"OLD, LIKE PUTRID GORE"Ĭurse: Vetus quomodo sanies signeficatur Tacita deficta. Some of the more inventive could be used in our 21st-century lives-just swap out the Roman names and use your imagination to get dark magic to do your bidding. Others addressed retribution, theft, love, and even sports. Used by commoners and the elite alike, the little notes revealed what many Romans really wanted the gods to do to their enemies: The garden-variety curse would ask the gods to “bind” someone else’s body to strip them of their power. Many are so formulaic that it’s thought they were written by professional scribes who sidelined as curse-writers, and whose words, it was believed, would imbue the tablets with magic. More than 1500 tablets-inscribed in Latin or Greek, and scribbled on bits of recycled metal, pottery, and rock-have been found from Britain to north Africa, sealed with nails and hidden away in graves, wells, and natural springs. Curse tablets, known to researchers as defixiones, were a popular form of expression in the Roman Empire from the 5th century BCE to the 5th century CE.
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