Prayer to Minerva

A single line from the Fasti: Ovid is beginning the story of how the Roman flute-players took offence, walked out of the city to Tibur, and had to be brought back by a trick.

Nunc ades o coeptis — "be present at my beginnings". A commonplace formula, and one already met in this corpus: Silius opens with it to Latonia (diana-016). Anything at all was begun this way — a poem, a campaign, a rite; the poet uses a ready-made phrase as the heading of a new chapter.

Minerva is invoked on business, not on rank. The flute was held to be her invention — and she was the first to throw it away, having seen in the water how it puffed out her cheeks. She is asked to intercede for the flute-players as the inventor of their trade.

Flava — golden-haired. A fixed epithet, repeated without semantic weight: in Latin poetry every deity has such a word, and it survives on habit and on metre.