Formula spoken at sowing

The shortest text in this corpus: one sentence, spoken over the furrow at sowing.

There is no deity in it at all. No one is named, nothing is asked for — it merely states what is being done and for whom: "this turnip I sow for myself and for the village". This is a carmen in the old sense of the word: neither song nor plea but efficacious speech, which works because it has been uttered aloud and correctly.

The whole meaning lies in the last two words. The sower names himself and the vicus, the village, in one breath. The land is his own, the harvest is common, because the pagus — the community of neighbours — eats together and starves together. Private husbandry is declared a public matter at the very moment the seed falls.

There are other texts in this corpus with no addressee — ceres-007, for instance, where likewise no god is named. Formulae of this kind are a reminder that Roman ritual was not always a conversation: sometimes it was simply a word correctly said.

The reference should be checked. No provenance note survives, and the citation given is book 24 of the Natural History, which is devoted to remedies from forest trees; Pliny treats the turnip in book 19. There is nothing to check it against.