The Hymn of the Field-Brethren

The Carmen Arvale is the archaic hymn of the Arval Brethren (Fratres Arvales), an ancient Roman priestly college concerned with the fertility of the fields, and it is one of the oldest pieces of Latin to survive. It is preserved because it was inscribed on stone as part of the recorded proceedings of the college in the early third century CE, by which time the Latin of the hymn was already so archaic that it must have been barely intelligible to the priests who chanted it, a striking instance of a sacred text preserved and recited long after its language had passed out of use, its holiness bound to the exact ancient words. The hymn calls upon the Lares and upon Mars for protection and the warding off of ruin from the fields and the people. Its extreme antiquity and the difficulty of its language have made it a much-studied object for scholars of early Latin and of Roman religion, and it stands as a rare direct survival of the archaic ritual poetry of Rome.

Its archaic Latin includes forms and words that had already vanished from ordinary use by the late Republic, so that even Roman antiquarians found parts of it obscure, and the priests are thought to have recited it more by fixed memorization than by living comprehension of every word, a striking case of ritual conservatism outweighing intelligibility. The stone inscription that preserves it also records the choreography of the rite, including a ritual dance the priests performed while chanting, giving scholars rare evidence for how an archaic Roman hymn was physically as well as verbally performed.