Prayer to Apollo and Diana

A six-line fragment attributed to Petronius — three elegiac couplets.

The prayer here goes through an intermediary. The speaker addresses not Apollo but his sister: "If you are Phoebus' sister, Delia, I entrust you with this errand: carry these words to your brother." A prayer sent by courier.

And the content of the message takes the whole structure apart. First the required piety — a temple of Sicilian marble, songs to the reed pipe. And immediately after: "now, if you hear us and are really divine, tell me: where does a man with no money get some?" The devotion was the set-up, and the point is that the god now owes an answer.

The card's English renders only the quoted speech; the frame with Delia has dropped out of it — and half the joke with it.