Having worked extensively on a comprehensive approach to ancient cursing practices – drawing on cross-linguistic and socio-anthropological perspectives –, I am especially attuned to the value of focusing on regional specificities and diachronic developments, particularly as regards the written form of curses. This perspective seems increasingly shared: two monographs on Greek curse tablets from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods have appeared within months of each other. The present review discusses the more recent of the two, by B.; the earlier one is J. Lamont’s In Blood and Ashes (2023; cf. CR 74 [2024], 385–7). As I have reviewed Lamont’s work elsewhere (Historische Zeitschrift 321 [2025], 431–3), I inevitably read B.’s study in dialogue with it. This review, accordingly, takes the form of a comparative reading.
Before proceeding, I would like to offer two preliminary remarks. As a native speaker of Italian who long ago had to abandon that language for scholarly publications and has since practised the condensed and minimalist prose of academic English, reading B.’s flowery and imaginative pages left me with a sense of nostalgia for this kind of writing. Readers less familiar with Italian may, therefore, find the book rather difficult to digest. Secondly, I was genuinely pleased to observe once again how the TheDefix database – which I contributed to creating – has proven to be a particularly useful digital tool for lexical or other specific research on a large corpus of curse tablets.
B.’s book pursues two central aims: (1) to reassess the significance of the circulation of manuals and written models from the earliest periods of inscribed curse tablets, and (2) to embed this ritual practice within a much broader oral tradition of ‘execratory diction’, linked to the performance of hymns and prayers as part of a ‘popular poetry’ of the time.
Lamont addresses the second point as well, and both authors reach similar conclusions, though via different routes. I previously identified this as the most valuable section of Lamont’s work, and I maintain the same view of B.’s treatment. While Lamont reconstructs a lexical-phraseological repertoire across epic, tragedy, public ἀραί, funerary inscriptions and private curses – highlighting an older, shared oral tradition –, B. focuses on internal textual features. Specifically, he examines (1) the formulaic units, which allow him to arrange the material into four (not particularly innovative) categories ranging from bare lists (termed ‘pragmatic’ by B.) to syntactically uniform compositions; and (2) the dactylic or, less frequently, iambic structuring of several formulae found in Greek curse tablets.
In an earlier chapter (pp. 92–123) B. also undertakes an excellent comparative analysis, drawing parallels between curse tablets and other Greek epigraphic genres, such as apotropaic texts and sacred laws, particularly from Sicily. This suggests a shared repertoire of religious formulae. In this respect, his approach seems more convincing than Lamont’s, who attributes the formulaic style of curses to the influence of juridical discourse in Sicilian poleis.
Beyond this thematic overlap, further analogies between the two works become increasingly difficult to identify. Most notably, Lamont grounds nearly her entire analysis in the diachronic emergence of curse tablets across various areas of the broader Mediterranean. She foregrounds Sicily’s primacy in producing the earliest curse tablets and argues that local factors enabled the ritual innovation of introducing writing into cursing. B., on the other hand, downplays the significance of Sicilian priority. For him, Attica’s overwhelming quantity of curse tablets outweighs any chronological advantage held by Sicily. Thus, he champions the forza propulsiva dei modelli attici (p. 55), positing that Attic models spread widely – as far as Sicily and the Black Sea –, rather than positing a Sicilian origin for the phenomenon. According to B., Attica, not Sicily, was the true cradle of inscribed cursing practices (cf. p. 169).
This has broader implications. B.’s typology of textual structures is not intended as a model of chronological development. Rather, he sees all four types as coexisting from the outset. He challenges the traditional notion that curses evolved towards increasing syntactic complexity, arguing instead that the most asyntactic texts – bare name lists – are not the most rudimentary forms but rather epitomised versions of more elaborate cursing formulas. This revisionist stance is underpinned by his key argument: that curse tablets drew on written manuals and models from their inception. He suggests that these were transmitted via papyrus rolls, carried by itinerant ritual specialists – the indovini selvaggi of the book’s title. This implies that highly literate practices, including the compilation of ritual instructions and formulae, were present from the very beginning of written cursing.
B. views the production of inscribed curse tablets as a highly professionalised activity and adduces two graphic features as evidence: the columnar arrangement of text and certain types of spelling errors, both of which he attributes to copying from papyrus models. Here, however, I find myself at odds with his argument. Treating curse tablets like literary manuscripts and applying to them the principles of palaeography and textual criticism may miss the point. These were private, performative objects, not meant for public transmission. The kinds of errors B. discusses could also arise from improvised writing without a model. In my view, these features should be integrated into broader debates on ancient literacy. Curse tablets, I would argue, are vital sources for understanding the varied ‘functional literacies’ of the ancient Greek world.
B.’s inclination to see curses as poetic texts is also clear in his treatment of first-person verbs. There, he resists identifying the ‘I’ with the curser, preferring instead to interpret it as a fictional ‘ritual I’ that may encompass both the professional officiant and the client commissioning the curse, and never the curser alone. The use of first-person plural forms is, in B.’s view, revealing in this respect, as it suggests the involvement of multiple agents in the ritual act. Yet I find it puzzling that he does not entertain the simpler possibility – that the curse may have been performed by more than one individual. Moreover, I struggle to see why a professional writer would expose themselves so much in a socially condemned practice.
The one area in which B. attempts to establish a relative chronology concerns the symbolic power of ritual gestures. Were practices such as reversing writing direction, using lead or depositing tablets in graves ritualised before being verbalised in texts – or did their symbolic weight arise only once they were textualised? I have always intuitively assumed that practitioners were aware of the efficacy of such ritual gestures from the outset and that their textual formulation came later – both logically and chronologically. Yet B. challenges us to reverse this assumption, suggesting instead that only after the symbolic significance of a ritual element was formalised in writing did it acquire its full ritual power. This is, for instance, how he explains the emergence of the formula linking the ateleia of the victim to that of the lead, arguing that such an association may not have been part of the original ritual imagery. While this is a fascinating perspective, I do sense a tension between it and B.’s earlier theory that list-like, elliptical texts are abridged versions of fully expanded formulas.
Indeed, B. seems to contradict himself when he later acknowledges that the desired effect of ritual harm must have shaped the development of certain ritual gestures – such as tablet manipulation (cf. p. 207 n. 157). In other words, the symbolic efficacy of material and performative elements must have been understood from their very inception, regardless of whether or not they were verbalised.
