The Amorous Gaze: A Poetic and Pragmatic Koinê for Erotic Melos?

Outside of any ‘lyricism’, Greek melic poetry, animated by the feeling of love, provides a series of metaphorical phrases for the verbal expression of amourous desire. Under the name of eros, this desire is conceived as a physical stream conveyed by looking, but which acts like a divine force. On the other hand, there are correspondences between the role of sight in the manifestation of amorous desire through the power of eros and the role of the gaze in the performance of a song that was danced, as a physical practice involving the body. Using language made rhythmical and metaphoric by the melic poiein, these songs activate the gaze, the vehicle of erotic desire, with physiological and anthropopoietic effects, independently of the sex-relationship involved: homo- or hetero-erotic, male or female, but generally asymmetric.