‘Rhyming Back Into the Canon’: An Anthology of Queer Roman Verse

This project brings together, for the first time, a representative selection of queer poetry from ancient Rome in line-for-line verse translations both amusing and accessible to the non-specialist. Nearly all the most famous Latin poets dealt with same-sex subjects — in lyric poetry (Catullus, Horace), elegy (Propertius, Tibullus), and epic (Virgil, Ovid) — yet a tradition of homophobic scholarship and translation means that a book of this kind has only recently become conceivable. Using a variety of formal idioms inspired by the poems’ metrical and generic diversity, this anthology aims to give the reader a sense of what collections of classical poetry in translation might have been like had these works not been suppressed for centuries.