Prayer to Diana

The opening of Grattius' Cynegetica — the only surviving Roman poem on hunting.

Two lines, and they set the genre at once: "I sing the gifts of the gods, the arts that gladden hunters". Not exploits and not myths but artes — techniques, gear, breeds of dog, the rigging of nets. A didactic poem declaring a craft to be its subject.

Diana is named not as goddess of the hunt but as auspicium — the patronage under which an undertaking is begun. The word is technical: auspices are taken before any enterprise, and the poet begins his poem as a consul would begin a campaign.

Even these two lines already show what distinguishes Grattius from the rest: for him hunting is not an aristocratic amusement but a body of knowledge to be handed on.