Library › Latin: Myth, Hymn & Religion › Precatio Omnium Herbarum
A short pagan prayer to all medicinal herbs, preserved with herbal manuscripts and printed among the minor Latin poems as no. 5 of the Anthologia Latina. The speaker beseeches the powerful herbs, born of Mother Earth and given to all peoples, to which she has granted the power of healing, to come with their virtues, for the Earth who created them has permitted him to gather them, and the one to whom medicine was entrusted favours him.
The prayer illustrates the religious rituals that accompanied the gathering of medicinal plants in antiquity. Together with the companion prayer to Mother Earth, it shows how healing, magic and devotion to the Earth were joined in Roman popular religion, and it continued to be copied in the medical manuscripts of the Christian Middle Ages.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: A. M. Duff, J. W. Duff, 1934), 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.