Prayer to Bacchus
BacchusSplendid Liber, draw near to me! With your forever mystical vine, and your ivy bound head, carry off my sorrows, in the same manner as you have so often used wine's healing powers to overcome the pangs of love.
From the Corpus Tibullianum: the poet asks Liber to carry away his pain.
The move is unusual. Pariter medicande — "you who likewise need healing". He asks the god for a cure and in the same breath points out that the god is in the same condition: behind this stands Ariadne, abandoned and found, and a history of loss the two of them share.
A prayer ordinarily rests on disparity: the god can do what a man cannot. Here the ground is different — the fellow feeling of an equal. The appeal is not to the strong but to the one who will understand.
The same argument is developed in bacchus-009 in Propertius, but there it is offered as proof of the god's competence, and here as grounds for compassion.
Fons · Source
AuthorTibullus
WorkElegiae
Section3.6.1-4
Period1st c. BC
Classificatio · Taxonomy