Prayer to Bacchus

Nothing has been established about this card, and that is its content.

The source field reads "Flores Carmina, 2". No work of that title exists in the ancient collections; no corpus of Latin poetry knows it, and what was meant — an anthology, someone's heading, a corruption in transmission — could not be determined. The Latin text has not been found.

One conjecture was tested and rejected: the Laus Liberi from the Poetae Latini Minores — a poem on the same god and of a suitable length, but agreeing with this text in not a single line.

The provenance field stands at unclear, and that is the honest result. The English may be a translation of something genuine, may be a paraphrase, may be a modern composition; there is no evidence on which to choose.

The second half ("but turned to another use, let it bring no harsh taste into our unkind veins") is obscure in English too: it reads like an awkward rendering rather than a sentence of its own. But that is an impression, not an argument.

The card is kept precisely for the sake of this record. To delete it would erase the trace of the search; to leave it without a caveat would be to pass off the unknown as ancient.