Prayer to Diana

Aeneas meets a huntress in a Libyan wood and, not knowing who stands before him, runs through the possibilities: "Are you Phoebus' sister? or one of the blood of the nymphs?"

This is a rare case indeed — a prayer to a deity whose name the petitioner does not know. Hence quaecumque, "whoever you are": the same insurance device as in the long catalogues of names in Statius and Apuleius, but compressed into a single word and prompted not by caution but by outright ignorance.

The prayer is not addressed to Diana. The huntress is Venus, appearing to her son unrecognised; Aeneas does not suspect it and identifies his mother only by her walk as she leaves. The deities field is left as it stands, but must be read with that reservation.

The attribution has been corrected: the card named Servius the commentator, but the words are Virgil's, and line 1.33, to which the reference pointed, is tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, which has nothing to do with Diana.