Prayer to Diana

A single line from Silius Italicus' Punica: "Be with us, Latonia, in what we begin."

The formula is entirely ordinary. Adsis … coeptis, be present at the thing begun, opened anything at all: a poem, a campaign, a rite. It occurs elsewhere in this corpus in Ovid (nunc ades o coeptis, minerva-004); it is a ready-made turn of phrase, not an author's invention.

The thirteenth book of the Punica is the one in which the shades of the dead are called up at Cumae. Latonia is apposite here because her third face is Hecate, who is invoked in necromancy. One and the same goddess is responsible for the hunt, for childbirth, and for this.

The card's reference was corrupt ("13.13-137"); corrected to 13.136.