Prayer to Bacchus

Two lines from Grattius' Cynegetica — a poem on hunting — and they stand in the middle of instructions on treating dogs.

So "Liber is medicine for the raging disease" is not a metaphor here but a note on dosage. Morbus furens, the raging sickness, is rabies, and wine enters the prescription alongside the other remedies. A god named in a veterinary manual as an active ingredient.

The first half meanwhile stays entirely poetic: "drives light cares from the breast". Grattius fits two different Libers into a single couplet — the consoler and the medicament — and marks no transition between them at all.