Prayer to Diana

A Horatian ode for two choruses: the girls sing Diana, the boys Apollo, and the poem is scored for voices.

Only the lines on Diana are taken in this card, and they contain the same run-through of places as other hymns: Algidus, Erymanthus, Cragus. But Horace compresses the device to its limit — one stanza, three mountains, not a superfluous word.

What is striking is how the goddess is characterised. Not by bow or hunt but by her delight in "rivers and the foliage of groves": nemorum coma, "the hair of the woods". Leafage is called a head of hair, and it is the only colour in the whole stanza.

The ode ends, beyond this card, with a request to turn war, famine and plague away from the Romans and onto the Persians and Britons. The same device of redirecting harm as in the prayer to Robigo (robigo-001).