Prayer to Diana

Strictly this is not a prayer but an account of one — and of the quietest prayer in the Metamorphoses.

Two men, a guide and a narrator, pass an altar of Latona, and both, without arranging it, whisper the same word: faveas, "be favourable". Ovid notes both that the whisper was timid and that the second man repeated it after the first.

Here one can see what ordinary piety looked like: not a rite and not a vow but a short word said under the breath while walking past a shrine. Such utterances made up the bulk of ancient religious practice — and almost never got into inscriptions or into literature.

The line survives only because Ovid needed to introduce the story of the Lycian peasants turned into frogs.