Prayer to Earth

The night sacrifice to Mother Earth by the Tiber at the Secular Games of 17 BC. The formula is the same as at the sacrifices to Juno and Jupiter, and is analysed on card juno-002.

Two details matter here, and they distinguish this offering from those.

The first is the time. The Secular Games ran three nights and three days, and the sacrifices were divided accordingly: by day to Jupiter, Juno, Apollo and Diana; by night to the powers below and the chthonic ones — the Moirae, the Ilithyiae and Mother Earth. The same formula was spoken in daylight and in the dark, only the name and the animal changing.

The second is the animal itself: sue plena propria, with a pregnant sow of her own. The pregnancy is not incidental: to Earth one offers a gravid female, returning fertility to fertility. And propria, her own, is a legal reservation: the animal is recognised as belonging to the goddess before it is killed, and the sacrifice is drawn up as the handing over to her of what is already hers.

The stone is more badly broken here than in the neighbouring prayers: almost everything in square brackets has been restored by editors from the parallel formulae of the same inscription.