Before Bath, the Roman curse tablet was understood mainly from the Greek and Italian material, where the typical text binds a rival without giving a reason. The writer names an opponent in a lawsuit, a race or a love affair and asks that he be disabled. No wrong is alleged, because none has been done. The act is aggressive and the writer knows it, which is why the tablets are hidden in graves and wells.
The British deposits do something different, and the difference is systematic enough to have forced a category. The writer states a grievance, claims to have been wronged, addresses the god openly at a public sanctuary rather than burying the message in a tomb, and asks for justice rather than advantage. H. S. Versnel argued in the 1991 volume Magika Hiera that this constitutes a distinct class, which he called prayers for justice, occupying a space between cursing and ordinary petitionary prayer.
The boundary is genuinely blurred and the scholarship is not unanimous about where it falls. A text asking a goddess to deny a thief sleep and blood until he returns a cloak is a curse by any ordinary use of the word, and the fact that the writer feels entitled does not change what is being requested. What the Bath deposit established is that the entitlement is not incidental: it shapes the wording, the choice of a public place, and the willingness to sign. This atlas describes what the tablets do rather than reproducing R. S. O. Tomlin's readings of them, which remain in copyright.