Alcmena's oath

Alcmena swears to her husband that she has been faithful — in a comedy where the audience already knows what actually happened.

This is an oath, not a prayer: the goddess is called not to help but to guarantee a word. Juno is named mater familias — the title of a Roman married woman, not of a Greek goddess. Plautus translates the myth into the language of household law: Alcmena swears not by the queen of heaven but by the senior mistress to whom a wife answers.

Quam me vereri et metuere est par maxume — "whom it most befits me to revere and to fear". The argument is not theological but social: a married woman is required to fear this particular goddess, because marriage is her department.

And the oath is true. "Except you alone, no mortal" — and no mortal did touch her: it was Jupiter. Alcmena speaks the exact truth while wrong about everything, and she swears it to the very goddess whose husband has just deceived her along with Alcmena.

The card cites lines 831-834; in the Latin Library text this passage stands as 830-833.