Binding Spells and the Ancient Courtroom

Imagine you are being sued in classical Athens.

There is no lawyer. You will stand up and speak for yourself, in front of a jury that may number two hundred, five hundred, or more, all of them ordinary citizens chosen by lot that morning. A water clock measures your time and stops for nobody. When both sides have spoken, the jury votes immediately, without deliberating, without discussion, without retiring. There is no appeal. The whole thing is finished by evening.

Your case is your speech. There is nothing else.

Now you understand what the curse tablets are for.

Sixty-seven tablets, one request

Judicial curses are the largest identifiable category of Greek binding spells: around sixty-seven tablets aimed squarely at legal opponents, the earliest from the fifth century BCE, and they are remarkably consistent about what they want.

They do not, on the whole, ask for the case to be lost. They do not ask for the jury to be swayed, or for the writer to speak well, or for the gods to reveal the truth. They ask, again and again, for one thing: that the opponent be unable to speak.

The formulas bind the tongue. Then, characteristically, they bind more than the tongue: the soul, the mind, the memory, the words themselves. One tablet from around 300 BCE binds tongue and soul and speech together, and asks that if the targets bring any claim before the arbitrator or the court, they should seem worthless, in word and in deed alike.

Not "let him lose". Let him seem worthless when he opens his mouth.

Why the tongue was the case

This looks like superstition aimed at a strange target until you look at how an Athenian trial actually worked, and then it looks like precision.

There were no professional advocates. A litigant spoke for himself. If he could afford it he bought a speech in advance from a specialist writer (this is how we have the surviving speeches of Lysias and Demosthenes), but he still had to stand up and deliver it, from memory, under time pressure, to a crowd.

The jury was enormous by modern standards and voted on the spot. There was no judge to instruct them on the law, no cross-examination as we would recognise it, no second hearing. Persuasion happened once, in public, in a fixed number of minutes measured by water.

Under those conditions a man who dries up, forgets his argument, or stumbles has not merely performed badly. He has no remaining mechanism by which to win. Binding the tongue is not a curse on a peripheral skill. It is a curse on the entire apparatus of justice as it was actually experienced.

Written badly, by frightened people

The physical tablets carry an argument of their own, and it is Christopher Faraone's, drawn from looking at the earliest ones closely.

They are inconsistent. Handwriting varies wildly between tablets. Spelling is erratic. Many texts are extremely short: a name, a verb, sometimes barely that. If a professional trade in curse-writing existed in the early classical period, these are not its products.

What they look like is ordinary people doing it themselves: someone facing a court date, buying a scrap of lead, scratching a name and a wish, and burying it. The wobbly letters are the evidence.

That changes later. By the Roman imperial period you find near-identical formulae recurring in the same hand across multiple tablets, which is the signature of commissioned work, and the magical papyri preserve the recipe books such a specialist would have used. Plato was already complaining in the fourth century about people going door to door selling binding spells. He means it as a sneer at credulity; read as evidence, it records demand.

The detail that gives it away

One recurring feature of the judicial tablets is genuinely strange, and it says more about the anxiety behind them than the formulas do.

They sometimes bind women (the wife of an opponent, or a woman connected to the case) despite the fact that women could not testify in an Athenian court. There was no speech of hers to freeze. Binding her tongue could not affect the hearing.

Unless, of course, the writer believed the case was not really being decided in the courtroom. Someone who curses a person with no formal voice in the proceedings is telling you where he thinks the influence actually sits: in households, in conversations, in whatever was happening around the trial rather than in it.

You could read that as paranoia. You could also read it as an accurate assessment of how a small city decides things, written by someone who had no other way to act on it.

Not sorcery. Procedure.

Set beside the wider corpus of curse tablets, the stolen cloaks and the rival taverns and the charioteers, the judicial ones stand out for how specific and how rational they are.

Every element is targeted. The mechanism of harm matches the mechanism of the institution. The writer has correctly identified the single point of failure in the process that is about to decide his property, his reputation, or his life, and has aimed everything he has at it.

He is doing what any litigant does the night before a hearing: turning over the one thing that could go wrong, and wishing very hard that it goes wrong for the other man instead. He just had a piece of lead, and we found it.