Akanthos curse tablet

What it is

The Akanthos curse tablet is a sheet of lead written on both faces in Ancient Greek, on which a man sets out a spell meant to bring two people under his control. Inscribed bindings of this sort are called katadesmoi, or curse tablets, and this one belongs to the erotic kind: its aim is a love affair rather than a lawsuit or a business rival. What the text asks for is that Sime and Ainis be held fast until they give Pausanias what he wants. The tablet was laid in a cemetery, following a Greek custom of sending such messages to the powers below by way of the dead.

Where it comes from

The tablet came to light in the burial ground of Akanthos, a town on the north-east side of the Chalcidice in Central Macedonia, and entered scholarship in 1993 together with three other tablets from the same cemetery. It is now kept in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. Its script places it in the closing decades of the 4th century BC, a period when Akanthos formed part of the Macedonian kingdom. Curse writing was long established in the Macedonian capital before Philip II and spread as Macedon grew: Pella and Pydna are well known for it, and by the middle of the century towns newly under Macedonian rule, Arethousa and Oraiokastro among them, were producing tablets of their own. Five have been found at Akanthos.

How it is done

Each face of the lead carries a single target. One names Sime, daughter of Amphitritos; the other names Ainis, of Melissa of Apollonia. The wording asks that neither be able to touch a sacrificial victim, and that Aphrodite withhold her favour from Sime, until they yield. A closing line calls on nobody but Pausanias to undo the work. The finished tablet was then buried in a necropolis, where a recently dead soul was hoped to carry the request down to the underworld. Pausanias alone is to decide when the spell ends.

Tools and materials

The text supplies the working parts. Personal names fix the people concerned, with a patronymic for one and a place for the other. The gods are drawn in as parties to the dispute: Athena, who receives Sime's sacrifice, and Aphrodite, whose favour is to be refused. A cemetery provides the route below, since the newly dead were thought able to carry a written message to the underworld.

What it is for

The spell is an attraction curse, a request that named people be drawn toward the person who set it going. Scholars set these apart from separation curses, which work to pull a couple apart. Here the goal is a man's access to a woman, and the pressure is open: Sime is to cling to Pausanias, and neither target is to take part in sacrifice until that happens. Pausanias also keeps the right to end the spell when he chooses, so its duration rests with him alone.

Who does it

Pausanias speaks in his own voice and puts his own name in the text, which makes him both author and agent. Nothing marks him as a professional. The burial in the cemetery is described as following the practice of Greek magicians, so a specialist may have handled that stage, or he may have acted alone. He writes from a male position, and the tablet is one of the few early texts of its kind where that standpoint is unambiguous. Whether Sime was a wife, a pallake, or a sex worker has been argued without resolution.

Peoples and places

The tablet belongs to Macedonia, and more narrowly to Akanthos on the Chalcidice, one of five curse tablets recovered there from the years of Macedonian rule. Comparable finds come from Pella and Pydna, and from Arethousa and Oraiokastro once those towns passed under Macedonian control. The reasoning of the spell travels further still: the threat that a cursed person's offerings will be refused, and the gods thereby offended, recurs in curses from Asia Minor, the wider Mediterranean, and Greek settlements on the northern shore of the Black Sea in the same century.

What people believe

Behind the text sits a world in which gods attend to small human affairs and can be turned against a person who neglects them. Sacrifice is the hinge. If Sime and Ainis cannot touch a sacrificial victim, they cannot take part in worship, and that omission is expected to bring divine anger down on them rather than on Pausanias. Aphrodite is asked not to be gracious to Sime; Athena is named as the goddess whose rite Sime would otherwise perform. Below the human level lies the underworld, reached through a fresh grave.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Modern work sorts erotic curses into two kinds, separation and attraction, and treats the Akanthos text as an early member of the second. The type was later called agoge or agogimon, and it was usually set going by a man seeking a woman. Older literature knew such rituals from stories, Jason and Medea among them, long before any example on lead appeared. The Akanthos find held the record for the oldest surviving attraction spell until two Greek spells from Sicily, dated to the 5th century BC, were published. Editors also disagree over whether Ainis is a woman, since the name is not gender-specific.

Compare and confuse

The nearest relative is the Pella tablet, a separation curse that works to drive people apart rather than draw them together, and the two are usually discussed as a pair. The same class of attraction working came to be known as agoge or agogimon in later usage. Other finds in the same family are the Pydna curse tablets. Katadesmos is the general Greek term for inscribed bindings, of which the love spells form only one branch.

Today

The tablet is held at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. Since the 1993 presentation, the study of Greek love magic has moved on: the two Sicilian spells published in recent years push the surviving evidence back a century, so the Akanthos text now counts as one early witness among several rather than the single oldest. What it preserves in full is an agent, two named targets, the terms demanded, and a clause reserving release to the writer.

Questions people ask about Akanthos curse tablet

Good reading and sources

• Akanthos curse tablet on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data