"Too Gross for Our Present Notions of Propriety": Roman Homosexuality in Two Nineteenth-Century Translations of Martial's Epigrams

This chapter considers two mid-nineteenth-century translations of Martial: the mass-market Bohn’s Classical Library edition, published in 1859, and the Index Expurgatorius, privately published and clandestinely circulated in 1868. The latter claimed to render into English those epigrams ‘hitherto omitted by English translators’, and specifically those expurgated by the Bohn’s edition, which had omitted those epigrams considered ‘too gross for our present notions of propriety’. The chapter considers strategies of censorship and expurgation in these texts as well as the use of sexually frank language. It analyses what Roman homosexuality looks like in these translations, and how it compares with the treatment of representations of male–female sexual relations. This chapter suggests that there is significant overlap between the two texts, that no consistent strategies of censorship or expurgation are applied, and that translations such as these give a distorted picture of Roman homosexuality (while misrepresenting Roman sexuality more generally).