Prayer to Janus

A single line closing an epigram on Janus' New Year appearance to Domitian: the god promises the emperor a long age, and at the end the poet asks him to add more.

Everything turns on the word tuam, which stands without a noun. What is understood is what Janus has just been handing out — years, a span, an age; and since Janus is the oldest of the gods and the year bears his name, "yours" is in his case the longest possible. Martial pushes the flattery to its limit without naming a single extra word.

The device is epigrammatic in essence: the reader is obliged to supply the missing word, and so it is the reader, not the poet, who speaks the flattery.

The card's Russian supplies "favour" — the word is not in the Latin, and the supplement is disputable: the sense of the epigram points rather to years of life. The rendering has been left as it stands, but should be read with that reservation.