The appearance of two important corpora of curse tablets is extremely welcome. Both are regional in focus and expertly edited. The first is Jaime Curbera’s magisterial re-edition of Richard Wünsch’s Defixiones Tabellae, which collects nearly all of the extant curses from Attica and the second is the Volume I of Magica Levantina edited by Robert Daniel and Alex Hollmann, which for the first time collects in an annotated edition the curse tablets of Syria-Palestine, primarily from two important Roman cities: Caesarea Maritima and Antioch. Curbera’s edition, in addition to providing new readings and illustrations for the lost-and-then-found tablets published by Wünsch in 1897 (see below), also includes many new tablets, most of them retrieved from various wells in the Athenian Agora: twenty-five from the Classical and Hellenistic periods and sixty from the Roman. The latter, for the most part, are fully extant and legibly inscribed by competent scribes, giving us an extraordinary view of Greco-Roman society in Athens and the lives of various litigants, athletes and lovers. The curses collected in Magica Levantina were also found primarily in wells, but date to somewhat later periods, when chariot racing became a cultural craze throughout the Empire and created a special and presumably lucrative focus on magical rituals designed to affect the outcome of races. As one would expect given their Levantine provenience, they often reflect the power of the Jewish god and his angels, refer to stories from the Hebrew Bible and a single example was even inscribed in Aramaic. Here we often get a close look at how the originally Greek practice of inscribing lead tablets with curses was adapted to local ideas and beliefs. These two editions take different forms, reflecting the practice of Greek epigraphy at a kind of technological crossroads. Curbera’s edition maintains the familiar albeit unwieldy folio-sized pages of Inscriptiones Graecae, but it is greatly enhanced by an extraordinary number of excellent drawings and photographs. The printed copy of Magica Levantina contains no photographs and few drawings, but thanks to an online Web Portal, readers can view amazingly clear photographs of every tablet taken from different angles with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).
Curbera’s Defixiones Atticae is 429 folio pages long and is a substantial enlargement of and great improvement on the original, which, minus Wünsch’s still useful 25-page Preface, ran to only 50 folio pages. Curbera expanded his edition to include the new curses mentioned above, but he has also provided new editions (with photographs and drawings) of most of the tablets previously published in Wünsch’s edition. Indeed, in some ways this book is a testament to the persistent detective work of the editor and the reminder of the need for careful archival work. After agreeing to republish the older curse tablets, Curbera naturally became interested in their whereabouts, in large part to check the original readings. The tablets had, however, gone missing. Wünsch had died at the age of 46 during the First World War, and by then the tablets had become part of the Antikensammlungen in Berlin. They apparently had vanished, he was told, in the destruction and chaos of the last year of the Second World War. Curbera, however, after spending a good deal of time in the archives, was able to trace them first to a secure blockhouse in the Berlin Zoo, where these and many other artifacts had been placed for protection, and then to Russia where in 1945 they had been taken by the Soviets and where they remained for thirteen years until they were returned along with many other stolen antiquities and placed first in a storage room of the Pergamon Museum and then in the Altes Museum, where they were eventually inventoried in 1997-98 and remained until Curbera rescued most of them from obscurity.[1] Because Wünsch had indeed packed and labelled his tablets carefully they were still in good condition more than a century later and after they were properly cleaned and photographed Curbera was able to have drawings made of almost all of them. The rediscovery of the Wünsch tablets also allowed Curbera to reconsider their date, which had vaguely been thought to span the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In fact Curbera (p. vii) was able to date them, with less than a dozen of possible exceptions,[2] to the fourth century BCE and later, an important datum that has led to a new assessment about when and whence the practice of writing curse tablets arrived in Athens.[3]
At the same time, as he was editing this volume, Curbera was also hard at work completing the important, but unpublished work of his friend and mentor, David R. Jordan, the master epigrapher of curse tablets, who in the 1980s and 90s almost singlehandedly revived interest in their study. In 2022 Curbera published Jordan’s unfinished study of the Roman Period curses from the Athenian Agora[4] and then in 2023 he and Jessica Lamont co-edited and translated twenty-five more unpublished tablets of Classical and Hellenistic date that also come from the Agora.[5] These two slightly earlier publications helpfully provide translations of and commentary on nearly all of the new texts from the Agora and should be read side-by-side with the new IG corpus. The bulk of the fifty curses of the Roman period come from wells in the Agora, of which two were most important, particularly one near the Metroon and other public offices, in which were found curses that often have a legal or economic focus. One example of this is a circular lead disk inscribed with a curse that aims to chill and destroy Philargurοs, whose name “Lover of Silver” and whose nickname “The Ram” seem to be a perfect combination for his chosen profession as a loan-shark (no. 432). This curse contains a rare mention of the person who commissioned the tablet, a man named Epagathos, who was apparently in a tough situation, similar to that of Strepsiades at the start of Aristophanes’ Clouds: he had a loan that was coming due at the end of the month and he was trying to chill and bind the loan-shark and thereby get out of paying back the loan. Other curses from this well involve slaves, for example, one that aims at chilling Pollio the Cilician and his legal actions concerning a runaway slave named Leon (no. 434). A much longer curse chills and binds five individuals, so that “they say nothing against Eros, whom Rhode bore, [and] that they never speak to him concerning his manumission by Sabinus” (no. 433).
The second important find spot for Roman-era curses was a well outside of the Agora proper and located in the courtyard of the “Poros Building”, a structure that in Roman times seems to have been used as a tavern or a brothel. These curses were primarily concerned with competition between athletes or courtesans, for example, three different tablets inscribed with curses against a wrestler named Eutychianus, one of them asking that he be chilled in a wrestling match on “this coming Friday” (no. 435). Other examples include a curse that aims to destroy the wrestling of “Petres the Macedonian” and to cause him to “fall down and disgrace himself” (no. 419) and another asking that the runner Alkidamos not be allowed “to get past the starting lines of the Athenaia” (no. 420), an annual footrace limited to Athenian ephebes. Much rarer is a curse against a trumpeter named Miltiades from Laodikea (no. 425) that aims to bind, among other things, his soul, his strength, and the blasts from his trumpet (salpismata). Here, like the handful of curses found in other cities against performers, we should probably imagine that the person who commissioned the curse was a rival in a musical competition or perhaps just an annoyed neighbor. We see a different competitive situation at play in the curses against courtesans and their boyfriends: one tablet aims at chilling the passion between Karpodora and Trophimas “so that they cannot lie together … go to bed together” (no. 426), and two others aim at the conversation and contact between a courtesan named Juliana and at least five different men: Proclus, Leosthenes and Pius listed on one tablet (no. 427) and Julian and Polynikos on another (no. 428). In these two wells it is clear, moreover, that different scribes were using two versions of the same long text (pp. 270-71), and because so many of these tablets were written with care Jordan was even able to identify hands of two main scribes and their associates.
Magica Levantina I is also primarily concerned with Greek curse tablets of Roman Imperial date, these from two cities of the Eastern Empire: Caesarea Maritima (nos. 1-21) and Antioch (22-33), including the first known curse tablet written in Aramaic (no. 31). The one outlier is a silver amulet against epilepsy (no. 34), which is of unknown provenience (but undoubtedly from the Levant) and written in extraordinarily small letters. Like the Agora tablets, the publication of these tablets has long been delayed, in this case because of the difficulties in conservation and decipherment. The tablets from Antioch were excavated in the 1930s and lay unopened in the Princeton Art Museum until the turn of the millennium and those from Caesarea were first available for study in the year 2000, but they too had to await the arrival of better conservation techniques and RTI photography. The delay was certainly worthwhile, because the tablets, when finally unrolled, cast a similar light on Roman urban culture in Palestine and Syria. Nearly all of Caesarea curses were found in a well in the Promontory Palace, date to the late fourth or fifth century CE, and most of them were designed to bind or otherwise incapacitate chariot horses and their drivers.[6] And in a few cases they used hitherto unknown methods. In five of the curses (nos. 4-8), for example, the scribe inserted organic material in an apparent effort to increase the power of the written text: leaves of sage in two of them (4 and 7) and small caterpillars in the other three. The editors suggest that both have to do with ‘word magic’, pointing out that sphakos, the Greek word for ‘sage’, is cognate with sphakelos, ‘spasm’ and that it was designed create spasms in the equine victim, although another, perhaps easier, explanation would be that sage is in fact toxic to horses and causes them to have an unsteady gait.[7] So its inclusion in the curse tablet could have also been designed to “poison” the performance of horse(s) named therein. In the second case, the Greek term for caterpillar—“twister” (kampê, cognate with kamptein, “to twist, turn”) —is descriptive of how the insect moves, but it also identical, except for its accent, to the word kampê which denotes the turning-posts of the hippodrome, which were the most dangerous spots in a chariot race and where curse tablets were sometimes buried (p. 50). These same five curses (nos. 4-8) also illustrate the Jewish influence on many of these Levantine curses: “Cherubim of Cherubim, help (me) and submerge the horses of the Green faction, Cherubim of Cherubim. I call upon the most high and undefiled God, the one and only God, the (god) of Michael and Arphael (= Raphael).” To which he adds (only in no. 6) a similia similibus formula based on a well-known biblical story “as Sodom was destroyed, so let the legwork of the horses (i.e. be destroyed).” Most of the curses from Caesarea and Antioch show a similar amount of Jewish influence and almost no Egyptian, with one exception: a curse against Porphyrios, a.k.a. Caecilianus, that aims at preventing him from winning a competition in pantomime dancing at Caesarea. It begins with some broken lines that address the Greek god Kronos (“You who <taking> the sickle made of steel <emasculated your father and> removed him from the kingdom. His genitals, when you cast them into the deep sea, engendered Aphrodite…”). In the second half of the curse, however, a new set of superhuman agents are invoked: “Daemons in ranks, all (of you) viewing, holy lord angels, strong and mighty ones, and gods with crocodile faces and having the bodies of crocodiles.” These gods with crocodile faces and bodies of crocodiles seem to have been important because in the lower right of the tablet the scribe added a drawing of a crocodile, presumably a reference, as the editors point out, to the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek–Souchos, who was indeed worshipped in a coastal settlement roughly 4 km to the north of Caesarea that was appropriately called Crocodilopolis, because of the crocodiles that lived in the swamps along the banks of its river. In this case, however, we seem to see the invocation of a local version of an Egyptian deity, not one borrowed abstractly from an Egyptian magical handbook.
Some of the thirteen curse tablets from Antioch are older than the texts from Caesarea, dating between the 4th and 6th centuries, but they share several features, most notably the presence of Jewish names and biblical stories. Of the five curses against charioteers deposited in drains close to one of the turning points in the hippodrome (nos. 27-31), one invokes only angel names as the agents of the curse (no. 30), and another is written entirely in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and includes the story of Balaam and the ass in a similia similibus formula (no. 31). Greek gods and myths appear on two other tablets, the first of which is again addressed to Kronos/Chronos (no. 27), who in a rather confused manner is equated with both Zeus and Jahweh and connected again with the castration of Ouranos and the birth of Aphrodite. But perhaps the most surprising curse tablet found at Antioch (no. 29) begins by invoking the secret names of the gods worshipped at the Samothracian mysteries along with other mainly male Greek gods (lines 1-12), before turning to Hekate-Selene, a more typical agent on Greek curse tablets (13-44), and then ending with a plea to Iaô Sabaôth and some unnamed angels to “bind-down, destroy and overturn” thirty-six horses each named individually.
Magica Levantina I also gives us insights into the scribes working in these two cities and the multiple recipes or handbooks they were using. At Caesarea, for example, close analysis of the handwriting of the twenty-one curses against charioteers, reveals that twelve were written by three different scribes each using a different model. But of the six curses found in and around the hippodrome in Antioch, there were no duplicates, although several of the individual texts themselves are so long and complicated that most of them were probably also copied from a handbook. What is a surprise is the relative dearth of drawings and wing-formations that we see elsewhere in this period, especially in North Africa and Rome. The four curse-tablets deposited in the well of the House-of-the-Calendar in Antioch (nos. 22-25) give us a different sense, however, of the uses of cursing in the East, much closer to what we saw in Athens. The first three were inscribed by the same hand, mention the same neighborhood (the “Quarter of the Mygdonites”), and curse individuals of the artisan or shopkeeper class, presumably to disrupt their businesses: Babylas, a greengrocer (nos. 22-23), Hyperechios, a carver of boxwood (24) and Hypsaios, who is probably a baker (25). The first of these curses against Babylas again reflects a good deal of Jewish influence when it deploys the following simile: “Just as you smote the chariot of Pharaoh, so smite his (i.e. Babylas’) obstinacy (or trickery). Thunder- and lightning-hurling Iaô, just as you destroyed the firstborn of Egypt, destroy his property(?)….” All three of these curses seem local affairs aimed at three men presumably living in the same neighborhood and perhaps the same building, a villa that was built in the third-century CE with lavish mosaics, but by the fifth century it seems to have been inhabited by a number of unrelated individuals, perhaps mainly tradesmen (pp. 180-82). If this assessment is correct, then, the well was presumably chosen because the victims lived nearby and proximity was an important part of the curse’s efficacy, as it was with the curse tablets buried near the turning point of the hippodrome.
Let me close by reiterating that both of these corpora were eagerly anticipated, are splendidly executed, and will immediately be an enormous boon to the ongoing study of magic in the ancient Mediterranean, especially now, as the field, encouraged by the increasing number of curses from carefully documented archaeological sites, turns to reconstructing such rituals at the regional or local levels.
Notes
[1]J. Curbera, “The Curse Tablets of Richard Wünsch Today” in M. Piranomonte et al. (eds.) Contextos màgicos/Contesti magici (Rome 2012) 193-94. He found only 179 of the original 206, the rest presumably having been separated from the collection during its peregrinations.
[2] Nos. 197, 198, 200-202 and 341-343
[3] See Chapter 4 of J. Lamont, In Blood & Ashes: Curse Tablets & Binding Spells in Ancient Greece (Oxford 2023)
[4] D. R. Jordan [and J. Curbera], “Curse Tablets of The Roman Period from the Athenian Agora” Hesperia 91 (2022) 133-210, completely the earlier landmark study: D.R. Jordan, “Defixiones from a Well Near the Southwest Corner of the Athenian Agora.” Hesperia 54.3 (1985): 205–255.
[5] J. Curbera and J. Lamont, “Classical and Hellenistic Curse Tablets from the Athenian Agora” Hesperia 92 (2023) 311-53. Jordan had planned to publish these, but among his papers, Curbera was only able to find drafts of drawings of three tablets and no transcriptions.
[6] The outliers for the dating are nos. 19 and 19a, which are much later than the non-charioteer curses are nos. 1 (a curse to prevent a slave from running away), 2 (a curse against a pantomime dancer) and 3 (a judicial curse).
[7] Sand sage, Colorado State University Guide to Poisonous Plants.