Prayer to Silvanus

A verse inscription set up in the mountains of Narbonese Gaul by a man who gives his name: Titus Pomponius Victor, an official in imperial service.

Semicluse fraxino — half-enclosed in the sacred ash. One word, and it holds the whole theology of a woodland god: Silvanus is neither beside the tree nor under it but half inside it. The god is visible and not visible, because he is the tree, half emerged into the visible.

Huius alti summe custos hortuli — highest guardian of this high little garden. Hortulus, a little garden, is a diminutive, and it is said of an alpine clearing. The official speaks to the place fondly and domestically, as to his own vegetable plot, though he is standing on duty in someone else's mountains.

Grates … musicas — thanks in music. The verses themselves are declared to be the offering; a travelling official had nothing else about him. The same reckoning as Ovid's in the Fasti (ovid-bacchus-001): a poet pays the god in what he knows how to make.

The poem does not end here. Buecheler prints it in full: further on, Titus Pomponius Victor explains that Silvanus keeps him and his people safe per arua perq. montis Alpicos, over fields and Alpine mountains, while he "administers the law and discharges the business of the Caesars" — and asks to be brought back to Rome and given Italian fields to till. The card holds the first three verses, that is, the address alone; the request the whole thing was written for is not on it.

That also explains the diminutive "little garden": the official is homesick for an Italian estate while standing in an Alpine clearing.