Prayer to Apollo and Asclepius
Apollo · AsclepiusA paean of the late Hellenistic period, and it preserves the name of its composer — Makedonikos of Amphipolis, who "made it when the god commanded". For a cult hymn this is rare: such texts are usually anonymous. The command most likely came in a dream: the plaque stood in the Asklepieion on the south slope of the Acropolis, where the sick slept waiting for the god to tell them something.
The construction shows even in translation. "IE PAIAN" recurs between the clauses — the chorus's response, written into the text so the singers knew where to come in; the Erythraean paean to Asclepius is built in exactly the same way (erythrai-paean-asclepius-001). Neither is verse for reading; both are records for performance.
That reading is confirmed twice over. The cutter left a wide space before each "ie Paian", a sign that the cry was sung apart, by the chorus or by the whole precinct. And the metre is dactylic but with lines of unequal length, not hexameters — the same metre as the "Erythraian hymns", and lines from those are incorporated directly into this paean. The kinship with the Erythrai text is not typological but literal.
The Centaur is mentioned too, "averter of men's pains": Chiron, from whom Asclepius learned medicine. The pedigree of the craft is traced to the teacher, as in the physicians' oath it is traced to the father (hippocrates-oath-001).
There is no Greek text on this card yet, but the inscription has been identified. It is IG II³ 4, 777 — formerly IG II² 4473 and SEG 23.126; the stone is broken, and its parts are in the Epigraphical Museum at Athens as EM 8619 and EM 13345. A translation and commentary are published by Attic Inscriptions Online (AIO 3362), but the Greek is not there: it sits on PHI, which is closed to machine access and opens only in a browser.
The earlier caveat is half lifted. The source is established, and the extent and content can now be checked against something; what has not yet been checked is the Greek itself, and so the English on this card remains unverified line by line.