Prayer to Venus

Two girls thrown ashore by a night shipwreck have caught hold of Venus' altar and will not let go: from an altar not even their owner has the right to take them. Sanctuary at a holy place was a real legal institution in antiquity, and the whole scene rests on it.

Genibus nixae — kneeling. In this corpus that posture is noted where the case is desperate: with the hundred and ten matrons at the Secular Games (juno-003) and with Encolpius on the threshold of a shrine (petronius-priapus-001).

They transfer the case from themselves to the goddess: not "we have been wronged" but "those criminals made light of your shrine". The suit is reassigned to the injured deity, and she is invited to avenge herself. The same manoeuvre as in the British curse tablet (neptunus-007).

And the best of it is the excuse at the end. One had to approach an altar clean, and the girls, soaked and dishevelled, hasten to declare that "we have both been thoroughly washed overnight by Neptune's efforts", and so ask not to be held hateful for it. A shipwreck is produced as a ritual ablution. The joke is legally impeccable, and no less terrible for that: girls who nearly drowned in the night are afraid first of all of being ritually unclean.