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The Carmen Arvale is the ritual hymn of the Arval Brethren, an ancient Roman priesthood devoted to the fertility of the fields. It survives in the inscribed records of the brotherhood’s ceremonies for AD 218, where the priests are said to have danced as they sang it from written copies. Each line is repeated three times: it calls on the Lares and Mars to help, to keep plague and ruin from the people, to be sated and stand on the threshold, and closes with a fivefold triumpe.
Its language is so archaic — enos for nos, Marmar for Mars — that it was probably barely understood by the priests who sang it. Preserved by religious conservatism long after its composition, it is among the oldest surviving specimens of the Latin language and of Roman ritual poetry.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: J. Blänsdorf, FPL, 2011), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.