Curse Tablets: Sixteen Hundred Letters Written to the Dead

Ancient literature was written by a very small group of people — aristocrats, essentially, with the leisure to compose and the money to have copies made. When we say we know what the Greeks and Romans thought, we mostly mean we know what a few thousand wealthy men wrote down.

Curse tablets are the exception, and it's a big one. Over sixteen hundred survive, scratched into lead by people who were often barely literate, and none of them were meant to be read by anyone alive. No rhetoric, no self-presentation, no managing an audience. Just a name, a wish, and instructions.

They're sixteen hundred pieces of mail addressed to the underworld. They were undeliverable, so we still have them.

The procedure

Remarkably consistent across eight centuries and the whole Mediterranean, which tells you something about how the knowledge circulated.

Take a thin sheet of lead, often cut from scrap or a water pipe. Scratch the text with a stylus or a nail. Roll or fold it, sometimes drive a nail through it, and deposit it somewhere the chthonic powers can collect it.

Graves are the commonest destination — and preferentially the graves of people who died young or violently. The reasoning was that such spirits hadn't settled, stayed near their remains, and were therefore both present and aggrieved. A restless ghost made a good courier.

Wells and springs served the same purpose as holes downward. So did the sanctuaries of underworld gods. At Bath they went into hot water rising out of the earth, which apparently counted too.

Many tablets manipulate the writing itself: text running right to left, or in a spiral, letters reversed, the victim's name written backwards. Sympathetic logic made typographic. Distort the writing, distort the person.

What people actually asked for

Lawsuits. One of the largest groups, and the request is rarely that the opponent lose. It's that he be unable to speak. Bind his tongue. Freeze his mind. Let him forget his arguments in front of the jury. In a legal system decided by oral performance before large juries, the ability to speak was the case.

Competition. Athletes cursing rivals, actors cursing actors, and an entire industry around the circus — tablets from Carthage and Rome curse named charioteers and their horses, listing the animals individually, asking that they crash or stumble or fail to leave the gate.

Business. Tavern keepers and shopkeepers cursing the competitor down the street. Bind his hands, his trade, his customers.

Love, in the worst sense. Separation curses to break up an existing couple, and attraction curses, which are the ugliest material in the corpus — demands that a named person be denied sleep, food and peace until they come to the operator. Like the equivalent recipes in the magical papyri, these aren't about affection.

Notice the pattern underneath the list. Almost every category concerns a contest with a specific named rival. These aren't attempts at general malice or world-shaping power. They're attempts to win one particular fight, by someone who clearly expected to lose it without help.

Bath, where they aren't really curses

About 130 tablets were pulled from the sacred spring at Aquae Sulis, thrown into the hot water that rises there. They're a distinct genre, and they change the impression the rest of the corpus gives.

The subject is overwhelmingly theft — specifically theft at the baths, where you had to leave your clothes unattended while bathing. Someone's cloak has gone. Someone's gloves. Six coins. A bath tunic. A ploughshare.

And the formula isn't vengeance so much as legal appeal. The writer tells the goddess Sulis Minerva what was taken, frequently states that they are giving the stolen property to her — transferring ownership to a deity, which reframes the theft as an offence against a god rather than a person — and asks her to afflict the thief until it's returned to the temple.

Since the culprit is unknown, tablets often list suspects by name, or cover the field: whether man or woman, slave or free, boy or girl. One writer asks that the thief lose their mind and their eyes in the goddess's temple. Another asks that they become as liquid as the water — which, given where the tablet was thrown, is a good line.

Scholars call these prayers for justice rather than curses, and the distinction holds. The writer has been robbed, can't identify who did it, has no realistic legal recourse over a stolen cloak, and appeals to the only authority available. That isn't sorcery. It's what you did when there was nobody else to complain to.

Why they matter more than they look

Three things emerge that we couldn't get any other way.

Ordinary literacy was more widespread than assumed. Many tablets are ungrammatical, misspelt, or written in shaky letters — and that's the point. Some were clearly commissioned from professionals, since near-identical formulae recur in the same hand. But plenty are homemade, by people writing badly and writing anyway.

The magic/religion line doesn't hold. The Bath tablets address a goddess in her own temple in the language of petition, and are formally indistinguishable from prayer. Elsewhere the same technology serves straightforward malice. The ancient distinction wasn't between religion and magic as categories, but between what the community endorsed and what it didn't — a social judgement, applied inconsistently.

These are real grievances. A stolen tunic. A rival tavern. A court case that decides whether a family keeps its property. A charioteer who keeps winning. The concerns of people whose names appear nowhere else in history, and who exist for us only because they were angry enough to write it in lead and bury it.

Plato complains in the Republic about itinerant specialists going door to door selling binding spells. He means it as a sneer. What he's actually recording is a functioning service industry meeting steady demand across the ancient world — whose customer records happen to be made of a metal that doesn't rot.