Curse the Charioteer: Magic at the Circus

Somebody in third-century Carthage sat down with a thin sheet of lead and wrote out the entire roster of the Red team. Not the drivers this time. The horses: Silvanus, Servator, Lues, and more besides, each named individually, each entrusted by name to whatever power was going to receive the tablet once it went into the ground.

Bind their hands, the text says, though horses do not have hands. Take away their victory. Now, quickly.

The urgency at the end is not decoration. Whoever wrote this needed the curse to work before the starting gates opened, not eventually, not someday. That is the whole genre in miniature: specific, timed, and aimed at animals with names that mattered to somebody very much.

Fifty tablets, one obsession

No part of the Roman world has produced more circus curse tablets than Roman Africa. More than fifty survive from Carthage and Hadrumetum (modern Sousse, in Tunisia) alone, most of them cataloged by Auguste Audollent at the start of the twentieth century and still the basis for everything written about them since.

They are part of a wider habit. Curse tablets already existed for lawsuits, business rivals, and love, and chariot racing simply gave the technology its most popular subject. Nowhere else in the Roman world combined organised gambling, fanatical team loyalty, and a result decided in minutes, in public, in front of everyone who had money on it.

The tablets follow the shape of the sport itself: four factions, Blues, Greens, Reds and Whites, each with its horses and drivers named individually, and each curse aimed with precision at one of them rather than at the field in general.

Buried with the restless dead

The method is the same one used against lawsuits and love rivals. A thin lead sheet, scratched with a stylus, rolled or folded, and buried somewhere the writer believed the underworld could reach it.

Graves were preferred, and specifically the graves of people who had died young or violently, whose spirits were thought to still be close to their bodies and available for hire. A grave near the circus itself was a bonus. Some tablets went straight into the track.

The wording escalates fast. One Hadrumetum text asks that the named horses and charioteers be unable to run tomorrow or the day after, that they collapse in the circus every hour they try. Another, cataloged among the Carthage group, asks for drivers to be overturned, dragged, and cut to pieces, addressed to a demon summoned specifically for the job.

The same hand, twice

Two of the Hadrumetum tablets, numbered 277 and 278 in Audollent's catalogue, were re-examined by Celia Sánchez-Natalías in 2023. Her conclusion: the same professional practitioner wrote both, before they were deposited together in the same grave.

That single finding does a lot of work. It means at least some of this material was not a desperate fan scratching out a curse alone by lamplight. It was commissioned, from someone who did this for a living and produced more than one tablet to order.

A separate group of Hadrumetum tablets makes the same point from a different angle. They share four recurring sequences of charakteres, invented magical symbols with no alphabetic meaning, one sequence appearing on ten different tablets, thirty-four separate times. Whoever produced that material was working from a fixed formulary, not improvising each curse from scratch.

Fandom, or a business risk

The obvious reading is passion: a fan of the Blues, furious at the Greens, paying to see them lose. R.L. Gordon's study of the Carthage and Hadrumetum material argues for something closer to professional risk management. Chariot racing ran on organised betting, and a curse aimed at a specific named horse the week before a race looks less like a fan's tantrum and more like an attempt to hedge a wager, or sabotage a rival stable's investment, by whatever means were available.

The money involved was real, and so were the stakes for the people it employed. A successful charioteer named Gaius Appuleius Diocles retired with career earnings recorded on his own funerary inscription at a sum some modern historians have called the largest fortune of any athlete in history, ancient or modern. Most drivers started as slaves. A win record was a route out of slavery and into wealth most free citizens never touched, which means a curse against a named driver was not aimed at an abstraction. It was aimed at someone with everything riding on the next few laps.

The two explanations are not competitive. A fan with money on the outcome and a fan without one write the same kind of tablet for different reasons, and nothing in the lead itself tells us which this particular curse was. What the tablets do prove is that magic aimed at chariot racing was common enough, and valuable enough, to support practitioners who specialised in it, kept formulas on file, and served more than one customer from the same stock of symbols.

What outlasted the race

None of the horses named on these tablets are attested anywhere else. Silvanus, Servator, Lues, and every other animal cursed at Carthage and Hadrumetum raced, won or lost, and died, leaving no trace in any other record.

The lead outlived every one of them. Two thousand years later we can still read the names the curse wanted destroyed, which is a strange kind of survival for an animal that was never expected to be remembered at all.