Dear Goddess, Ruin Him: What Curse Tablets Actually Tell Us About Ancient Women

For over a thousand years, ordinary people across the Greek and Roman world wrote their darkest, smallest, most desperate wishes on thin sheets of lead, rolled them tight like secrets, and buried them in wells, graves, and temple floors, trusting a goddess to finish what they couldn't. We've already met Sulis and her cloak thieves in Bath. Today we widen the lens across the whole Mediterranean: to Aphrodite and the ache of unwanted love, to Demeter and a woman named Antigone who used a curse tablet to swear her own innocence, to the many small, human names: Theodotis, Polias, Theophilos, history would have completely erased if they hadn't once been angry, jealous, frightened, or heartbroken enough to write something down and hand it to a god. Along the way, we'll ask an uncomfortable question the popular imagination usually skips: when we say curse tablets, whose hands were really doing the cursing?

REFERENCES: