How Ancient Greeks and Romans Used Dark Magic to 'Curse' Their Foes

In Rome, a thin sheet of lead measuring 4 by 6 inches was found inside an urn containing the ashes of a person who died young and violently. The sheet, dating to the fourth century A.D., was folded over several times, pierced with a nail and inscribed with a message in Greek:

“I invoke you, holy angels and holy names, join forces with this restraining spell and bind, tie up, block, strike, overthrow, harm, destroy, kill and shatter Eucherios the charioteer and all his horses tomorrow in the arena of Rome... Let him not come from behind and pass but instead let him collapse, let him be bound, let him be broken up, and let him drag behind your power. Both in the early races and in the later ones. Now, now! Quickly, quickly!”

This is an example of a Greco-Roman “curse tablet,” a magical petition written on a sheet of lead that ancient people believed had the power to control or “bind” their enemies. Archaeologists have recovered more than 1,500 of these historic hexes that were secretly directed at rivals in the realms of sports, politics, legal disputes and love.

According to the archaeological record, curse tablets were in wide circulation for roughly 1,000 years, from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500. Surviving curse tablets have been found in Athens, Rome, Spain, Syria and as far away as England, where a cache of 130 tablets was recovered from the 2,000-year-old Roman baths in the town of Bath.

Known in Latin as defixiones—meaning “to bind down” or “to fix”—the earliest curse tablets were nothing more than a name scratched into lead and accompanied by a spoken “binding spell,” which was later written down as part of the text. The complexity of curse tablets evolved as professional sorcerers took over their production. By the fifth century A.D., Roman curse tablets included fantastical images, magical nonsense words and appeals to gods from multiple religions.

Curse tablets were usually folded up, pierced with a nail and fixed to a hidden place, which seemed to actuate the curse’s power.

“The text of the curse will say ‘I bind so-and-so' or ‘I nail down so-and-so,’ and that’s reinforced through the ritual act of nailing it to some location,” says Kimberly Stratton, a religion professor who studies ancient magic at Carleton University. “The nailing is part of the curse that's binding the [targeted person], holding them or harming them.”

While some scholars see curse tablets as part and parcel of Greco-Roman religion and even early Christianity, Stratton thinks ancient people knew the difference between conventional religious practice and “magic,” and that curse tablets fell squarely into the darker arts.

"Everybody in the ancient world agreed that curse tablets were magic,” Stratton says. “Nobody says, ‘I'm going to go carve a curse against my neighbor and bury it in the grave of someone who died violently’ and thinks of it as religion.”

One of the major differences between a curse tablet and something like a prayer offered in a Greco-Roman temple is that curse tablets rarely asked the gods for a personal blessing. Instead, they almost exclusively wished harm on others. For Stratton, curse tablets reflect the ancient worldview that life was a “zero-sum game.”

“If someone else gets something good, that means I lost something,” says Stratton, author of Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology and Stereotype in the Ancient World. “The idea behind curse tablets is that my situation will improve if I can ‘bind’ somebody, make them unattractive, ineffective in speech, make their chariot wheel fall off, etc. You want to make somebody else fail so you can succeed.”

Curse tablets were written to “bind” all kinds of rival targets, but the most popular arenas were sports, legal battles and sex. Chariot races, for example, were absolutely huge in the Greco-Roman world—as was gambling on chariot races—and people were fanatical about their local teams and star charioteers.

“They would get into fights and start riots when their team didn’t win,” Stratton says, which is not so different from today. A typical curse tablet from Syria in the second century A.D. reads:

“[N]ow attack, bind, overturn, cut up, chop into pieces the horses and the charioteers of the Blue colors.”

In ancient Athens, lawsuits and criminal trials were held in public, and the outcomes of cases often hinged on the oratory and rhetorical skills of the opposing parties. An Athenian curse tablet from 300 B.C. targeted the public speaking abilities of a lawyer named Lampias:

“I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing, and his hands and feet and eyes and mouth. All of these I bind, I hide, I bury, I nail down. If they lay any counterclaim before the arbitrator or the court, let them seem to be of no account, either in word or in deed.”

While “true love” was occasionally the goal of curse tablets, most romance-themed curses were intended to neutralize the competition and compel the target’s physical affections, as expressed by this semiexplicit curse tablet from second century Egypt:

“Make use of this binding spell, employed by Isis, so that Theodotis, daughter of Eus, may no longer try anything with any other man but me alone, Ammôniôn and may be subservient, obedient, eager, flying through the air seeking after Ammôniôn, son of Hermitaris and bring her thigh close to his, her genitals close to his, in unending intercourse for all the time of her life.”

To our modern sensibilities, curse tablets are easily dismissed as superstition. But the fact that curse tablets were used for at least 1,000 years is evidence alone that ancient people really believed that they worked, writes John Gager in his book, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World.

To the Greco-Romans, the effectiveness of a curse tablet started with the wording of the curse itself. A popular curse formula was to use what Stratton calls “analogical language.” An example might be, “Just as this lead is cold and useless, so let my enemies be cold and useless.” Or, “Just as this corpse is speechless, so let my adversary be struck dumb.”

When the analogy is spoken out loud, says Stratton, “the magic is effected through a kind of ‘performative utterance.’ So you recite the ritual, you bury the lead tablet, and that itself is what activates the curse.”

Where the tablet was physically deposited was also critical to its success. To the Greco-Romans, the best locations to stash a curse tablet were “liminal” spaces like tombs and bathhouses that sat on the borderline between the realms of the living and the dead. A lot of curse tablets were found in the tombs of the “restless dead”—people who died young or violently and whose souls still wandered the earth.

“These souls followed Hecate, the goddess of the underworld, who was a popular addressee of curse tablets,” Stratton explains. “Maybe the restless dead could deliver the message directly to Hecate or even enact the curse themselves.”