My book analyzes representations of tender love in Roman wall painting and Latin poetry between the late first century BCE (ca. 30s BCE) and the mid-first century CE (ca. 60s CE). More specifically, it investigates depictions of lovers that evoke affection and desire, yet stop short of representing the sexual act. A close study of Latin elegiac poetry of the early Augustan age is central to my analysis of these painted love scenes. Through close consideration of the dialogue between media, I delineate a symbolic vocabulary, or semantics of love, through which Romans imagined, visualized, and communicated amorous feeling. In Roman amatory representations, tenderness is both a subject and a mode that inflects images and texts, turning sex into romance. By situating the development of a Roman semantics of love in a broader historical context, I offer new insights into individual works of art and literature and on a much-overlooked facet of early imperial culture.