With Halloween swiftly approaching, now is the time to explore monsters and magic in the ancient world! I have attached below an activity for crafting curse-tablets, by means of which Romans commonly sought to harness dark powers to inflict a gruesome demise — or, at least, an annoying amount of discomfort — upon their rivals. This activity requires little in the way of crafting materials (i.e., just some heavy-duty aluminum foil for the tablets and dulled pencils for inscribing the letters upon them), and gives the students an opportunity to do some simple, structured composition. Regarding the shapes of the letters, I usually insist that the kids try to write in Roman cursive (a good guide to the forms of those letters can be found here); we might practice writing out some words or sentences with those letters a couple of days prior to starting this project.
Curse Tablet Project
And on a side note… when we look for a primary-source reading to present to our students concerning matters supernatural, I’m sure we all think first of Pliny’s ghost-story, or Apuleius’ descriptions of witches. I thought, however, I might cite a little Libanius on the topic. In this passage (more-or-less Orations 1.243-250, with the translation, by A. F. Norman, taken from pages 123-124 of Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture as Observed by Libanius), Libanius relates how, when teaching rhetoric in Antioch, he came to suspect that his sudden sickness was the result of a curse placed upon him. His description of struggling physically and mentally to conduct his class is certainly an ailment from which I’ve suffered myself, though, in my case, I usually attribute it less to “curses” and more to “not having time to stop at Starbucks before first block.”
“My old migraine attacked me again after sixteen years of respite. It became worse, and it was feared that I would collapse when seated in front of my class or even as I lay abed. Every day was painful; every night I was thankful for sleep, and when day dawned it brought my affliction back with it. I began to pray heaven for death in preference to any other blessing, and I was convinced that the malady would affect my reason. While I was in this state I had the following dream. I thought I saw people sacrifice two boys and put the dead body of one of them in the temple of Zeus behind the door, and upon my protesting at this sacrilege against Zeus, they told me that this was how matters would stand until evening, but that when evening came, he would be buried. This seemed to portend spells, incantations, and the hostility of sorcerers. And so it turned out in fact, when those fears beset me and I wished nothing save to die. This was the sole topic of conversation with each fresh visitor and of my prayers to heaven. I loathed any mention of bath or of dinner. I avoided my classical books and the writing and composition of discourses, and my eloquence was undone, even though my students loudly demanded it. Whenever I ventured upon it, I was carried off course like a boat in a contrary wind, so that while they kept expecting some discourse, I would fall silent. My doctors bade me seek the remedy somewhere else, for there was no such remedy in their art. So some of my friends kept urging me and each other, too, to prosecute certain individuals who were regarded as practitioners of [magic], but I did not share their attitude and I restrained them, telling them that they should offer up prayers rather than prosecute anyone for such goings-on. However, a chameleon turned up from somewhere or another in the classroom. It was an old specimen and had been dead for several months, and we saw it there with its head tucked in between its hind-legs, one of its forelegs missing, and the other covering its mouth, as though to silence it. Nevertheless, not even after such a revelation did I name anyone as responsible for its appearance, but it seemed that the guilty parties were overcome with panic and relaxed their pressure, and so I was able to move about again. Anyway, it was a stroke of good fortune that what had been buried deep should lie above ground, exposed for all to see.”
