In the spirit of John Green’s book of the same title, our theme for the month of October is “the Anthropocene reviewed.” Writers were asked to review and rate some facet of human experience on a five-star scale.
A little less than two thousand years ago, someone stole the cloak of a man named Verio, who lived in the area that now makes up the city of Frankfurt, Germany. The thief, as best we can guess, was never caught, and that is why we know about it.
For all his rage, you see, the unfortunate (and presumably now naked) Verio had no real recourse against whatever quick-fingered bastard had made off with his favorite jacket; the Romans, who at the time controlled Germania, had no formal policing force, so if you couldn’t (or, as was more likely, didn’t have the money to) sleuth out, sue, and effectively prosecute the culprit, your crime would go unpunished. A lot of crime went unpunished in ancient Rome.
So most of the time, all you can do is what any righteously incensed Roman would do: grab a piece of lead, scrawl a curse on it, pound it full of nails, and chuck it in the ground until the criminal faces justice. Or, as our newly nude Verio would put it, until “the worms, cancer, and maggots penetrate his hands, head, feet, as well as his limbs and marrows.”*
It was a really good cloak, okay?
Verio’s is one of over fifteen-hundred Greco-Roman curse tablets that have been discovered in Greece and the rest of the vast area that the Roman empire once occupied. Most are less verbose (e.g. “Tacita, hereby accursed, is labelled old like putrid gore”*) but rarely less vitriolic. Some ask for specific horrors to be visited on their enemies while others are far more general—the deciding factor being the relative creativity of the inscriber, one suspects.
As a primary source, curse tablets are fantastic. Not only can we infer how the ancient Greeks and Romans felt about chthonic religion, we can also learn what sorts of things were curse-worthy, like the aforementioned unpunished crime, rivalry over love, and—perhaps above all—sporting events. (A lie, I’m afraid; while these things do show up in tablets with regularity, the ancients were mostly cursing people so that they could win court cases against them, which is both very disappointing and dreadfully boring.)
As a piece of internet culture, curse tablets have found a side gig populating lists on horrible, ad-ridden aggregation websites in articles with titles like “The Top Ten Ancient Curses to Use on Your Enemies Today!” (Just google “curse tablets” and you’ll get a handful.) Unsurprisingly, it’s the same ten curses every time, both because all these websites are stealing from each other and many curse tablets are fragmentary or require too much exposition to stall the thumb of scrolling passersby.
What is more interesting about these articles are their titles, almost all of which seem to imply that curse tablets have modern utility for the non-historian. And to be fair, when I decided that I was going to review curse tablets for this month’s theme, that’s how I approached it too. My first idea was to rate curse tablets not on their value as source material but as a practical way for solving problems. Stunt journalism, essentially, where I get a sheet of pliable metal, scratch a denunciation of my enemies on it, and bury it out behind my apartment.
There were a lot of problems with this plan.
The first, of course, is that it’s not ethical to intentionally bury lead in the landscaping. (Aside: You can buy sheet lead online for not that much money, and along the way encounter some slightly concerning Amazon reviews. Five stars, apparently, since you “never know when we will get hit with an emp [sic].”) Using aluminum foil would downgrade the sin from willful contamination to mere littering, but doesn’t have quite the same aesthetic and also doesn’t solve the secondary logistical hurdle, which is that Floyd in the basement apartment will absolutely call the police on anyone he sees futzing about suspiciously out back.
And I just don’t have it in me to explain to a cop why I’m burying Reynolds Wrap under the hostas. (“No, officer, I’m not destroying evidence; I’m making a facsimile of an ancient Greco-Roman magic artifact so that I can blog about it for John Green month on the post calvin.”)
The more fundamental problem is that I have no enemies.
I really did try to find one. I sat down and thought of all the people I hate, both the ones that I know and those that I’ve never met. The people who make my life hard, who make my job hard, who’ve hurt me and didn’t even notice. Then I thought about scoring their name into metal and asking the cosmic forces to ruin their career, stitch up their tongue, to turn their insides into wax and make their memories bleed out from their ears. I thought about how much time that would take, how long I’d have to sit there thinking about how much I wanted bad things to happen to them, and I realized that I couldn’t.
Even as I joke, I couldn’t, and I haven’t yet figured out if that’s cowardice or some evolutionary aversion to attracting the attentions of forces that might listen to such a plea, which I do not even believe in. It isn’t moral superiority, certainly, but I do think that being able to believe that someone you know (or at least have encountered) should be blinded and go insane in a house of worship and then to want that badly enough to act upon it is pretty frightening.
But of course, curse tablets do not work. They are fundamentally powerless and only used by powerless people. For the use of a curse tablet posits that if you had the capacity to kill the rival charioteer’s horses or steal Zois’s husband or get your damn cloak back by natural means, you would. But you can’t. So you turn to magic, which is, I’m sorry to say, not effective as a solution to actual problems.
Except maybe it will make you feel better, in the same way that pouring all your jealousy and rage into a horribly racist or misogynistic YouTube comment might. Because that is the most frightening thing about curse tablets: we are able to relate to them because our petty outrages and envies—and, my reticence notwithstanding, our impulse to act on them—really haven’t changed all that much in two thousand years.
But, then again, “may he become as liquid as water”* is a pretty good line to pull out on the guy who just cut you off on the freeway.
I give curse tablets three and a half stars.

Annaka, you are so fun!! As a middle school social studies teacher I love all the goofy wild stuff that shows people are the same across centuries. And creative insults are quite endearing to a middle schooler:)
Mom shared this on our family group chat for a laugh, and it was a treat!
Thanks, Anna! It means a lot to know I made the Kluitenberg group chat lol (but actually). Glad you enjoyed.
I love this article, thank you. If you’d like to curse people using the script and methods of a totally different ancient civilization, this guy will transliterate your 140-characer-or-less message into cuneiform and put it on a little clay tablet for you! https://dumbcuneiform.com/
Well now I know what I’m getting for stocking stuffers this year. Thanks for reading!