venuti

Invisibility 33more certainty about Caesar’s motives and actions and aboutSuetonius’s own estimation: the translation is not just slanted againstCaesar, but homophobic. This first appears in an inconsistency in thediction: 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 thatdiagnoses same-sex sexual activity as pathological and is thereforeinappropriate for an ancient culture in which sexual acts were notcategorized according to the participants’ sex (OED; Wiseman1985:10–14). Graves then leads the reader to believe that thisrelationship did in fact occur: not only does he increase the innuendoby using “suspicion gave place to scandal” to translate “rumoremauxit” (“the rumor spread”), but he inserts the loaded “ostensibly,”entirely absent from the Latin text. Graves’s version implicitly equateshomosexuality with perversion, but since the relationship was with aforeign monarch, there are also political implications, the hint of atraitorous collusion which the ambitious Caesar is concealing andwhich he may later exploit in a bid for power: the passageimmediately preceding this one has the dictator Sulla associatingCaesar with his archenemy Marius. Because the passage is so chargedwith lurid accusations, even the conclusive force of that “however,”promising a rehabilitation of Caesar’s image, is finally subverted bythe possible suggestion of another sexual relationship in “saving afellow soldier’s life.”Suetonius later touches on Caesar’s sexual reputation, and here tooGraves’s version is marked by a homophobic bias:Pudicitiae eius famam nihil quidem praeter Nicomediscontubernium laesit.(Butler and Cary 1927:22)The only specific charge of unnatural practices ever brought againsthim was that he had been King Nicomedes’ catamite.(Graves 1957:30)Where the Latin text makes rather general and noncommittalreferences to Caesar’s sexuality, Graves chooses English words thatstigmatize same-sex sexual acts as perverse: a question raised about“pudicitiae eius famam” (“his sexual reputation”) becomes a “specificcharge of unnatural practices,” while “contubernium” (“sharing the