Prayer to the Lares

A line from the Annales of Ennius — the first Roman epic, of which not a single complete book survives. Everything we know of the poem is gathered from quotations in grammarians and commentators, and so this line has no context: who speaks it, and on what occasion, is unknown.

The argument in it is the one that runs through all Roman household religion, but put as briefly as possible: "guard the house which you set up". The Lares are obliged to care for the house not out of kindness but because the house is their own construction. The ground of the request is authorship.

It is two words shorter than any ritual formula and preserves the whole of their logic. Latin prayer nearly always states why the god is obliged; here the statement is reduced to a single relative clause.

No provenance note survives for this card — only the fragment number is recorded, with no edition against which the text was checked.