Prayer to Diana

Glycerium's cry offstage in The Girl from Andros: she is giving birth, and the audience cannot see her.

Iuno Lucina, fer opem, serva me, obsecro. The line was famous in antiquity. Roman comedy signalled a birth in exactly this way — by a cry from behind a door — and the formula recurs almost verbatim in both Terence and Plautus. Decorum did not allow a woman in labour on stage; the voice was what remained.

The prayer is as short as possible and consists of nothing but imperatives: bring help, save me, I beseech you. No epithet, no justification, no vow. At the moment when one asks in earnest, the whole ritual apparatus falls away.

The card's English does not correspond to this Latin: it gives a prayer about easy delivery and a midwife's mistakes, neither of which is here.