Corpus de prières grecques et romaines

In the civilisations of the Ancient World, where the holy was omnipresent, any undertaking of importance was placed under the aegis of the gods, for no other course of action was conceivable. Humankind addressed the divinity in particular through prayer, a means of communication of which Greek and Latin texts furnish numerous examples. The goal of the present work is to reflect the diversity of these speech acts to the gods in presenting a corpus of Greek and Roman pagan prayer. The authors have selected some two hundred texts covering all of the ancient period and representing different sources and genres : formulaic prayers of rituel, literary prayers in verse and prose, private writings, mystical and magical texts, and so on. They have presented the documents in the original tongue with a new translation and a commentary.

This is the companion volume to the Analytic Bibliography of Greek and Roman Prayer (Bibliographie analytique de la prière grecque et romaine) which began the collection.

Frédéric Chapot and Bernard Laurot, specialists of ancient language and literature, are associate professors at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.