Introduction

Abstract

The erotic gaze plays a crucial role in Latin literary representations of desire: desire itself arises from the gaze. For the most part, this gaze is portrayed as male, with a woman as its immobile object. Critics, moreover, often consider the gaze merely a mode of control that the male lover employs over the female beloved. Yet Roman poets represent situations that defy simple categorization. As Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (2005, 163–164) has observed, elegiac poetry depicts the puella as an object of the male gaze; yet by being stared at for a long time, as Andromeda is by Perseus, she can be viewed as exerting dominance over the male lover, who is both stupefied by her beauty and paralyzed by his passion. The first couplet of Propertius 1.1—Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis / contactum nullis ante cupidinibus—suggests that not only is Cynthia the passive object of the burning male gaze, but she has also provoked his desire through eye contact.