Supplicare deis

Amongst the rites for procurating prodigies, those ominous signs of divine anger, the supplication holds a special place.

A lavish ceremony in which not only the priests but the whole Roman people took part, it gathered men, women, and children who were due to visit all the sanctuaries of the City in order to address their prayer to the gods, according to a religious rhetoric where verbal request and body language were associated. Through the supplicatio, ‘self-abasement’ rather than a properly ‘kneeling’ rite which a much debated etymology suggests, Roman people intended to placate deities of whom they acknowledged in the same way as the undeniable superiority.

The purpose of the present work is to define this rite, regarding the people, the places and the various elements it involved. At the same time, the point is also to clarify the controversial origins of a ceremonial traditionally related to the ritus Graecus. Quite similar to the supplication ‘between human people’ with which it shares most of its ritual elements, the religious supplication seems to have been influenced by the ritus Graecus and the practices which come under it, without asserting, though, a Greek origin. Complexity and contradictions characterise, as well, the supplication which, without breaking thoroughly with the austerity of ancestral rites, still belongs to the typically Roman procuration. Officially attested since the fifth century B. C., this rite disappeared in the last century of the Roman Republic, just as the notion of prodigy changed, under the influence of a new way of thinking.

Caroline Février is maître de conférences in Latin language at the University of Caen. Her research work focuses mainly on Roman religion. Her doctoral thesis and several of her articles are devoted to the expiation of prodigies.