Curses for the Racing Season

The tablets were recovered from a tomb on the Via Appia outside Rome and were published in 1898. Their subject is the circus. They name charioteers, they name the horses those charioteers drove, and they identify the factions, the organised racing companies whose colours divided Roman crowds into partisan blocs. Some of the tablets set out entire teams.

The scale of the surviving material is the point. Curse tablets against athletes and performers are known across the Roman world, but this group shows the practice attached to a professional entertainment industry with money behind it, and the precision of the naming indicates writers who knew the sport. Whoever commissioned these tablets knew which driver was dangerous in which race and which horse was worth disabling.

They also confirm the technique. Depositing in a tomb is not concealment for its own sake. The dead who had died young or violently were held to be restless and available, and a message placed with them could be carried down to the powers below. A tomb on a road out of the city was therefore both a hiding place and a postal address, and the fact that these tablets were deposited rather than dedicated at a temple marks them as belonging to the aggressive tradition rather than to the British prayers for justice.