Prayer to Artemis

One of the few short prayers to survive entire from archaic Greek lyric — eight lines of Anacreon.

Its argument is flattery, and the flattery is directed not at the goddess but at the city. "Come now … rejoicing: for the citizens you shepherd are not untamed." The goddess is invited on the ground that her charges behave well: come, you will find it agreeable here. What is asked is not a favour but a visit, and the reason given is the quality of the flock.

Ποιμαίνεις — you shepherd. Shepherd of the people is the Homeric definition of a king; here it is applied to a goddess over a city, and the deity's relation to the polis is described as rule rather than cult.

The place is identifiable: the Lethaios is a river at Magnesia on the Maeander, where the temple of Artemis Leukophryene stood. The poem is attached to a particular sanctuary, not to the goddess in general.

How this text was obtained. It was collated from two independent scans of one and the same Hiller-Bergk edition: the second scan yielded a comma, an apostrophe and a capital invisible in the first. The usual scanning substitutions were removed (Z for Δ, χ for κ, ϑ for θ). One reading remains unresolved: at line 6 both scans give eskatora, a grammatically impossible form; most likely an iota subscript has been lost. The place has been left as it stands and needs checking against a printed page.