Prayer to Hercules

A Roman inscription, and after the literary prayers around it, a sobering one: no epithet, no myth, no condition. Who, for whom, to whom, what — and that is all.

Numisia Aphrodite is a woman with a Greek cognomen, almost certainly a freedwoman or a freedwoman's daughter. She dedicates to Hercules "for the wellbeing of my son and of my own", pro salute: the commonest formula of private dedication, in which the petitioner asks nothing for herself.

The verb is first person and past — posui, I set this up. The inscription speaks not of intention but of performance; the stone is itself the record that the thing was done.

In m{a}ei there is a letter too many: the cutter carved maei for mei. The braces in the text are editorial, marking a letter the editor judges erroneous. Slips of this kind are the ordinary mark of a private commission, modestly paid for.