Prayer to Aesculapius and Salus

From Terence's Mother-in-Law: a young woman is ill in the house, and an older one speaks a few words in passing, on her way.

The whole prayer lies in a negation. Nequid sit huius — let none of this be. Of what, exactly, is not said. Death is not named, the illness is not named; only "this" is named, by a pronoun. People spoke so not from delicacy but from caution: a word once uttered was held capable of coming true, and an evil name was best not let out into the air. The same reckoning by which the gods below were called the Kindly Ones.

Two are invoked: Aesculapius and Salus. The first is a physician, the second is Health itself, an abstraction deified with a temple of her own on the Quirinal. A Roman asking for one thing addresses at once the one who treats and the outcome that is wanted.

A discrepancy on this card. The occasion field names Pamphilus as the speaker; in this edition the words belong to Sostrata. The line number (328) has not been verified against it either.