Wendy Heller has argued the force of iconic female imagery and characters in early Venetian opera as emblematic of the Venetian self-image as a city-state both sacred and profane. She also, through her analysis of selected female operatic characters and relevant contemporary treatises, demonstrates how these female voices were conceived and received onstage as embodiments of circulating Renaissance obsessions with classic literature and popular debates surrounding theories of the sexual body and gender roles. Against this background, and alongside the work of Beth and Jonathan Glixon's archival study of the emergence of Venetian opera during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, I argue how the male characters in Cavalli's early operas complicate cultural attitudes about masculinity through stage violence as well as through violence veiled through aesthetic strategies of indirection. In doing so, through the explication of selected scenes from Cavalli's Gli Amori de Apollo e di Daphne (1640) and La Virtu de Strali e d'Amore (1642), I focus on how these operas and their respective male characters reflect and shift Venetian cultural norms through the creation of operatic tropes of masculine lament, dutiful and heroic reflection, and other deliberate behaviors generally identified as masculine "virtu"—artistic strategies created to deflect the negative consequences of violence onstage while at the same time promoting violence as a male imperative in life--attitudes central to the political project that was Venice.