Prayer to Priapus

A vow for healing from the Priapea — a collection of obscene verses ascribed to the garden god.

The joke is built on a genuine practice. Anatomical votives — clay or painted images of the healed body part — were among the commonest offerings in antiquity; healing sanctuaries were heaped with them. Here a painted tablet is promised showing the member "equal, alike and of the same colour": the vow stipulates the accuracy of the copy as one stipulates the terms of a commission.

Quoius tu, pater, ipse pars videris — of which part you yourself, father, appear to be a part. Priapus is the organ prayed for; the diseased thing and the healing god are one. The prayer addresses a deity who coincides with its subject.

Sine sectione — without surgery. The condition is meant in earnest: ancient medicine offered a choice between prayer and the knife, and the petitioner specifies which way he wants his cure. The same arrangement as in Martial, where healing is described as litigation with the Fates (martial-aesculapius-001).

Checked against the edition: the card's text agrees with it word for word. Only the direct speech is on the card; the frame of the poem explains why it is Priapus who is asked — the speaker fears the surgeon's hand and is ashamed to take his case to "the lawful and too-great gods, such as Phoebus and Phoebus' son", that is, to Apollo and Asclepius. The prayer goes to a lesser god for want of nerve to approach a greater one.