Prayer to Apollo

A votive inscription from Philippopolis, found — according to Bormann — in a sanctuary of Apollo; Rostovtzeff assigned it to the reign of Commodus. Two elegiac couplets.

It is built more subtly than it looks. The offering is made to Apollo — but what is offered is an image of Hercules: Tirynthia munera, Tirynthian gifts, that is the hero's arms or a statue of him in armour. And the third line sets the two gods against each other: "he subdued the world; you, Phoebus, gave peace". Conquest and pacification, force and calm — and the dedicant asks that "both those things assent" to his vows. A votive inscription that turns out to be a small theological argument as well.

The card's English translation misses this: it reads Tirynthia as an epithet of Phoebus himself and renders only the first of the two couplets.