Prayer to Carmenta

This is the first line of Livius Andronicus' Odusia — the Latin rendering of Homer made in the third century BC. The oldest line of Latin poetry that has come down to us.

Virum mihi, Camena, insece versutum renders the Homeric ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον. And the important thing here is the substitution Livius himself made: in place of the Greek Muse stands the Roman Camena. That is how Rome's own goddess of inspiration entered Latin letters — in their very first line.

Strictly it is not a prayer: it is an epic proem, an appeal to a deity for the content of the song. But it has its place in this corpus — the whole of Roman poetic prayer grew out of such openings.

The text is in this card by mistake. The Ritus Carmentis collection included the line as a prayer to Carmentis, confusing Camena with Carmentis, and the English translation is a fresh composition about the teaching of Latin letters, with no relation to the line. The work field further conflates two different works of Livius Andronicus: the Odusia and the Equos Troianus (the latter is in ceres-007).