea scandal. He paints Crastinia as a would-be wife to Caesar, who uses her rejection of Catullus as a kind of virtue-signalling.

The English translation of La Chapelle's work occupies a major place in the Anglophone history of Catullus’ reception. Firstly, this appears to be the first time in English that an author swapped Juventius’ gender. This enabled them to include the homoerotic poems, marking a significant shift, yet at the same time stripped them of that same homoeroticism.Footnote ⁴⁷ As we will see, swapping Juventius’ gender would become a common approach in the Anglophone tradition. Secondly, in making it clear that Catullus’ feelings for ‘Juventius’ were just an attempt to escape his love for Lesbia, La Chapelle (and his English translators) elevated Lesbia further in Catullus’ story. This would become a common theme in the Anglophone chain of reception, both scholarly and artistic.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thirdly, the translation of La Chapelle's work appeared more than a century before a full translation of Catullus’ poetry was available in England. Julia Gaisser points out that The Adventures of Catullus included more Catullus translations in English than had ever been circulated, giving readers access to forty-six poems.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Henry Stead has shown, access to the Latin editions was limited to a select audience at this stage.Footnote ⁵⁰ These combined factors elevated the importance of this originally French novelisation to the English world; much of the Anglophone reception of Catullus was shaped by a racy work of French fanfiction.Footnote ⁵¹

Translations of c. 48 and c. 99 soon follow, appearing in an anonymous 1713 translation of Petronius, which includes (among other additions) poems from Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.Footnote ⁵² The Juventius poems had so far appeared at arm's length in English: posthumously à la Lovelace, with a gloss of heterosexuality via the translators of La Chapelle's novel, or anonymously. Loughlin notes that in the same period some other homoerotic Greco-Roman literature was valorised (generally despite its homoeroticism) and could be tamed for an English audience.Footnote ⁵³ Catullus’ poems, however, could serve neither as moral exemplars for a transcendent, platonic love, nor satires against men's sexual desires for other men, as per Juvenal or Martial. Nor did they lend themselves to allegorical, Christianised readings.Footnote ⁵⁴

The early modern responses to Catullus also eschewed his same-sex themes more generally. The epithalamia (cc. 61–62) attracted a number of responses, but the concubinus of c. 61 is passed over in silence.Footnote ⁵⁵ The concubinus’ nuts (nec nuces pueris neget / … concubinus, 61.121–3) appear in ‘Epithalamie to Sir Thomas Southwell and his Ladie’, stanza 13 (1648) and Peacham's ‘Nuptial Hymn’ (1613), but without any hint of the concubinus. Peacham nods to the groom having had previous interests, but without mentioning same-sex affairs:

Herrick's and Peacham's responses to Catullus’ homoeroticism (ignoring or de-sexualising), are not unique to Catullus, instead reflecting the era's translation practices.Footnote ⁵⁶ These bowdlerized treatments of c. 61.121–3 had a wider impact on British understandings of Roman wedding customs and sexuality, appearing in a Christian account of pagan customs and a compendium of global wedding traditions.Footnote ⁵⁷

With the advent of ‘complete translations’ in England, beginning in 1795, in the Romantic and then Victorian eras, writers engage with a wider selection of Catullus’ poems, and therefore deal more coherently and explicitly with the ‘problem’ of ‘objectionable content’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Simple exclusion was not possible in a complete edition, so we find an increase in writers using other strategies to minimise homoeroticism and male-male sexual violence. This includes using their introductory and other paratextual material to mitigate the potential ‘threat’ to the reader. Texts from the ancient world that normalised same-sex desire and relationships supposedly posed a particular danger of activating those desires in (otherwise) upright, British men.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is in this socio-cultural context that Catullan translators, editors, and apologists develop a consistent poetic practice that relied on bowdlerising specific homoerotic words, translating obscenities into languages other than English, and changing Juventius’ gender.Footnote ⁶⁰

The first English translator to include all the poems was John Nott in The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (1795). With his work published anonymously by a ‘radical bookseller’, Joseph Johnson,Footnote ⁶¹ Nott explicitly aimed at filling a literary and scholarly gap, noting: ‘hitherto we have had no complete translation of that Roman classic’.Footnote ⁶² This required a comprehensive approach, and Nott defended his inclusion of ‘indecencies’:Footnote ⁶³

Nott's concern for the ‘modesty of language’ nevertheless hinders his project of conveying Catullus’ meaning. Venuti suggested that Nott's ‘foreignizing’ translation practices, producing more literal versions, reduced ‘the risk of euphemism and expurgation’.Footnote ⁶⁴ We find, however, that he obscures homoerotic desire by translating gendered Latin terms with less explicitly gendered terms, such as ‘favourite’ for c. 15's puer,Footnote ⁶⁵ or by excluding the addressee's name. He titles cc. 48, 81, and 99 ‘To his favourite’, and does not use Juventius’ name, though it appears in the Latin on the facing page.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, readers with some Latin can recognise Juventius as a male name, but readers without cannot easily identify these poems as part of the Juventius cycle. Nott also draws a veil over other homoerotic content, addressing the concubinus of c. 61 as ‘thou’, which obscures his gender, but keeping the reference to shaving in lines 131–2. One poem where Nott makes the same-sex content clear is c. 100, naming both Aufilenus and Aufilena, and maintaining the original gender of the prospective lovers.

Nott's linguistic modesty also affected his treatment of Catullus’ obscene poems, both same- and opposite-sex. For example, tangam te prior irrumatione (c. 21.8) is translated as ‘for e'en my guilt should thine prevent’ (line 12). In poem 37, confutuere is translated as ‘mingle with wantons’ – something of a euphemism. One important point is that in the opposite-sex obscene poems, while Nott's language is tame, the ideas are clear (for example, that the inhabitants of the bar in c. 37 are contemplating intercourse); this is by no means the case in the same-sex obscene poems. What is Catullus’ ‘guilt’ that will ‘prevent’ Aurelius? The Latinless reader must speculate in vain. Overall, then, while claiming to publish a full and honest version of Catullus – and being critiqued for it – Nott actually produced something quite different.Footnote ⁶⁷

In 1821, George Lamb introduced what we suggest was a new type of Catullus edition. Unlike previous translators and adaptors, who elected to work on their favourite Catullus poems (generally a small proportion of the corpus),Footnote ⁶⁸ and then Nott, who went the ‘Full Catullus’, Lamb essentially produced the ‘complete poems, except the naughty bits’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Gaisser notes, he omitted twenty poems based on their ‘indecency’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Lamb's text thus reflects a series of compromises as he grappled with what he saw as his responsibilities to protect the reader. Lamb included cc. 48, 81, and 99, but erased the homoeroticism. He titled c. 48 ‘To his love’ and omitted Juventius’ name. For c. 99, Lamb changed Juventius’ gender, using the phrase ‘dearest maid of my soul’. Only in c. 81 did Lamb retain Juventius’ name and gender, and here Catullus’ sexual interest is less overt: there is jealousy, but no kisses. Similarly, Lamb included the concubinus lines of c. 61 but altered the content, obscuring the sexual connection between the master himself and the concubinus:

As Stead has shown, Lamb's edition did not meet with universal approval; his re-writing of obscenity ironically denuded Catullus too successfully for some critics.Footnote ⁷¹

We next move into the Victorian era, when, unsurprisingly, translators and adaptors brought considerable energy to the task of censoring, expurgating and bowdlerising Catullus. This period is notable in the history of the reception of ancient Greek and Roman sexualities as a time when in Britain (and its colonies), queer men and women who had a certain status and access to education could find comfort and a model for their sexuality in the ancient Greeks, from Plato to Sappho.Footnote ⁷² Such comfort, however, did not save them from exile, pathologisation, public humiliation, or imprisonment.Footnote ⁷³

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is scant trace of queer- or homosexual-identifying people finding the same comfort in ancient Roman literature that many found in Greek. This may have resulted from the many Roman portrayals of homoeroticism as extremely transgressive, quite unlike the elevated ideal of either Platonic or Sapphic love.Footnote ⁷⁴

The first fully Victorian Catullus is Martin's Reference Martin1861 verse translation. Martin was even more selective than Lamb, including only 76 poems. Martin reordered those works to create a sense of narrative that focuses on Lesbia, which has a strong impact on how Catullus’ sexuality comes across. Martin began with seventeen poems (all Lesbia poems, or those he assumes to be Lesbia poems, such as c. 109), ordered along Martin's presumed timeline of ‘The Affair’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Here we can see Martin, whether consciously or not, echoing the novelistic strategies of La Chapelle.Footnote ⁷⁶

After Martin's ‘Lesbia cycle’, the poems are mostly in their accustomed order (though with some exceptions; for example, Martin places cc. 16–17 between cc. 113 and 116). In keeping with the focus on Lesbia, Martin leaves Juventius out of his Introduction and claims that ‘Besides his poems on Lesbia, Catullus wrote few verses that can be called erotic’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the text, only cc. 48 and 99 are included from the whole cycle of Juventius poems. Martin obscured Juventius’ gender (he titled c. 48 ‘To a Beauty’ and did not name the addressee) and inverted it (c. 99's addressee is ‘dear girl’ (line 2)). He excluded the same-sex lines of c. 61, and because the edition has no Latin facing text and no line numbers, a reader unfamiliar with the poem will not detect the omission. Martin excluded the ‘wing-man’ poem, c. 100, and the sexual violence in c. 56. He did include some obscene poems, but he markedly toned down both same-sex and opposite-sex obscenity, with ‘I'll trounce you’ for pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (16.1) and ‘…loving none / Of all the fools by thee undone’ for nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium / ilia rumpens (11.19–20). Taken together, Martin's interventions in the text produce a Catullus who differs considerably from the Roman poet.

Many of these early works seem to have anticipated a relatively small readership, whose members already knew Latin (marking them as upper class).Footnote ⁷⁸ Kelly's Reference Kelly1854 translation for Bohn's Classical Library marks a turning point. Appealing on both price and aesthetic grounds,Footnote ⁷⁹ this series successfully aimed at a mass audience which was reading for self-improvement, including both the middle and working classes.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bohn's edition of Catullus includes Kelly's prose translation, followed by selected verse translations (by Hunt, Lamb, and Nott, among others). All poems are said to be included, though this is not completely true. The biographical Introduction mentions Hypsithilla and Aufilina (sic) as well as Lesbia, but Juventius and similar personae are mentioned only by way of ‘the traces of a turpitude to which we cannot without a painful effort make even a passing allusion’.Footnote ⁸¹ Kelly also aligns same-sex themes with Catullan obscenity:

Kelly adopted an inconsistent approach to the Juventius poems.Footnote ⁸² He obscured the gender of Catullus’ puer in c. 15 (with ‘this ward’, ‘this one object’, and ‘one who is dear to me’) and c. 21 (Aurelius is ‘bent on debauching my young friend’). Poem 24 is titled ‘To Juventius’, signalling the masculine addressee, but in the poem itself, gender remains ambiguous, with the gender-neutral ‘O fairest bud of the Juventian race’. Kelly obscured both gender and name in his version of c. 48, entitled ‘To His Love’, and c. 99, entitled ‘To ——’, but retained both in c. 81, ‘To Juventius’. Poem 81 presents an interesting case for the translator. It reads as homoerotic when seen alongside cc. 48 and 99, but stripped of that intratextual context, as Kelly chose to present it, can be read as a poem unrelated to Catullus’ own desires, that actually denigrates male-male relations.Footnote ⁸³

At points, Kelly provided no prose translation, instead directing the reader to the metrical version. Often a French prose translation (by Noël) is given in a footnote.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the footnote to c. 33, Kelly states: ‘a literal translation of this, and of some other pieces … would be insufferable in English’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The reader with French (presumably better educated and likely of higher social status), has access to a reasonably clear and less expurgated, if free, translation.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the monolingual reader (more likely to be working class with less formal education) must resort to Nott's modest verses included by Kelly, which we have seen themselves were expurgated.Footnote ⁸⁷

Kelly diligently expurgated Catullan obscenity, both same-sex and opposite-sex. He uses em-dashes to ‘translate’ irrumatus (c. 21.13), renders pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (c. 16.1) as ‘I will trim you and trounce you’,Footnote ⁸⁸ and makes confutuere in c. 37 ‘kiss’. The footnote draws the reader's attention to this expurgation with this weak claim: ‘There is often an immense difference between the conventional and the etymological meaning of words.’

Our next complete translation, by Cranstoun in 1867, also aimed at a broader audience. However, where the Bohn's series aimed at all men, including working-class autodidacts, Cranstoun focused on those in formal education, mentioning ‘youthful students’ in his preface.Footnote ⁸⁹ This likely reflects his profession, as master at Kirkcudbright Grammar School. Like Kelly, Cranstoun included all poems, and defended the desirability of a complete translation: to do otherwise would be to ‘mutilat[e] the poet, and [present] him in a totally different aspect from that in which he has revealed himself’.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, Cranstoun also signalled that modesty would sometimes supersede accuracy: ‘Some of the poems, for obvious reasons, have not been rendered with the same verbal accuracy as others…’. These ‘obvious’ reasons are, however, obscured for the non-expert reader: Cranstoun excludes any mention of Juventius and other pueri in the introduction,Footnote ⁹¹ and in his translations he excluded all same-sex content either by gender reversal (cc. 15, 21, 24, 48, 61, 81, 99, 100) or removal of the sexual implications. For example, in c. 56, Catullus no longer rapes his victim, but beats him with a weapon: ‘[I] pommell'd him well with my cane’ (line 12). Obscenity, both same-sex and opposite-sex, is sanitised. In buffing away these ‘objectionable’ elements, he has, despite his claims, presented Catullus in a ‘totally different aspect’.Footnote ⁹² Cranstoun's practice stands out as one where the stated intentions do not match the result.

By contrast to the popularising impulses of Kelly and Cranstoun, the scholar Robinson Ellis self-consciously aimed at an educated, even erudite audience with a 1871 translation of Catullus into English versions of the original meters.Footnote ⁹³ Interestingly, Ellis was criticised in his obituary for the ‘unexpurgated’ nature of his translations.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, we found that he did bowdlerise both same-sex and opposite-sex obscenity. For example, confutuere in c. 37.5 is rendered as ‘possess’, pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (c. 16.1) as ‘I'll traduce you, accuse you and abuse you’, while he omits cc. 56, 71, 80 and 97 entirely. He also changed the gender of the male love object in c. 15, and obscured Juventius’ gender in c. 99 with ‘dear one’. However, Ellis did include and translate much of the non-obscene homoerotic content, retaining male names and genders of cc. 48, 81 and 100, while translating concubinus in c. 61 as ‘womanish youth’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Sadly, this open inclusion of Juventius and other homoerotic objects made Ellis a target for criticism.Footnote ⁹⁶

In 1879, Hart-Davies located his select edition within the tradition of translations for a general audience.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hart-Davies, like Kelly, argued that Catullus’ obscenity was ‘part of the ordinary speech of the day’,Footnote ⁹⁸ and should not be taken literally; accordingly, he markedly sanitised opposite-sex obscenity and largely omitted the same-sex obscenities.Footnote ⁹⁹ Like Ellis for his scholarly readers, however, Hart-Davies retained much non-obscene same-sex content for his general audience. This is noteworthy in the context of a select edition, in which these poems could easily have been left out.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hart-Davies included cc. 24, 48, 81 and 99, with the correct genders retained, and titled ‘To Juventius’; c. 61's concubinus appears as a ‘favoured slave’ who has lost ‘his master's love’; and c. 100 appears, with Caelius feeling both ‘friendship’ (line 5) and ‘love’ (line 14) for Aufilenus.

Examining these Victorian editions reveals considerable variation in what the authors considered objectionable, and what they thought would threaten readers’ morality. While Martin and his ilk tried to eliminate homoeroticism, Ellis and Hart-Davies retained it, but toned down the obscenity (related to same-sex practices or otherwise). The latter works aimed at two distinct audiences, so their intended readerships do not explain their similar approaches. It seems an example of personal mores dictating how these men responded to – and expressed – what they found in Catullus. Ellis’ and Hart-Davies’ approaches to both obscene male-on-male sexual violence and homoeroticism complicate Gaisser's argument that the common pattern was for authors to retain male-on-male sexual invective but omit Juventius, unable to ‘allow a homosexual romance to the poet himself’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In fact, some could tolerate Juventius. In a different world Richard Burton would have numbered among them.

In his 1894 edition, Burton explicitly aimed to provide an unexpurgated text of the ‘nude Roman poetry’,Footnote ¹⁰² with plenty of notes. Co-author Leonard Smithers says that before his death, Burton ‘laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic) point of view’.Footnote ¹⁰³ But ‘subsequent circumstances’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ (Burton's death prior to publication) prevented Smithers from annotating as thoroughly as he might have wished,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ while Burton's widow apparently expurgated certain passages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Both same-sex and opposite-sex obscenity in Burton's verses has been expurgated, though not in Smithers’ prose,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ while other same-sex content survives unscathed. As such, this text yields a fascinating example of a volume simultaneously censored and uncensored. Its treatment of homoeroticism is patchy as a result. Juventius’ name and gender are retained in cc. 24, 48, 81 and 99; c. 56 is included (trusantem yielded to Lady Burton's ellipses, but the sexual imagery of the last line survives), c. 61's concubinus appears as a ‘he-concubine’ (Burton) and an ‘ingle’ (Smithers),Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and the genders of Caelius’ and Quintius’ lovers in c. 100 are retained. Their version of c. 15 clearly follows the Latin, with the title, ‘To Aurelius – Hands off the Boy!’ Burton translates pene as penis, emphasising it through the rhyme with ‘I ween is!’. Smithers’ note also makes matters clear: ‘my fear is from thee and thy penis’. However, in the translation of c. 16 we find em-dashes instead of pedicare and irrumare. It seems likely from Smithers’ comments in the Preface that Burton's widow may have altered the text. Burton's situation highlights how hard it was to publish un-censored versions of Catullus. Not only did people have to get past their own internal censor; in death their translations ran the gauntlet of their executor's mores.

Our final example from the Victorian era proper is also, arguably, the most ‘Victorian’, Macnaghten's Reference Macnaghten1899 The Story of Catullus. Macnaghten was a schoolmaster at Eton. His 1899 work selects the corpus in service of a Lesbia-centred narrative, which Macnaghten supplies by interleaving his own prose. The book thus follows a similar model to La Chapelle's The Adventures of Catullus, although Macnaghten likely saw his work as more scholarly.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Macnaghten never mentions Juventius in the prose text, and of the Juventius poems, only c. 48 appears. Macnaghten links it thematically to c. 7, omitting mention of Juventius’ identity and gender.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Macnaghten thus uses the placement of poems to convey an impression of heterosexual content. He also removes other homoerotic content, omitting the concubinus from c. 61, and excluding c. 100 from his selection; same-sex obscenity and threats of sexual violence were also cut (cc. 15, 16, 56). Macnaghten mostly omits obscenity about women, with the exception of a much-toned down c. 11: ilia rumpens becomes ‘though … she drain / the lives of all’. Finally, like La Chapelle centuries before, Macnaghten made no mention of homoeroticism in his supposedly biographical introduction. This volume shows an author adopting multiple strategies to deal with ‘objectionable’ content of many kinds, ranging from exclusion of whole poems, excision of specific lines, and bowdlerisation. Overall, then, readers of Catullus ended the century – and the Victorian age – with a series of versions of the Roman poet that all, in some way, reflected mainstream culture's distaste with both homoeroticism and sexual violence among men.

This attitude undoubtedly persisted into the twentieth century. Across the Atlantic in 1915, Mary Stewart, a language instructor at the University of Montana, published a volume titled Selections from Catullus.Footnote ¹¹¹ The volume includes an introduction, but has neither notes nor other technical paratextual material; Stewart aimed at a general readership. As we have seen was common practice, Stewart did not discuss Juventius or homoeroticism in her introduction, and censored both homoeroticism and obscenity. She wrote Juventius out of cc. 48 and 99 and addressed the poems to Lesbia instead. Stewart also polished up Catullus’ rough edges by eliminating all traces of obscenity of any kind.Footnote ¹¹² However, in her Introduction Stewart strongly rejects some interventions, such as changing names.Footnote ¹¹³ She thus fits within the tradition we have already observed, in which an author's actual practices in the main text can differ significantly from what they say they will do in their paratextual material.

However, Stewart diverges from the other writers herein in additional ways. Her biography is fascinating.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Academically, she deserves note as the first woman to translate a volume of Catullus.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Of even greater interest is her contemporaneous role as an important suffragist.Footnote ¹¹⁶ From 1907, Stewart served as the first Dean of Women at the University of Montana, being responsible for the female students in their on-campus dormitory, and she worked both for women's suffrage and the state and national level, and for better services for women students. And yet, while pursuing women's voting rights, in her work on Catullus she out-censored (or out ‘Victorian-ed’) many of the translators who came before her.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Going into this project, we were aware of some receptions that censored or expurgated Catullus, and some socio-historical factors in each era that might have shaped authors’ perspectives. We had been struck encountering egregious cases (such as Macnaghten and Fordyce) but we wanted to build up a fine-grained, full picture. We particularly wanted to focus on both Juventius and the wider depiction of male–male sexual relations in Catullus, because these topics have been so thoroughly eclipsed by interest in Lesbia.

We found much that confirmed the earlier scholarly narrative, that the early moderns and Victorians especially stripped Catullus of his distinctively Roman sexuality, often torn between a desire to represent and transmit Catullus, and a pressure or desire to do so ‘modestly’. However, we found that not all authors censored homoeroticism more than they censored obscenity. Instead, some authors were able to portray desire for male love objects more transparently than they could communicate threats and acts of sexual violence. And while we saw that the Victorian era produced the most extreme examples of censorship and expurgation – of both homoeroticism and sexual violence – even in the Victorian era we found examples of certain writers pressing (however gently) against mainstream conservatism, presenting ‘objectionable’ parts of Catullus’ corpus more transparently than their peers. We found examples of extensive expurgation in both scholarly and popular works, and counter-examples of writers subverting cultural boundaries in both types of work. This suggests to us that the mores of individual writers played an important role in shaping their take on Catullus, perhaps as much as the broader culture of their era.

Finally, we found one great irony. Until well into the twentieth century, readers had fairly limited access to Catullus’ positive depictions of male–male desire, so Catullus, sadly (from our perspective), stood outside the canon of Classical works that offered succour and a cultural model to queer men and women. However, this meant that readers had even fewer opportunities to read Catullus’ violent sexual threats and depictions of male–male rape. As a result, any queer readers likely to internalise the generalised, Christian homophobia of their age were not exposed to a series of poems that linked male–male sexual activity with aggression, competition, and even violence. For members of minorities, lack of representation in culture causes problems, but so does the prevalence of negative and stereotyped representations.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Representations matter, and they are not all created equal. It is a bittersweet irony that, in attempting to protect ‘virtuous’ (presumed heterosexual and Christian) readers, the early modern and Victorian expurgators we have surveyed unwittingly protected their queer readers from internalising disturbing portraits of male–male sex based in a violent slave culture.