Lucius Afranius was an ancient Roman comic poet who lived at the beginning of the 1st century BC.
[8] His comedies are spoken of in the highest terms by the ancient writers, and under the Empire they not only continued to be read, but were even acted, of which an example occurs in the time of Nero.
[12] The Spanish-Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian wrote of Afranius's plays:[13] Such is the generally accepted interpretation of this sentence.
[14][15] An alternative view is proposed by Welsh (2010),[16] 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.