Prayer to Bellona

Appius Claudius Caecus, in the thick of the fighting against the Samnites, promises Bellona a temple. The vow fits into one sentence and consists of nothing but a condition and a payment.

The language is deliberately archaic, and Livy preserves it. Duis for des is an old subjunctive; ast carries its old legal sense, "then, in that case". This is how the Twelve Tables were written, and the vow sounds like a clause of a contract: if the one party performs, the other undertakes.

It is worth comparing with Romulus' vow in the same historian (jupiter-006), which has a reminder of past favour, a statement of circumstances, and a concession. Here there is none of that: a bare transaction, without one word of piety.

And this is one of the few cases in this corpus where the fulfilment of a vow can be checked not against a text but against stone. The temple of Bellona was built on the Campus Martius; in it the senate received foreign envoys and generals awaiting a triumph — those who could not enter the city. A vow made in battle determined for centuries where Rome would talk to outsiders.