Prayer to Bacchus

Nine short lines that survive because of their rhythm rather than their content. Caesius Bassus quotes them in his treatise On Metres as a specimen of the ithyphallic, and after him Diomedes, Marius Victorinus and Terentianus Maurus copy the same lines. The prayer has been preserved the way a musician preserves a scale.

What is striking is that it contains no request at all. Five names of Bacchus in three lines — Lyaeus, Bassareus, two-horned, Maenalian, twice-mothered — then the dressing of ivy and clusters, then "come peaceably to the altars" and a threefold cry. Pure summons, without a single petition: a prayer consisting entirely of calling the god by name.

Who composed it is unknown. Baehrens says outright that it is unclear whether Caesius Bassus wrote the lines himself, translated them from Greek, or took them from an earlier poet. Hence the inconsistency in the card's fields, which carry both Caesius Bassus and "hymn of Callimachus", and the provenance marked unclear. Lines 4, 6 and 7 are Baehrens' conjectures against the manuscripts.