All sacrifices and offerings required an accompanying prayer to be effective.
Pliny the Elder declared that "a sacrifice without prayer is thought to be useless and not a proper consultation of the gods."
[34] Prayer by itself, however, had independent power. The spoken word was thus the single most potent religious action, and knowledge of the correct verbal formulas the key to efficacy.
[35] Accurate naming was vital for tapping into the desired powers of the deity invoked, hence the proliferation of cult epithets among Roman deities.
[36] Public prayers (
prex) were offered loudly and clearly by a priest on behalf of the community.
Public religious ritual had to be enacted by specialists and professionals faultlessly; a mistake might require that the action, or even the entire festival, be repeated from the start.[37] The historian
Livy reports an occasion when the presiding magistrate at the
Latin festival forgot to include the "Roman people" among the list of beneficiaries in his prayer; the festival had to be started over.
[38] Even private prayer by an individual was formulaic, a recitation rather than a personal expression, though selected by the individual for a particular purpose or occasion.
