Editing Lucius Afranius (poet) (section)

==Quintilian's judgement==
The Spanish-Roman teacher of rhetoric [[Quintilian]] wrote of Afranius's plays:<ref>Quintilian 10.100.</ref>

:''Togātīs excellit Afrānius: utinam non inquināsset argūmenta puerōrum foedīs amōribus, mōrēs suōs fassus.''
:("Afranius excelled in Roman-style comedies: if only he hadn't polluted his plots with unseemly sexual affairs with boys, confessing his own habits.")

Such is the generally accepted interpretation of this sentence.<ref>Cf. Fontaine, Michael (2009) ''Funny Words in Plautine Comedy'' (Oxford), p. 224</ref><ref>P.G.M. Brown, "Afranius, Lucius (1)", in ''The Oxford Classical Dictionary'': "his plays included pederastic themes".</ref> An alternative view is proposed by Welsh (2010),<ref>Welsh, Jarrett T. (2010). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/40984742 "Quintilian's Judgement of Afranius"]. ''The Classical Quarterly'', New Series, Vol. 60, No. 1 (May 2010), pp. 118-126.)</ref> who, noting that there is no trace of pederasty or any lewdness in any of the quoted fragments of Afranius, proposed to translate the sentence "if only he hadn't polluted his plots with disreputable love affairs (conducted) by boys", something which Quintilian perhaps thought unsuited to the moralising tone of Roman comedies. A problem with this interpretation, as Welsh himself admits, is that in Roman literature the word ''pueri'' is usually used for the boys who are object of love affairs, not the young men who conduct them.