Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.