The viscous and steady flow about two distinct parallel infinite rotating circular cylinders is theoretically investigated. Because any inner steady Stokes flow is not quiescent far from the cylinders, a strictly steady analysis requires matching an inner steady Stokes approximation with an outer solution of the steady Navier–Stokes equations. However, except for the case of identical cylinders of equal angular velocities, it is impossible to determine this outer solution. In the same spirit as Nakanishi et al. (1997) and Ueda et al. (2001), the present work therefore first addresses the unsteady viscous flow induced by cylinders impulsively set into both steady rotation and translation ${\bm W}.$ Using integral representations of the stream function and the vorticity, the resulting long-time flow is approximated in the limit of large viscosity. Letting time tend to infinity for ${\bm W}$ non-zero extends Lee & Leal (1986) and agrees with Watson (1996), whereas the required steady flow is obtained by making ${\bm W}$ vanish before letting time go to infinity. At the obtained leading-order approximation, the ‘lift’ and ‘drag’ forces on each cylinder (parallel and normal to the line of centres) are respectively zero and independent of the Reynolds number. The drag experienced by each body is plotted versus the gap between the cylinders for several values of the rotation, both for identical and non-identical cylinders.