Prayer to Diana and Apollo

The Carmen Saeculare is the one ancient hymn about which everything is known: who commissioned it, who wrote it, who sang it, when and where.

Augustus needed a text for the Secular Games of 17 BC; Horace wrote it; a chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls performed it on the Palatine and the Capitol. The record of the games, cut in stone, states this too: carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus. The same record gave this corpus apollo-006, juno-002, juno-003, jupiter-005 and tellus-003 — the prose formulae spoken on those same days.

The two are worth setting side by side. The formulae of the record are legal, impersonal, full of cross-references; Horace's hymn is literary, with an eye on the Greek paean. The state commissioned both at once, for one festival.

The stanza on Ilithyia shows the workmanship close up: "whether you approve being called Lucina or Genitalis" — Horace builds into his hymn the same safeguard against a wrong name that stands in the genuine formulae.