The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Invisibility 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)
Where the Latin text makes rather general and noncommittal
references to Caesar’s sexuality, Graves chooses English words that
stigmatize same-sex sexual acts as perverse: a question raised about
“pudicitiae eius famam” (“his sexual reputation”) becomes a “specific
charge of unnatural practices,” while “contubernium” (“sharing the