Supplication
specific type of prayer asking a god or someone who is in a position of power for something in a humble way
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.
In Classical Greek religion
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
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.
The public source identifies “Supplication” as specific type of prayer asking a god or someone who is in a position of power for something in a humble way. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Supplication, specific and type.
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This entry incorporates text from “Supplication” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.