Curses, some deliberately vague and others eerily clear, had many reasons for their occurrence, though the most common were political, economic, and romantic. Some were simple desires for vengeance and divine justice and others were complex strategies for pain and unspeakable suffering.
These signs were a particular point of Greco-Roman civilization, so to speak.
One of the best-preserved signs for this kind of curse comes from Amathus, the city-state in Cyprus. "Your penis shall hurt when you make love," it says engraved on a lead sign, a curse found in 2008 during an excavation in the ancient kingdom on the island's southern coast.
Despite the rise of Christianity, many pagan beliefs and cults survived for several centuries, so it was not uncommon for Greeks to invoke the old gods when they wanted to settle a matter that the new god did not approve of.
The scholars tell us, the curses were one of the points from which the old traditions entered the new cult context. The oldest signs with curses date from the 5th century BC and we have even found curses from the 7th century AD when Christianity was definitively established in Greece.
Greece was best known in the ancient world for the tradition of cursing, which passed on to Roman civilization, both in its democratic and imperial periods. From there it spread to the ends of the known world, reaching even Britain.
Archeologists know of the prevalence of these signs, the contents of which were left to the imagination of the writer and the amount of his anger. And they contained everything from invoking the gods to destroy or kill someone to specific instructions on what exactly to suffer.
The gods our ancestors invoked when they wanted to cast their curses were usually the chthonic ones of the underworld, like Hades, Persephone, and Hermes. In fact, it was not at all rare for them to be associated with gods of other traditions if they were deemed more appropriate to successfully complete the curse.
Ancient civilizations interacted with each other and there was an endless flow of divine entities. Osiris, for example, was invoked not only by the Egyptians but also by the Greeks.
Most of the ancient Greek curses we have are engraved on lead plates, a tradition that continued into the Roman world. We know, however, that there were other curses written on parchment and wax plates and were carefully inserted into the cracks of the outer walls of the victim's house.
Bringing the curse so close to the victim was one of the crucial steps that determined its success. If it was a curse intended to harm a man's virility or sexuality, then a deity of fertility or love, such as Aphrodite or Eros, was invoked at the same time as the chthonic god being invoked.
We know one such famous example of a sexual curse from a man named Pausanias (not the known one) who, because he wanted a woman, Symi, for himself, cursed her to not be able to pray to Athena and Aphrodite should turn her back on her.
Academic professor, Esther Eidinow, argued in 2007 about the nature of this curse, that Symi was probably a prostitute and Pausanias was claiming her sexual exclusivity.
Not one or two, but five curses were pronounced by some against the tavern-keepers of ancient Athens, as we are told by lead plates (bindings) removed in 2003 from a 2,400-year-old tomb in Piraeus.
The four curses invoke the usual chthonic gods with a request to mark an equal number of tavern owners, while the fifth was unwritten, as curses were sometimes recited orally over the plate, without being written.
One of them asked Hecate, Artemis and Hermes to direct their hatred towards Fanagoras and Demetrios, as well as towards the tavern and their property.
With blood and ashes, the curse was "bound" to work better. And it was put in the tomb of the dead for the bonds that invoked the deities of the underworld to be under the surface of the earth. That is why they put them in graves and wells.
In fact, according to the archeologist of the Johns Hopkins University, Jessica Lamont, who published the relevant academic article, there were "experts in curses" in ancient Greece who knew how to write them and lived richly from them. Most likely, she says, they also offered other similar magical services, such as spells and amulets.
