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Curse Tablets of Roman Britain
Curse Tablets of Roman Britain
‘Curse tablets’ are small sheets of lead, inscribed with messages from
individuals seeking to make gods and spirits act on their behalf and
influence the behaviour of others against their will. The motives are
usually malign and their expression violent, for example to wreck an
opponent’s chariot in the circus, to compel a person to submit to sex or
to take revenge on a thief. Letters and lines written back to front,
magical ‘gibberish’ and arcane words and symbols often lend the texts
additional power to persuade. In places where supernatural agents could
be contacted, thrown into sacred pools at temples, interred with the
dead or hidden by the turning post at the circus, these tablets have
survived to be found by archaeologists.
Our written evidence for the Greek and Roman world mostly derives from
literary texts written by and for small aristocratic groups, but in
curse tablets we hear different voices, of provincials and non-citizens
on the edge of empire, women and slaves. With the growing number of
discoveries, scholars have become more familiar with the scripts and are
reading texts with greater confidence. Since the major discoveries of
curses at Bath and at Uley Roman Britain has been at the centre of the
study of curse tablets, since the province is currently the principal
source for new discoveries of curses in Latin.
The following pages introduce curse tablets in the ancient world at
large and in Britain in particular. They outline the preparation of
curses, from making the tablet through writing the text to dispatching
the curse to the gods. They examine the languages and scripts in which
they were written, the cursers, the scribes and those who were cursed.
Motives for cursing and the supernatural powers engaged to put curses
into effect are investigated. We explore too where tablets are found and
how they are preserved and interpreted by archaeologists and
historians.
Throughout this introduction cross-references are made to the tablets
and to the archaeological sites presented elsewhere in this website.
Evidence from other curse tablets in Britain, especially Bath, and
across the ancient world is also used.
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