Prayer to Venus

A single line opening the fourth book of the Fasti — the book of April, Venus' month. Ovid begins it as he began March with an address to Mars (ovid-mars-001): with the owner of the month.

Alma — nourishing, fostering. It is Venus' most persistent epithet: Lucretius calls her by it at the opening of his poem on the nature of things (venus-001), and so do the shipwrecked girls in Plautus (venus-005). Three centuries, three genres, one word; epithets of this kind are a deity's real name, while the proper name only indicates who is meant.

Geminorum mater Amorum — mother of the twin Loves. Who the two are Ovid does not explain: either Eros and Anteros, love and love returned, or one Love apiece for the two Venuses, the heavenly and the common. The distinction was a schoolroom commonplace, and a poet beginning a book about love leaves both possibilities open — he will need both.