Prayer to Ceres and Libera

A single line which Caesius Bassus quotes in his treatise On Metres as a specimen of the Philician measure — named after Philicus of Corcyra, the Hellenistic poet.

"Philicus" in this card's fields is the name of a metre, not an author. Caesius says plainly that he finds no example of this measure among Roman poets and therefore supplies his own. What we have, then, is not a scrap of a lost hymn to Ceres but a line composed for metrical illustration: Latin, but written to show how a Greek verse sounds.

Hence the broken syntax — no one ever carried it as far as a complete sentence. Marius Victorinus quotes the same line differently, mystica sunt nota Iovi potenti, and there is nothing on which to decide between the readings.

In this corpus it is a rare case of a "prayer" that was never a prayer: it was born as a teaching example.