Prayer to Mother Earth

In his seventh satire — on the poverty of men who live by their minds — Juvenal recalls the ancients who knew how to honour teachers, and wishes their shades a good earth.

The formula is taken from tombstones: tenuem et sine pondere terram, thin and weightless earth, is the same sit tibi terra levis that stands on thousands of stones (terra-funerary-001). The satirist uses a ready-made graveyard wish as a quotation, and it was recognised instantly.

But he continues it, and the continuation is no longer epigraphic: "and breathing crocuses and everlasting spring in the urn". Crocuses were planted at graves; spring is an image of blessedness beyond death. All of that is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the last word.

In urna perpetuum ver — everlasting spring in the urn. A whole season is placed inside a vessel the size of a jug. Juvenal takes the funerary wish to its actual scale: everything one can wish a dead man fits inside a burial urn, and the urn is no roomier for it.