Prayer to Apollo

The hymn to Apollo sung at the court of Adrastus in Argos — at the feast to which Polynices and Tydeus have just come.

It is built on the "wherever you may be" formula: seu … seu … seu — the Lycian thickets of Patara, snowy ridges, the chaste dew of Castalia. The point is to run through every address at which the god might be found and miss none: the summons must not fail because the petitioner guessed the location wrong.

And the closing clause extends the same device to names: "whether they call you rosy Titan after the manner of the Achaemenid people". Not only the addresses are covered but the aliases too.

A prayer engineered as insurance against non-delivery. The same device in fully developed form appears in Apuleius (ceres-003, diana-001), where the goddess's names, rites and forms are all enumerated together.