In 1857, excavations at the necropolis of Santa Maria di Capua Vetere brought to light a lead tablet bearing the names of six individuals, followed by a wish that they should be unable to speak: nep fatíum nep deíkum pútíans -- “may they be unable either to speak or to say anything” (Murano 2012, 637–38). The formulation is unusually direct in its identification of the desired injury. The author does not ask that the named individuals lose a lawsuit, that their testimony be disbelieved, or even that they make a poor impression before a judge; the request concerns their ability to produce speech in the first place. One individual, Lucius Octavius, receives additional attention in the lines that follow, where his capacity to communicate is further restricted in connection with the intentions of the Novellii. The inscription does not preserve the circumstances of the dispute, the identity of the person who commissioned the tablet, or the eventual appearance of any of the named individuals in court. It does preserve the particular form of interference that somebody considered desirable, and the means by which that interference was to be attempted: a written object, deposited beyond the ordinary social world, was made to carry an instruction concerning what should happen within a legal one.
The author’s attempt to prevent other people from speaking through a written request creates an apparent contradiction: the tablet is an unusually articulate instrument for the suppression of articulation. Yet writing and speech were not necessarily competing forms of communication in the circumstances represented by the inscription. The tablet was not an alternative courtroom speech, nor was it necessarily a written version of an incantation first delivered aloud. It was an object intended to operate within a different set of relations, involving the commissioner, the named targets, the place of deposition, and the divine or chthonic powers to whom the request might be directed. The problem, then, is not simply that a written curse was used to silence speakers. It is that the author appears to have understood the capacity to speak as something that could be acted upon through a written ritual, even though the consequences sought belonged to a setting in which speech itself had considerable social and legal importance.
Francesca Murano identifies fourteen Oscan curse tablets distributed across Campania, Samnium, and Lucania, written in the Oscan alphabet as well as in Latin and Greek characters (Murano 2012, 630–32). Their dates extend back to the fourth and third centuries BCE, while the surviving Oscan material largely disappears by the beginning of the first century BCE. Murano describes the inscriptions as among the earliest witnesses to the Oscan language, and the historical value of the corpus therefore exceeds the immediate questions of ritual classification: these are documents through which a language otherwise unevenly represented survives in use, attached not to a literary composition or an official public inscription, but to objects made for particular ritual purposes.
Murano notes that the Oscan tablets had often attracted attention primarily as linguistic evidence, with their forms and constructions considered in relation to the reconstruction of the Italic languages, while their character as magical documents had received less sustained consideration (633–34). This is not an unreasonable division of scholarly labour. The language is difficult, the inscriptions are brief, and the interpretation of a single verb may affect the classification of an entire text. Yet a grammatical form in a curse tablet is not merely an example of a language surviving in an unusual context; it may also be the means by which the author presents an action as having been performed, requests that another agent perform it, or describes a condition that is desired but not yet accomplished. The linguistic question and the ritual question are therefore difficult to separate without losing something from both.
Drawing on the comparative study of binding spells, including Christopher Faraone’s work on the ritual treatment of victims and objects, Murano distinguishes direct binding formulae, prayer formulae, wish formulae, and formulae based on the principle of similia similibus (Murano 2012, 635–37; Faraone 1991). These categories are not simply different ways of saying that the author wants something unpleasant to happen. They distribute agency differently. A direct binding formula presents the speaker as undertaking an act of binding or entrusting; a prayer formula addresses a deity and requests divine action; a wish formula states the condition that the author wants to obtain, without necessarily specifying an agent who will bring it about; and an analogical formula uses the condition of an object or body as a model for the condition desired for the victim. The categories are useful precisely because they prevent the tablets from being treated as interchangeable examples of a single, generic practice.
The Santa Maria di Capua Vetere tablet, for instance, does not need to be understood as a direct declaration that the author has already bound the tongues of the named individuals. Its wording expresses the desired result: that they should not be able to speak. The grammatical form matters because the request is not identical to the performance of an act by the speaker. This distinction brings the tablets into conversation with J. L. Austin’s account of performative utterances, although Austin’s twentieth-century philosophical framework should be used as an analytical instrument rather than attributed to ancient writers as a theory they consciously possessed. Austin’s familiar formulation, “to say something is to do something,” is useful here not because it explains ancient ritual by itself, but because it directs attention away from the assumption that language merely describes states of affairs. In the curse tablets, the wording may itself constitute part of the action, but the precise relation between utterance and action varies from one formula to another. “I bind” and “may he be unable to speak” do not make the same claim about what the speaker has done.
Faraone’s article, “Binding and Burying the Forces of Evil,” examines the use of figurines and related objects in ancient Greek ritual, particularly the relationship between physical manipulation, deposition, and the intended restriction of another person’s capacities (Faraone 1991, 165–220). It provides a comparative framework for considering why binding might be represented materially, rather than only verbally, and why the physical treatment of an object could belong to the ritual rather than merely accompany it. The Oscan tablets are not all figurine spells, and Faraone’s Greek evidence cannot simply be transferred to Campania or Samnium as though the same practice were being repeated in another language. His work is more useful for the questions it allows one to ask: whether the tablet’s material form participates in the binding, whether the deposition site contributes to the intended direction of the request, and whether the target is imagined as being restricted through a correspondence between the written object and the person named upon it.
The Cumae tablet, which Murano catalogues as number 4, makes the physical dimension of the curse more explicit. Its author does not stop at the general wish that the targets should be unable to speak, but specifies the organs and processes involved:
pus ollum solum fancuas rectas sint
“May the tongues of them all be rigid.”
The following line extends the request:
pus flatus sicus ollum sit
“May their breath be dry.”
(Murano 2012, 639.)
The parallel construction directs attention to two related components of vocal production, the tongue and the breath, and the desired condition is not simply a failure of persuasion but a restriction of the bodily means through which persuasion might occur. The author has not written that the opponents should be confused, dishonest, or unsuccessful; the curse specifies a physical condition that would make speech difficult or impossible. Murano interprets the tablet in relation to the vocal activity of adversaries in a legal context, but the surviving wording does not provide a transcript of the proceedings or establish exactly what kind of testimony was expected. The connection with courtroom speech is persuasive because of the broader pattern of judicial curses and the explicit attack on the tongue, not because the tablet supplies a complete account of the case.
John G. Gager’s collection Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World gives this judicial context a broader comparative setting. Its third chapter, “Tongue-Tied in Court: Legal and Political Disputes,” gathers material concerned with legal and public competition, and the chapter’s very title reflects the recurrent importance of speech as an object of ritual interference (Gager 1992, 116–50). Gager’s introductory discussion describes curse tablets as inscribed objects used to influence “the behavior and welfare of personal enemies and rivals” through the agency of spirits, daimones, and deities (Gager 1992, 175–99, in the discussion introducing the later thematic material). The definition is broad, but it is useful in distinguishing a curse tablet from a private expression of anger: the object is directed towards a target and seeks to affect that target through an agency beyond the ordinary reach of the commissioner. In the judicial examples, the target’s speech, memory, or ability to present a case becomes one of the capacities that the commissioner wishes to place under such control.
Legal proceedings in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds did not operate through the modern separation of professional legal representation, documentary evidence, and judicial administration. The ability of an individual to speak, maintain a coherent account, and persuade an audience could have direct consequences for the outcome of a dispute. Gager’s introductory discussion places lawsuits and public trials among the ordinary features of civic life, noting that ancient historians and public orators repeatedly attest to their importance (Gager 1992, 116–50). The Oscan material cannot be used to reconstruct the precise legal procedures of every community in which it was deposited, and it would be misleading to assume that a Campanian dispute operated according to the institutions of classical Athens. Nevertheless, the tablets belong to a world in which disputes could be consequential and in which speech was one of the means by which competing claims were advanced.
The Cumae tablet’s emphasis on tongue and breath distinguishes between interference with the content of speech and interference with its production. A target might say something false, fail to remember a fact, or offer an argument that the audience finds unconvincing; alternatively, the bodily means through which speech is produced might be restricted altogether. The Cumae author appears to move towards the second possibility, specifying the physical conditions through which speaking takes place. This is not the same as the later Roman rhetorical concept of actio, with its attention to delivery, voice, gesture, and bodily presentation, and it would be anachronistic to claim that the author was anticipating a system of rhetorical instruction associated with Cicero or Quintilian. The comparison is narrower: both the tablet and later rhetorical discussions make it difficult to treat public argument as a purely abstract exchange of propositions, since the argument must be delivered by a body before an audience. The curse takes that dependence literally enough to make the body itself its target.