Prayer to Apollo

The continuation of the same story: Amphiaraus, fallen alive into the underworld, stands before Dis.

It begins with a question of propriety. He is alive among the dead and does not know whether he may open his mouth at all: "If it is permitted, and right here to unseal the lips before the holy shades …" The seer who spent his life knowing in advance does not, for once, know the rules.

And the whole point is in the parenthesis. "O greatest terminator of all things (but to me, who once knew the causes and the elements, a begetter also)." He claims kinship with the god of the underworld and grounds it in his profession: I knew hidden things, therefore you are not merely my end but in some sense my father. An argument only a prophet could have devised.