Roman Curses in Antiquity

Noah B.

December, 1, 2010

Curses in Antique Rome

In Ancient Rome, throughout the empire, people used curses to generally invoke harm onto other people, to invoke good luck in a person or object, and occasionally, to recover objects. Ancient Roman cures did not necessarily mean to bring harm onto someone as they do in modern time, a curse was just a term for anything that invoked a god or a deity.

Invoking one or more gods was the beginning of the curse. If not god was to be invoke, then the curse would not work, or so the Romans believed. When the god is invoke in the first part of the cure, the statement is asking the god to do something, such as harming someone, as asked by the person writing the curse. When writing a cure, the author of the curse, may invoke as many gods possible to make the curse more powerful, however, some people believed by invoking a god that was not related to the task being asked of him or her, it would bring bad luck to the author. So to make the curse more powerful, but not to bring bad luck upon themselves, many Romans asked gods of different religions, but who had the same main role. For an example, if someone want to write a curse asking for plentiful crops they would probably invoke Ceres, the Roman Goddess of grain, and then the author would probably look to another culture, such as the Greeks, and invoke the Greek Goddess of grain, who would have been Demeter. In Roman culture the most common culture that a juxtaposed deity would come from, would be a Greek god. But, with Gaul being taken over by the Roman Republic, and soon completely conquered by Ceaser's new gods were somewhat introduced into curses. However, the big change occurred when British were introduced into into the with Ceaser's expositions to Britain in 54 and 55 B.C, and the eventual conquest completed by Claudius 90 years later, lead to more gods discovered, and these new British gods started to replace the Greek gods in the late empire, especially in the Northern Gaul and when Britain was conquered Britain. In Roman Egypt and sometime also on the Italian Peninsula Egyptians gods would be invoke alongside Greek and Romans.

The middle part of the curse tells the god or goddess what is being ask of them. In the times before Christianity was the predominate religion in the Roman Empire, curses tended to be more direct, because there was no or little fear of being punished. The main body of the curse was usually accompanied by a spoken portion that the author would say aloud as they were writing out the curse. This process would be done to help amplify the prayer to the gods and they believe this would make it more likely that their prayers would be observed and completed. The second action the author might do while writing the curse is to make some sort of effigy, especially in the curses that involve harming people, and the person invoking the curse would mark on the effigy where they wanted the person hurt or killed, while they were saying and inscribing the curse. This practice again was to help amplify the curse to the gods so that their curse would be acted upon.

The final part of the curse is the part where the author would promise something in return to the god, for their services. The item given depended on who was the god, where the person who was asking the favor lived, and how costly the curse was, as in does it ask for a small favor such as praying a rabbit would stop raiding the garden or is the curse asking for the god to decimate out an army. The most common bribe would have been wine for minor deeds and for major deeds a sacrifice might have been in order.

To conclude, curses in Rome before 1 A.D were different that curses after that time period because, it was before Britain was conquered by the Romans so the use of Romanized British gods was very limited and instead Greek and Egyptian gods were used more frequently, Christianity was not around so people were more subtle about their curses that invoked hurting people by not drawing effigies of people who they wanted dead and not directly referring to the death, and finally, because with Christianity people started to view curses as pagan and the practice eventually became less wide spread.

*All information came from http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk, Cambridge Latin 3 Book, or In Class Notes