The inscribed lead curse tablets from Uley and Tarlton in Gloucestershire (published together here) provide surprisingly rich material. Although less extensive than the (urban) Bath or (military) Vindolanda tablets, they offer the best insight currently available into the countryside of Roman Britain and its concerns. For example, Tab. Uley 72 reads:
‘Honoratus to the holy god Mercury. I complain to your Divinity that I have lost two wheels and four cows and many small belongings from my house. I would ask the genius of your Divinity that you do not permit health to the person who has done me wrong, nor (permit) him to lie or sit or drink or eat, whether (he is) man or woman, whether boy or girl, whether slave or free, unless he brings my property to me and gains my concord. With renewed prayers I ask your Divinity that my petition may immediately be evident that I have been vindicated by your Majesty.’
This is a prayer for justice: Honoratus does not know who has taken his cows and therefore cannot pursue the thief via the human justice system—but Mercury knows, and therefore Honoratus appeals to the divine justice system. The Uley tablets, like the Bath ones, are very often of this type. Of course, one might wonder whether Mercury would actually bestir himself to help Honoratus, since there was nothing in it for him and ancient gods rarely acted out of altruism. Therefore some tablets dedicate all or part of the stolen property to the god, incentivising him to get it back: for example in Tab. Uley 2 Saturnina, who has lost linen cloth, ‘gives a third part to the aforesaid god on condition that he exact the property above-written’ (p. 89). This gambit also appears in other British curse tablets, but not in curses from other provinces (p. 18). Roger S. O. Tomlin considers what such a donation would mean in practical terms if the property was in fact recovered: would Saturnina have to give a third of the recovered cloth to the temple, or would she keep it but consider it sacred? There is another possibility he does not mention: perhaps Saturnina would keep the recovered cloth and pay the temple one-third of its value.
In a long, interesting introduction Tomlin collects the information that can be derived from these tablets on topics ranging from the name of the god invoked (Mercury Aruerius, an identification of a Roman with a pre-Roman deity) to the language, handwriting, and layout of the tablets. A section on what kinds of things were stolen reveals that they included a beehive (Tab. Uley 24 is the first documentation of Romano-British beekeeping), women’s underwear, and garments apparently forcibly stripped from their wearer during an altercation (though Tomlin rejects that interpretation on grounds of implausibility, p. 39). Particularly interesting is a section on authorship in which Tomlin argues that the tablets were composed and written by individual petitioners after consultation with the priest, who advised them on the appropriate formulas to use. Illiterate petitioners could scribble random letters (seven such tablets are included in the present collection) or simply deposit blank tablets, 54 of which were found along with the inscribed ones (p. 7).
Unfortunately, few of the tablets are completely intelligible. Of the 93 presented in this volume (86 from Uley despite the numbering 1-87, since there is no Tab. Uley 64, plus seven from Tarlton), only 13 offer a complete Latin text, and one of those texts is only one word long. Another 37 offer a partially intelligible text, 22 offer legible letters but no sense, and 21 do not even bear legible letters. The usable content of the tablets is therefore much lower than would seem from the number of texts involved, but it is nevertheless good that the unintelligible texts have been included, both because their material form provides information about cursing practices (how the tablets were folded, whether they were pierced, etc.) and because the photographs and drawings provided here could enable future scholars to make more headway with them.
Most of the unintelligible texts are unintelligible because too few letters can be read, but two (Tab. Uley 7 and 35) provide rather a lot of letters and seem to be in a language other than Latin. Tomlin suggests that they were composed in a Celtic language written in the Roman alphabet, which would be historically plausible, and I understand that Celticists are actively working on those two. A third tablet (Tab. Uley 39) seems to be in Latin but is nevertheless unintelligible for palaeographic reasons.
Tab. Uley 52 is Latin in Greek script, not a phonetic transcription but a letter-by-letter encipherment of the way the Latin would be spelled. There are some bizarre features here: Latin u/v is consistently transcribed with υο rather than the ου normal for u (v would at this period normally be written β), and e is transcribed with η regardless of length. Tomlin says (pp. 231-2) that q is transliterated κυο and the u after it accidentally omitted, but given how qu is normally represented in Greek script, probably the κ represents q and the υο u: the writer did not make a mistake.
The seven Tarlton tablets (two of which are intelligible) are new material that has never been published before. By contrast the Uley tablets are in principle not new. Many were published piecemeal in Britannia between 1973 and 2021, and the entire group was presented (Tab. Uley 1-5 with full editions, the others only as descripta with perhaps a few words of text) in 1993 as part of the Uley excavation report.[1] All are included in Sánchez Natalias’s 2022 corpus of Latin curse tablets[2] (which in the case of descripta simply repeats the information in the 1993 report), and many have also been treated elsewhere.
Nevertheless, this volume is in a meaningful sense the first full publication of the Uley corpus. More than 60 of the tablets had previously been presented only with minimal descriptions; many of these still have no intelligible text, but now they all have colour photographs, drawings, and full descriptions. The tablets that can be read have transcriptions, translations, and detailed commentaries, and ones previously published elsewhere often have new readings. Unfortunately the editions have no apparatus criticus, and new readings are rarely signalled as such in the commentary. Publications of curse tablets seem traditionally to lack apparatuses, and until recently that made sense because most texts had been published only once or twice. But by now there are so many publications of each text that it is high time editors of curse tablets joined those of papyri in providing a proper record of where their readings come from. (The fact that nearly all previous readings stem ultimately from Tomlin himself is in my view irrelevant here: editors of papyri state explicitly where they have changed their mind from their own previous editions, and that information is often very helpful to readers who expect the earlier readings and need to know, for example, whether the new ones are deliberate changes or typos.)
Deprived of the assistance that an apparatus would have given in evaluating the extent to which the readings in this edition are new, I examined an 18-tablet sample consisting of every fifth Uley tablet, comparing them with previous publications. Five (Tab. Uley 1, 5, 50, 55, 80) had already received proper editions elsewhere; two of these appear here with effectively the same readings and three with significant changes, only one of which is flagged in their commentaries. These changes all seem to be improvements. Four (Tab. Uley 20, 40, 70, 75) had previously been published only as descriptions that included readings of one or more words; three of these appear here with much improved, substantially intelligible texts that include the words originally read, but one makes a significant change to the original reading. (That is Tab. Uley 70, where Severino is now Severini; from the drawing the i seems certain, but the photograph is indecipherable and the drawing represents only lines that Tomlin considers parts of letters – is Severino a possible reading, or simply a mistake?) The remaining nine had previously been presented as descripta with no legible words; of these two (Tab. Uley 30, 60) now have at least some intelligible text, five (Tab. Uley 15, 35, 45, 65, 85) now have at least some legible letters but no intelligible text, and only two (Tab. Uley 10, 25) remain completely illegible. All changes seem to be improvements; my examination did not turn up any identifiable new mistakes.
One thing the tablets have lost, sadly, is their dates. The excavation report assigned most of them to specific periods in the site’s history, but those datings have now been withdrawn. Tomlin argues (p. 2) that the locations where the tablets were found are not where they were originally deposited, and in consequence that they can be dated only within the general parameters of second to fourth century AD.
The editions may not entirely follow the Leiden conventions, for the explanation of transcription conventions (p. 81) states that [ ] are used both for lost and for illegible letters, while making no mention of dotted letters. The actual transcriptions do often include dotted letters, however.
The book lacks a concordance, which may make things difficult for readers looking for specific texts. Previous publications are normally listed at the start of entries, except that descripta are only selectively mentioned. For example, although all 86 Uley tablets appear both in the 1993 report and in Sánchez Natalias 2022, only 29 of their entries include references to the report (and one of those references is wrong: Tab. Uley 20 is number 20 in the report, not number 12) and only 20 entries include references to Sánchez Natalias 2022. Kropp’s list of curse tablets is cited in all entries for tablets it includes, but Urbanova’s only sometimes.[3] On the one hand, Tomlin’s practice makes sense, in that the references omitted are normally to entries containing no useful information—as far as I can tell, publications with actual texts of the tablets have not been omitted. On the other hand, the lack of these references could increase the problems caused by the absence of a concordance for readers coming to this book with a reference from a previous publication. Such readers may need to use Sánchez Natalias 2022 (which lists all previous publications) to find the 1993 tablet number, which will be the same as the entry number in this volume (except for 64, which Tomlin has removed on the grounds that it was actually a duplicate of 67).
The book includes a useful appendix of publications of curse tablets from Roman Britain, arranged by site and including quite a few tablets not in Sánchez Natalias 2022. There are also indices of personal names, gods, Latin words, and misspellings, as well as a general index (located after the bibliography, which the other indices precede).
Overall, then, this book is an important step forward in the study of Roman curse tablets. Tomlin could have been more helpful by spelling out more explicitly the links with and differences from previous work on these texts, but as that work becomes obsolete with the publication of this volume most readers will simply be delighted with what he has done—which will not become obsolete any time soon.
Notes
[1] R. O. Tomlin, ‘7: Votive objects: the inscribed lead tablets’, in A. Woodward and P. Leach, The Uley Shrines: excavation of a ritual complex on West Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, 1977-9 (London 1993): 113-30.
[2] C. Sánchez Natalias, Sylloge of defixiones from the Roman west (Oxford 2022), for which see BMCR 2022.10.38.
[3] A. Kropp, Defixiones: ein aktuelles Corpus lateinischer Fluchtafeln (Speyer 2008); D. Urbanová, Latin Curse Tablets of the Roman Empire (Innsbruck 2018).