Prayer to Demeter

An Attic skolion — a drinking song. They were sung in turn at symposia, a myrtle branch passing from guest to guest; Athenaeus preserved a whole run of them, and this one stands between a skolion to Pallas and one to Leto's children.

Hence the construction of these four lines: first praise — "mother of wealth, Olympian, I sing" — and at the end a request that is no longer for oneself: chairetōn, eu de tēnd' amphepetōn polin, rejoice, you two, and tend this city well. Over wine, men pray for the polis. Domestic conviviality and civic prayer fit into one short song, and this is not a confusion but the ordinary state of things.

Both verbs are in the dual: chairetōn, amphepetōn. In Attic cult Demeter and Persephone were called tō theō, "the Two Goddesses", and the grammar preserves it: not two goddesses separately but a pair.

Πλούτου μητέρ᾽ — mother of wealth. The same connection as at the close of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where Ploutos is sent into the initiate's house (homeric-demeter-001).

How this text was obtained. It was taken from the text layer of Meineke's edition and required analysis. Ζήμητρα was corrected to Δήμητρα — Δ had been read as Ζ. The decisive place is in line 3: the scan gives "zai", which might have been καί. But Latin z in this same scan stands for both κ and π — four lines below, "Az0A40" means Ἀπόλλω — and so it is read here as παῖ, "child". The card's English ("child of Zeus") confirms that this is what was printed.