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82 The Translator’s Invisibilityeven if supported by such culturally prominent writers, was ratherminor. There were few translations, usually of the same small groupof kiss and sparrow poems, showing quite clearly that he wasvirtually neglected by English translators in favor of Homer, Virgil,Ovid, Horace: these were the major figures, translated in the serviceof diverse aesthetic, moral, and political interests. Catullus’smarginality was partly an issue of genre, with epic privileged overlyric in English poetry translation during this period. But there wasalso the issue of morality, with English writers at once attracted anddisturbed by the pagan sexuality and the physically coarse language,entertaining a guilty fixation on the poet’s scandalous affair with“Lesbia.”The first substantial selected translation, the anonymousAdventures of Catullus, and History of His Amours with Lesbia (1707),was itself a translation from the French, Jean de la Chapelle’s LesAmours de Catulle. It consisted of several narrative sections, some inthe voices of Catullus and Lesbia, punctuated by versions of theLatin texts, all arranged to support “a train of Historical Conjectures[which] have so great a foundation in the poet’s own Verses” (TheAdventures of Catullus 1707:A2 r ). For the English editor, the book wasdidactic, “one of the severest Lessons against our Passions andVices”; but since it was described as “a just Representation of theNobility of Antient Rome, in a private Life, in their Friendships,Conversation, and Manners within Doors,” the editor was alsoassimilating Roman aristocratic culture to bourgeois values likeemotional intimacy and moral propriety and perhaps questioningthe “private life” of the British aristocracy: the book was dedicatedto the earl of Thomond (ibid.:A2 v –A3 v ). In his Lives of the Roman Poets(1733), Lewis Crusius, anxiously feeling the need for a “justificationof this Writer [who] has been very much censured for the Lewdnessof some of his Pieces,” asked the English reader to respect thehistorical and cultural difference of Catullus’s poetry, its differentsexual morality:We would not be understood by any means to vindicate thisconduct in our Author, but barely to shew, that Obscenity, accordingto the Antients, was not only allowable in these sorts ofCompositions, but when artfully drest up, was esteemed one of itsgreatest beauties.(Crusius 1733:28)