Supplication

Supplication (also known as petitioning) is a form of prayer, wherein one party humbly or earnestly asks another party to provide something, either for the party who is doing the supplicating (e.g., "Please spare my life.") or on behalf of someone else. Supplication is a theme of earliest antiquity, embodied in the Iliad as the prayers of Chryses for the return of his daughter, and of Priam for the dead body of his son, Hector. Richard Martin notes repeated references to supplicants throughout the poem, including warriors begging to be spared by the Greeks on the battlefield. In ancient Rome, formal supplication as a request, whether to a private individual or following surrender or military defeat, had four formal steps:

1. Approach: the suppliant approaches the supplicandus, the person from whom the request is sought. During the Republican era, this approach was not made at an altar and was not considered a prayer (prex) in the technical religious sense.
2. Identification: the suppliant performs conventional gestures or words in order to identify himself.
3. Request: the suppliant states what his request is and may present an argument for why he should receive it.
4. Rejection or acceptance: The supplicandus may reject the request. If he accepts it, he makes a pledge to fulfill it. The pledge to fulfill the request is the part of the process considered sacred and witnessed by deities including Fides and Jupiter. In Latin, the word submissio more commonly expresses this act than supplicatio, which was a form of public prayer procession. In the Imperial era, however, a petition to the emperor for judicial review was called a supplicatio, with the term later used for a request that the emperor review a legal judgment that otherwise would not have been subject to appeal. In Christianity, the prayer of supplication for health by and on behalf of the sick is referenced in early Christian writings in the New Testament, especially James 5:13-16.