In Part 1 of this book, we have felt the heavy materiality of defixiones, the weight of the lead despite the thinness of the hammered sheets onto which letters were inscribed. These curses may have been nailed or suspended or deposited in gestures and with archival practices that paralleled contemporaneous, official legal modes of display and collection. Justin, a Christian, similarly displayed documents seeking justice by citing or appending them to his Apologies. Sotērianos placed a judicial curse in a shaft or well in Amathous, Cyprus, along with many other such lead and selenite tablets, participating in another materially constituted archival practice. The very substance and location of the curse against Babylas were mechanisms for its successful working: the cool of the lead, the watery chill of the well. Drawing upon the coldness and deadness of lead to chill or thwart the tongue of a speaker was a common strategy of curse tablets. These substantial and sensory elements were essential to the ritual efficacy of the curse.

Titus Kaphar’s painting To Be Sold depicts Princeton University’s president Finley (1761–66), partially obscured by shredded, hanging canvas strips affixed with nails (Plate 2).2

When I was an undergraduate student, deeply clueless, around nineteen years old, I wandered into John Gager’s course “Ancient Christian Magic.” I had (shockingly) only recently realized that the Bible itself was something other than a unitary Word of God, excitingly and frighteningly more than a single book offered by one divine voice and spirit. Gager drenched unsuspecting undergraduates in understudied and (to me) surprising aspects of the history of ancient Christianity and of Mediterranean antiquity more generally. I can’t remember many details from the course. But I know it left me with at least two books that I’ve lugged around from school to school, job to job, home to home: an old, blandly toned gray-green print version of the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Betz’s Greek Magical Papyri in Translation.

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am resonating bronze or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13.1).2 These words were written in a letter by Paul and Sosthenes and read aloud to Christ-followers in Roman Corinth in mid-first century. The first recipients of the letter called themselves an ekklēsia or assembly, a political term indicating civic engagement and debate.3 They included those of low status, the enslaved, and women. We already met the garland weaver Karpimē Babbia, whom we met in the Introduction. To their north, the blue waters of the Corinthian Gulf lapped at Lechaion Harbor; to their south, they were shadowed by a high, rocky Acrocorinth, which sheltered defixiones or curse tablets. Eighteen curses have been found at the Acrocorinth’s Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, and more than thirty within the larger region of the Corinthia.

Clement of Alexandria’s Protreptikos or Exhortation to the Greeks, written in the late second century, begins with an elaborate story of a song that lures fish, and a cicada that jumps up to fill in for the broken string of a lyre, scraping away with perfect pitch. I have long thought this was odd. The ancient genre of protreptic offered a kind of professional calling card, an introduction to speakers’ cultural sophistication, the strength of their argument and teaching, and a demonstration of their ability to argue for the superior form of philosophy-theology.

Someone had it out for a garland weaver named Karpimē Babbia, a low-status woman who lived in Corinth in the late first or early second century CE. Chthonic Hermes, the goddess Anankē or Necessity, and the justice-exacting Fates are called upon to bring monthly destruction to her entire body, head to toe. Someone – a ritual practitioner with a client, most likely – made this curse by inscribing letters onto a thin lead tablet (Figure 0.1). What they wrote included rhythmic Greek, but also bubbled into a continuous stream of letters and sounds, the meaning of which is still unclear, which scholars call voces magicae: magical utterances. The curse-makers then rolled up the lead and pierced it with a nail, depositing it on or near a pedestal at the sanctuary of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, midway up the Acrocorinth, facing the busy city below and the blue of the Gulf of Corinth beyond.

The curse tablet comments on its own materiality or substance and on the aesthetics of lead, often characterized as cold and unprofitable. It reflects upon its drop location in a well. It uses the story of Exodus and the drowning of the Pharaoh’s chariot. Story and substance are the themes of this chapter. The curse against Babylas uses a fragment of scripture, set within a rhythmic text, to seek some sort of justice for the petitioner.