Prayer to Juno

From the record of the Secular Games of 17 BC — the very festival of the renewal of the age for which Horace wrote the Carmen Saeculare. The prayer was spoken at the sacrifice of a cow to Juno Regina; the text was cut in marble along with the whole order of the festival.

Uti tibi in illis libris scriptum est — "as is written concerning you in those books". The prayer cites its own warrant: "those books" are the Sibylline books, kept under the guard of a priestly college and prescribing what was to be offered to whom. The rite legitimates itself by quoting a document it names but does not open.

Bove femina — "with a female ox". The Latin is not tautologous but procedural: bos can be masculine, and the rite required the victim's sex to be stated outright, leaving no room for interpretation.

Cetera uti supra — "the rest as above". The cutter did not repeat a formula already inscribed for the preceding deity. The abbreviation is kept in translation too: expanding it would pass off a reconstruction as the text of the stone.

Square brackets mark what the editors have restored where the stone is lost; round brackets, expanded abbreviations.