POMPA. — From the Greek πομπή “procession” (from πέμπω “send,” “accompany”), it is the solemn procession that in Greece and Rome accompanies: 1) magistrates and sacred symbols toward a consecrated place, a temple (v. PROCESSIONE), or toward a site of public games; 2) the bride to the bridegroom’s house; 3) the deceased to burial. A religious significance is always implicit in the p.
In the nuptial procession (p. nuptialis), the young woman leaves her father’s house accompanied by her relatives and preceded by an escort of girls and young men of her own age; at funerals (p. funeris), the bier was preceded by the herald (proeco) and the flute-player (sitice), who modulated the funeral chant, by the insignia of the offices held, and by the wax images of the ancestors; in the triumphal procession (p. triumphalis), the general, dressed in purple and crowned with laurel, advanced on a quadriga drawn by white horses toward the Capitol; from there the solemn procession descended into the circus for games, either those vowed by the victor or the ordinary ones held at the end of the autumn military campaign; and this explains the affinity between the triumphal and the circensian procession.
In the circensian procession (p. circensis), the magistrate occupied the place of honor, proceeding on a two-horse chariot, wearing a purple toga, the tunica palmata, a crown on his head, and holding a scepter with an eagle. The procession was opened by young men whose parents were both still living; they were followed by those taking part in the games, lesser ministers of the cult with smoking censers, priests, images of the gods carried in the arms or on litters (fercula), and their primitive attributes and symbols, perhaps of a fetish-like type, called by the benevolent euphemism exuviae deorum, on small two-wheeled carts. The circensian procession, having left the Capitol, reached the Circus Maximus and circled around the spina so that the people might admire II. When the procession arrived beneath the balcony of the magistrate presiding, a sacrifice was celebrated, after which the games began. The fullest description of the circensian procession is that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (VII, 70).
The ostentatious manifestation of pagan worship characteristic of the procession, which for Christianity was a diabolical manifestation (omnes di gentium daemonia), led to the catechumen’s being invited, in the baptismal rite, to renounce the processions (Tertullian, De cor., 3 “to the procession”) of Satan, summing up in this word all the ceremonies and vanities deriving from paganism.