In the English city of Bath, ancient Aquae Sulis, the Romans built a great bath complex and a temple dedicated to Sulis Minerva around a hot spring, a deity in whom the local goddess Sulis and the Roman Minerva were merged. From the waters of that sacred spring has emerged one of the most interesting groups of ritual texts of the Roman world: the so-called Bath curse tablets, which, on closer inspection, are mostly something else.
The discovery
The tablets were recovered during excavations of the spring reservoir between 1979 and 1980, under the direction of the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe. There are about one hundred and thirty sheets, mostly of lead or of a lead-tin alloy, rolled or folded and thrown into the water. The texts were edited by the epigraphist Roger Tomlin, who published them in 1988.
The tablets date largely to the second to fourth centuries AD. The script is a Latin cursive that is often hard to decipher; some texts are written backwards, from right to left, or with the letters reversed, a device that underlined the exceptional nature of communication with the goddess.
What they asked for
Anyone expecting love spells or curses against rivals is surprised. The great majority of the Bath tablets concern thefts. The stolen objects are those of everyday life in a bath complex: a cloak, a tunic, a pair of gloves, a ring, a few coins, a vessel. The victim does not know the culprit and turns to the goddess to find him and force him to give the item back.
The typical structure of a text is this:
- dedication of the stolen object to the goddess: the lost item becomes the property of Sulis, and so the theft becomes an offence against her;
- list of suspects, sometimes with precise names, sometimes with a general formula;
- request for punishment, often in the form of a torment lasting until the object is brought back to the temple.
The formula «man or woman, slave or free»
One of the most frequent expressions is the series of pairs meant to cover every possible culprit: si vir si femina, si servus si liber, «whether man or woman, whether slave or free», sometimes with the addition «whether boy or girl». The formula reveals the concrete situation: the victim does not know who did it and asks the goddess to extend her attention to everyone until the culprit emerges.
Curse or prayer for justice?
The Dutch scholar Henk Versnel proposed a distinction that has been very influential. Alongside classic defixiones, in which one tries to bind an opponent without justification and often in secret, there is a category he called «prayers for justice». In these:
- the writer presents himself as the victim of a wrong;
- he addresses a deity openly, often under his own name;
- he asks the goddess to intervene as judge and avenger;
- the punishment is conditional: it ends if the object is returned.
The Bath tablets belong largely to this second category. They are, in a sense, complaints filed with a divine court, in a society where recovering a stolen cloak through official channels was practically impossible.
Names and languages of Britain
The tablets are also an archive of names. Alongside Latin names there are many Celtic names, evidence of the romanized local population. Two texts seem to be written in a non-Latin language, probably British Celtic, and would be among the very rare written witnesses of that language: their interpretation, however, remains uncertain.
Parallels and context
Bath is not an isolated case. At Uley, in Gloucestershire, the sanctuary of Mercury has yielded another large group of similar tablets, also mostly about thefts of animals and goods. Elsewhere in the Empire prayers for justice are found in Greece, Asia Minor and the western provinces. What is special about Britain is the quantity and coherence of the finds, which allow us to watch an entire community turn to the same goddess for the same kind of problem.
What they teach us
The Bath tablets remind us that ancient ritual was not always a dark and secret act. It was also a way of giving shape to an injustice suffered, of turning anger into written words and handing them over to a higher order. The gesture of throwing the tablet into the hot water of the spring, from which steam rose, marked the passage from the human sphere to the divine. For students of the history of religions, this is perhaps their most valuable lesson.
In short
- The Bath tablets are about one hundred and thirty lead sheets found in the sacred spring of Sulis Minerva in the 1979-1980 excavations.
- They mostly concern thefts of everyday objects: cloaks, gloves, rings, coins.
- Formulas such as «man or woman, slave or free» serve to include every possible culprit.
- Henk Versnel classified them as «prayers for justice», distinct from defixiones proper.
- They are also a valuable source for Celtic names and the society of Roman Britain.
