Prayer to Jupiter Capitolinus
Jupiter Capitolinus · Mars Gradivus · VestaVelleius Paterculus ends his history of Rome with a prayer. The narrative breaks off, the author steps out of it and addresses the gods — a rare device in Roman historiography.
Vos publica voce obtestor — you I adjure with the public voice. A private man, a writer, declares his voice to be the community's and prays for the state as a magistrate would. He has no right to do so; he appropriates it — and in that appropriation lies the whole political character of the work.
Three are named: Jupiter of the Capitol, Mars Gradivus as "begetter and stabiliser of the Roman name", Vesta with her everlasting fires. Then the covering clause: "and whatever divinities have raised this mass". The arrangement is standard in Roman prayer (cf. livy-scipio-001), and custodite, servate, protegite is the familiar tripling of the verb.
The substance is at the end, and it concerns the succession: appoint the princeps successors as late as possible, but ones whose necks can bear the weight.
This was written under Tiberius by a man close to Sejanus, and so the request about a successor is politics, not piety. Sejanus fell in AD 31; it is supposed that Velleius perished with him, though this is not certainly known. A prayer about the future went out of date almost as soon as it was written down.