Publication details
How Legal Context of Latin Curse Tablets Can Help Us to Understand Respective Situations?
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
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| Description | The first question about curse tables is who and why resorts to it. Apart from the belief in the effectiveness of magical rituals, in some cases, there might be “rational” reasons (even though we shall realize that practicing magia is potentially dangerous as it is regarded as a crime). Thus, we may assume that people use curse tablets especially in situations which particularly affected them and/or when there was no other remedy accessible. The limited access to court may stem from the social status of some people. Another frequent situation would be using curse as a substitution for a lawsuit against an unknown perpetrator. An action (e.g. for theft) must be filed against a specific (and therefore known) perpetrator (or against his heirs, if they obtained the stolen thing). However, if the perpetrator is unknown, there is no one to sue, and the curse seems to be the only “solution”. Such cases are often encountered, either with the use of the general (and in law used) formulation “quisquis” which generally includes everyone who will correspond to the given characteristic, or with express characteristics involving all possible perpetrators (e.g. dfx.3.2/10 from Bath “si vir, si femina, si servus, si liber”). In specific cases, knowledge of law allows us to better understand the context of the curse and (albeit with some caution) to understand the facts of the case. E.g. dfx. 2.1.3/3 from Saguntum, which deals with returning money given by one of the slaves to another. Further dfx. 3.2/73 from Bath, which asks for sending divine revenge on six perjurers. Some curse tablets are not prays for justice, but prays for injustice, such as dfx. 1.7.4/1 from Cremona, which demands death of several other people in order to make the prayer heir of a testator, who is unknown to us. Another case dealing with the law of succession is dfx. 2.2.3/4 from Cordoba, asking for someone’s incapability to give testimony concerning heritage. |