Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom

Richard Wünsch's Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom, published by B. G. Teubner in Leipzig in 1898, is a critical scholarly edition of a corpus of Greek curse tablets, defixiones, recovered from Rome and associated with the so called Sethian magical tradition, including tablets invoking chariot racing curses at the circus. Wünsch was among the founding generation of scholars who established the systematic study of ancient curse tablets as a discipline, transcribing, dating and annotating the tablets from direct examination of the objects rather than secondhand description. Its strength is that primary editorial work, the kind of careful transcription and dating a claim about a specific tablet's text ultimately has to rest on. Its limit is that it is over a century old, and later epigraphic and papyrological scholarship has refined some of Wünsch's own readings and dating methods since, so a claim needing the most current reading of a specific tablet benefits from checking more recent corpora that build on but sometimes revise his editions.