The Translator’s Invisibility

Stipendia prima in Asia fecit Marci Thermi praetoris contubernio; a quo ad accersendam classem in Bithyniam missus desedit apud Nicomeden, non sine rumorem prostratae regi pudicitiae; quern rumorem auxit intra paucos rursus dies repetita Bithynia per causam exigendae pecuniae, quae deberetur cuidam libertino clienti suo. reliqua militia secundiore fama fuit et a Thermo in expugnatione Mytilenarum corona civica donatus est.

(Butler and Cary 1927:1–2)

Caesar first saw military service in Asia, where he went as aidedecamp to Marcus Thermus, the provincial governor. When Thermus sent Caesar to raise a fleet in Bithynia, he wasted so much time at King Nicomedes’ court that a homosexual relationship between them was suspected, and suspicion gave place to scandal when, soon after his return to headquarters, he revisited Bithynia: ostensibly collecting a debt incurred there by one of his freedmen. However, Caesar’s reputation improved later in the campaign, when Thermus awarded him the civic crown of oak leaves, at the storming of Mytilene, for saving a fellow soldier’s life.

(Graves 1957:10)

Both passages rest on innuendo instead of explicit judgment, on doubtful hearsay instead of more reliable evidence (“rumorem,” “suspicion”). Yet the English text makes several additions that offer {33} more certainty about Caesar’s motives and actions and about Suetonius’s own estimation: the translation is not just slanted against Caesar, but homophobic. This first appears in an inconsistency in the diction: Graves’s use of “homosexual relationship” to render “prostratae regi pudicitiae” (“surrendered his modesty to the king”) is an anachronism, a late nineteenth-century scientific term that diagnoses same-sex sexual activity as pathological and is therefore inappropriate for an ancient culture in which sexual acts were not categorized according to the participants’ sex (OED; Wiseman 1985:10–14). Graves then leads the reader to believe that this relationship did in fact occur: not only does he increase the innuendo by using “suspicion gave place to scandal” to translate “rumorem auxit” (“the rumor spread”), but he inserts the loaded “ostensibly,” entirely absent from the Latin text. Graves’s version implicitly equates homosexuality with perversion, but since the relationship was with a foreign monarch, there are also political implications, the hint of a traitorous collusion which the ambitious Caesar is concealing and which he may later exploit in a bid for power: the passage immediately preceding this one has the dictator Sulla associating Caesar with his archenemy Marius. Because the passage is so charged with lurid accusations, even the conclusive force of that “however,” promising a rehabilitation of Caesar’s image, is finally subverted by the possible suggestion of another sexual relationship in “saving a fellow soldier’s life.”

Suetonius later touches on Caesar’s sexual reputation, and here too Graves’s version is marked by a homophobic bias:

Pudicitiae eius famam nihil quidem praeter Nicomedis contubernium laesit.

(Butler and Cary 1927:22)

The only specific charge of unnatural practices ever brought against him was that he had been King Nicomedes’ catamite.

(Graves 1957:30)