For ancient Romans, Shadi Bartsch argues in her The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire , sight was not merely passive and receptive but active. Gazing with the evil eye meant sending out “little bodies” out of the eye that “penetrate the body of the victim through his pores, and especially through his eyes,” and this puts the internal harmony of the body into disarray.

Strangely, phallic images were sometimes used to ward off the penetrating, evil eye.

Bartsch suggests that “the phallus may have come into use against the evil eye at least partially via homeopathic reasoning: against something that penetrates, use something else that penetrates. The eye, in other words, is figured in its effects in terms borrowed from or assimilated to the workings of the phallus, the penetrative instrument par excellence.”

As Bartsch points out, this association is recovered in Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus story, in which “Oedipus’ self-blinding represented a symbolic castration because he had slept with his mother.”

In erotic contexts, however, the direction is reversed, and the one who looks becomes a victim of the wounding beauty that radiates from the body of the beloved. In one works, “the beauty of the beloved is sharper than arrows and causes the ‘erotic wound’ by flowing into the soul via the eyes.”