Female Gaze in Dedications: The Case of Nossis

An almost exclusive focus on female subjects has often been acknowledged as a central feature in Nossis’ poetry. In this paper, I re-consider Nossis’ female perspective by comparing her epigrams with other texts that belong to the same genre. More specifically, the analysis focuses on dedicatory epigrams, which represent the most recurrent form for her epigrams with a female subject. Votive offerings made by women – or in their honour – are not a novelty in the Greek world. Although much rarer than those performed by men alone, female dedications are celebrated by inscribed epigrams from the archaic age onwards and represent a recurrent topic in Hellenistic book epigrams. Moving from the comparison with a comprehensive corpus of inscribed and book epigrams from the archaic age into the beginning of the second century BC, the paper demonstrates that Nossis’ epigrams are profoundly rooted in the tradition of dedicatory epigrams. Points of contact with the pre-Hellenistic tradition as well as with coeval inscribed and book epigrams are multiple. Within the frame of a general adherence to the tradition, however, Nossis introduces some significant innovations. Such innovations usually develop from conventional elements, which are re-interpreted in a female way. In particular, the act itself of making her female gaze explicit in the text is what mostly characterises Nossis’s treatment of female dedications in comparison with earlier and contemporary dedicatory epigrams.