Prayer to the Penates and Vesta

The end of the first book of the Georgics. Virgil has just catalogued the portents that accompanied Caesar's murder and the wars that ruined Italy — and there he breaks off a poem about farming with a prayer.

The request is framed as a double negative: ne prohibete, do not forbid. Not "help", not "grant" — only do not stand in the way. And hunc saltem, this one at least: after a book of catastrophes the poet asks for the smallest thing that can be asked.

"This young man" is Octavian, barely past thirty in the year the Georgics appeared. The name is never spoken; the whole prayer rests on a demonstrative pronoun, and a contemporary understood it without explanation.

Di patrii Indigetes — the Indigetes, deified ancestral founders, about whom Roman antiquarians already disagreed. Virgil sets them beside Romulus and Vesta: ancestors, founder and hearth — three supports, all three native, not one imported god among them.

The card's deities field names the Penates; they are not in the Latin, which has di patrii, ancestral gods, often but not necessarily identified with the Penates.