Roman religion can often be reduced to a variety of ritual transactions to ensure the maintenance of good relations between gods and men and the prospering of Rome's endeavours domi militiaeque. While it is true that aspects of the state religious apparatus were operated in the manner of levers and pulleys, the complex relationship between official functions and popular piety is only now being accorded its proper place in the study of Roman religion. Caroline Février's Supplicare deis represents one such contribution to this burgeoning field of inquiry. A reworking of her doctoral thesis Le pontife et le décemvir, a study of the interaction between two of the priestly colleges in expiatory lore, this monograph focuses on the origins and applications of the Roman rite of procuratio from the fifth through to the first century b.c. Thereafter the rite vanishes, perhaps washed away in a flood of equally prodigious social, political and religious upheavals.

F. employs an eminently Roman principle in giving her study a tripartite structure, with each partie subdivided into three chapters. The first part addresses the necessary methodological questions of ‘Définition et structure du rite’. A brief first chapter considers the typology of supplicationes and the origin of the word itself: F. explores the subtle interplay between supplication and placation, both in terms of posture and the wider construction of religious ‘attitudes’. Ch. 2 attends to the forms of prayer and sacrifice associated with these rituals. The author is to be commended for her analysis of obsecratio which has often, erroneously, been used interchangeably (since Livy onwards) with supplicatio. F. convincingly demonstrates the unique function of this element in the process of expiation; it is around this notion of collective prayer that the various agents of Roman religious life — senate, populus and priestly collegia — are seen to congregate and participate in this constitutive feature of the ritual. The gestures which would have accompanied the ritual are the focus of the third chapter. An important aspect of F.'s treatment is the recognition that women played a prominent part in the manifestations of grief and formalized abjection in the face of disaster: it is not an easy task to filter out which of these rehearsed social conventions bled into the ritual repertoire of expiation and which gestures were regarded as intrinsic to supplicatio. Although definitive conclusions necessarily evade a study of this nature, this chapter offers an intriguing, if speculative, analysis of the relationship between the ways in which clientela and relations homme à homme mirrored power relations between the citizen body and Rome's tutelary deities.

The second part mostly addresses the origins of supplicatio, with a considerable emphasis, over two chapters, on the tension between the ritus graecus and the ritus romanus, especially in the propitiatory celebration of lectisternia. The connection between these rites has been fertile ground for scholars — from Agnes Kirsopp Lake in the 1930s to our contemporary John Scheid — and F.'s approach clearly shows the influence of both approaches, especially in rejecting a hellenizing tendency in accounting for the gradual development of expiatory rituals such as supplicatio from a ‘profane’ rite to one clearly within the purview of religious officials. In a third chapter, F. mounts a robust defence of the Roman character of supplication, permitting only superficial ‘Greek’ overtones in minor aspects of the rite.

Having explored the origins of the rites, from mourning matronae to the formalism of the middle Republic, F.'s third part focuses on the performance of the procuratio itself. In the first chapter, particular attention is given to the involvement of the various priestly colleges in determining a hierarchy of prodigies and their expiation. The central plank of F.'s thesis is the relationship between the decemviri and the pontifices, representing the ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ traditions respectively (with a lesser rôle accorded to the haruspices). With its discussion of the ceremonial itself in ch. 2, F. offers us the chapter which will be most accessible to students of Roman religion, especially those of the ‘faire/croire’ school of analysing ritual practices. The liturgical ‘meat’ of expiation — in terms of which gods were to be placated, the actors involved and the sacred spaces they inhabited — is rendered wholly palatable by crisp exposition and a supply of intriguing, though not burdensome, detail. Sadly, a hint of aridity creeps into the final chapter: F.'s attempt to offer a chronology of the rite's (or rites’) decline feels somewhat repetitive.

In her conclusion, however, F. offers us a compelling image of a religious ritual in which it is the people themselves, and not so much the priesthoods, who play the major part. Although much time is given to the rival and competing claims of religious specialists, it is the suggestive image of a fearful populace flocking to the sanctuaries in times of crisis, which captures the reader. A series of Annexes, stretching over thirty-six pages, offer a variety of critical tools: a glossary, a series of primary source texts, arranged in chronological order (the vast majority, predictably, from Livy) with following French translations, and a chronological table of supplicationes. Hidden at the end of the book, this is a jewel of an appendix, offering a description of the prodigy, the authorizing priests and any distinguishing details of the event. Frustratingly, there is no index and the bibliography, although ample, is, for a 2009 publication, lacking in more recent scholarship. It would have been interesting to read the author's engagement with Rosenberger's Gezähmte Götter – Das Prodigienwesen der römischen Republik (1998) or Van Haeperen's Le Collège pontifical (2002), both of which have interesting things to say in this field. Such minor criticisms aside, F. has produced a penetrating study of a much neglected facet of religious life in Republican Rome — indeed un prodige in its own right.