Cat got your tongue? Or maybe it’s just a curse… (6th C BC – 1st C AD)
“I bind down Aristaichmos the smith before those below and Pyrrhias the smith and his work and their souls and Sosias of Lamia and his work and soul and what they say and what they do…”
– lead curse tablet from Athens, 4th C BC; found in the walls of a house
A curse tablet , or ‘binding spell’, was a certain kind of curse used to ask the gods to bring harm to someone; generally this would be a person against whom one was competing – in a law court, at an athletic event, or even a rival lover. For example, a curse tablet written by a court prosecutor might ask the gods to bind the wits and tongue of his opponent, to prevent him from mounting a strong defense. In athletic competitions, a curse might ask that a various parts of a rival’s body be ‘bound’ – his arms, shoulders, eyes, or whatever part that would be most important for the competition – so that the rival would not perform effectively.
In the classical world, curse tablets were usually very thin sheets of lead upon which the text of the curse could be inscribed. Then, the entire sheet was rolled up or folded, and pierced with an iron nail. These tablets were often buried in the ground, either inside of a grave or a well, or in a relevant area – if the curse was against a rival lover, the tablet could be buried next to his house, or in the arena for a curse against a fellow athlete. The simplest texts consisted of just the person’s name, though much longer and more elaborate curses were not uncommon.
The second type of binding spell was slightly more bizarre: lead ‘voodoo dolls’ were physically bound, stabbed with nails, and placed inside lead boxes. These types of curses are considered ‘sympathetic’, in the sense that the victim was persuaded by the curse to become like the lead material: “…as this lead is valueless and cold, so let him and his deeds be cold and valueless…”*.
It is likely that curse tablets were also written on perishable materials such as wood or papyrus, however these have long disappeared from the archaeological record. What is very interesting is that this seemed to be a common practice in Greek and Roman society – indeed, there was a very real fear of curses in the ancient world. In Selinous, a 5th C BC city in Sicily, the city government set up a column in the town square, explaining how a person could rid themselves of an avenging spirit brought on by a curse!
*Christopher A. Faraone, “Aeschylus’ umnos desmios (Eum. 306) and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets”,
The Journal of Hellenic Studies 105 (1985), pp. 150-154.
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