The surprising absence of violent language from classical Athenian curses is best understood as a rhetorical strategy appropriate for getting the divine powers to enact the curser's desire to harm his or her enemies and to gain an advantage in the particular agonistic context. A contrast with the extravagantly violent language of other contemporary curses, which call for unmitigated catastrophe to befall their targets, shows that the fundamental difference between these curses is the audience that they primarily address, which shapes the nature of the request that is made in the imprecation. Whereas contingent curses primarily address the human community with highly intense rhetoric to deter potential violation, these agonistic curses against rivals request assistance in the rivalry from some power beyond the human community, limiting the extravagance of the request to improve the chance of fulfilment.

This article examines the relationship between oral traditions of cursing and the oldest Greek curse tablets from Selinous and Himera in western Sicily. As much early Greek writing is thought to record or reflect the spoken word, it is perhaps unexpected that these early Sicilian texts carry few signs of orality or speech. There are no verbs of speaking, incanting, cursing, singing, binding; no deictic language; no metre. Rather, the oldest curse tablets in the Greek world show clear signs of written literacy. Sicilian curse tablets from 500–450 bce employ verbs of writing to curse their victims (ἐνγράφω, ‘I inscribe’; καταγράφω, ‘I write down’; ἀπογράφω, ‘I enrol’), and exhibit textual distortion, scribal symbols, abbreviations, and columnar lists of names – features that ground these texts in the realm of writing. It is suggested that Greek curse practice developed alongside and in response to the spread of legal writing in the late sixth-century law courts of western Sicily.

Commercial curses indicating an occupation, business, profit, workshops or shops, or targeting individuals identified by a trade number about sixty; most come from Greece and date to the fifth to third century bce. That the texts concern rivalries or conflicts between tradesmen has been the prevailing opinion, though ambiguity in curses that include multiple targets (sometimes with different trades) or family members have led some to maintain that competition may not explain commercial curses best, and instead suggest that the tablets reflect attempts to deal with risk or uncertainty arising from a range of social, legal, or political contexts. Though a steady stream of scholarship detailing economic activity, particularly at non-elite levels, has rightly reoriented the debate about the nature and scale of the ancient economy, and the strategies that craftsmen, merchants, and others engaged in commerce employed to mitigate concerns about risk and competition, the contribution of commercial curses, spells, and oracles has not been a part of the conversation. The curse tablets help further refine our understanding of the ancient economy because of what they reveal about concerns related to competitors, profit, and reputation, and the methods the practitioners used to hinder opponents. Rather than being at odds with commercial competition, those methods which target multiple craftsmen, their families, and others besides workshops, skills, and profit align with strategies of collaboration among ancient craftsmen and merchants and their reliance on social capital, described as social networks and notions of trust, reputation, and the shared norms that supported them.

This article examines the ritual contexts of two recent discoveries of materia magica in complex and carefully excavated archaeological sites, and situates the prayers found there within the wider range of prayer in traditional Roman religion. Both the texts found in the so-called ‘magician's cellar’ in Chartres and those on the lead tablets found behind the temple of Magna Mater in Mainz date to the first century ce and are thus among the earliest surviving magical texts in the West. Despite the usual assumption that many magical rituals migrated from east to west across the Mediterranean and then up into western Europe, it shows how these two early caches of magical text reflect, in fact, the pattern and style of early Latin votive formulae, as well as traditional Roman prayers, like those of the Arval Brethren, and traditional Roman rituals.

This article deals with curse tablets against thieves, also known as ‘prayers for justice’. In the first part, I offer a short introduction to the topic and the scholarly debate surrounding the definition of this type of inscription, concluding that a more emic approach can help us understand the complex nature of a technology that, far from being monolithic, evolved over time and space. In the second part, I compare the literary and epigraphic evidence (in Greek and Latin), pointing out the similarities and differences between our different sources of information. Finally, I turn to the handful of Latin curse tablets from Roman Britain in which the stolen object's value is divided between the principal and the invoked gods. In my view, this type of transaction should be analysed as a new take on the more traditional votum, in which legal concepts such as obligatio or ownership also play an important role. By establishing an almost contractual agreement with a deity, practitioners obtained not only divine assistance but also tangible evidence of the god's participation.

This paper looks at our term ‘curse tablet’ in the light of the Greek distinction between ἀραί (‘curses’) and κατάδεσμοι (‘binding spells’). It analyses the role of cursing in Greek culture and sketches a short history of research that led German and Anglophone scholars to coin a modern terminology that disregards the ancient distinction.

This article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the particularities of specific tablets or groups of tablets. This article argues that, if human and object agency are taken into account, it is possible to explain both the discontinuities in the history of curse tablets and also the shape of their thousand-year history. Curse tablets emerge as a technology the affordances of which allowed it to be put to many uses in many different social locations formed by the complex and shifting cultural contours of antiquity.

The influence of Greek poetry on Latin poetry is well known. Why, then, is the reciprocal influence of Latin poetry on Greek not so readily discernible? What does that reveal about Greek–Latin bilingualism and biculturalism? Perhaps not very much. The evidence that Daniel Jolowicz surveys in the densely written 34-page introduction to his 400-page Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novel amply testifies to Greek engagement with Latin language and culture on a larger scale than is usually recognized. That this engagement is more readily discernible in Greek novels than in Greek poetry is no reason to dismiss the evidence that the novels provide. On the contrary, the seven main chapters provide ‘readings of the Greek novels that establish Latin poetry…as an essential frame of reference’ (2). In Chapters 1–3 Chariton engages with the love elegy of Propertius, Ovid and Tibullus, with Ovid's epistolary poetry and the poetry of exile, and with the Aeneid. In Chapters 4–5 Achilles Tatius engages with Latin elegy and (again) the Aeneid, and also with the ‘destruction of bodies’ (221) in Ovid, Lucan, and Seneca. In Chapter 7 Longus engages with Virgil's Eclogues and the Aeneid. The strength of the evidence requires only a brief conclusion. Jolowicz's rigorously argued and methodologically convincing monograph deserves to be read widely, and with close attention.

The second volume of Harm Pinkster's Oxford Latin Syntax is a stunning achievement and an admirably thorough account of the Latin ‘complex sentence and discourse’. Far from restricting itself to classical prose, the work covers Latin texts from c. 200 bc to c. ad 450, in both poetry and prose. Overall, I was struck by the good balance that Pinkster maintains between presenting Latin syntax in a systematic and well-structured way and leaving enough room for the portrayal of the Latin language as a dynamic phenomenon, in which the frequency of and predilection for certain linguistic constructions keeps changing and the ‘correctness’ of certain expressions is a matter of time and context. Equally salutary are Pinkster's reminders of the role that intonation must have played in the production and reception of Latin – and of what we lose by no longer having access to it. Throughout, Pinkster gives due consideration to the fact that it is often hard to securely classify a grammatical phenomenon, but that several analyses might be possible. Similarly, where appropriate, the importance of the larger interpretive context of a sentence for understanding and classifying its grammatical phenomena is acknowledged as well – which is a great achievement in a monumental work that quotes a wealth of examples from such a wide range of Latin texts.

Free labour constitutes the largest black hole in ancient Greek economic and social history. The New Institutional Economics approaches that are currently so influential in Greek economic history focus on growth and transaction costs, but have largely ignored labour; it is not accidental that Bresson's monumental synthesis of ancient Greek economies has no chapter devoted to the issue. This is what makes the volume edited by Edmund Stewart, Edward Harris, and David Lewis on skilled labour and professionalism in ancient societies such an important contribution. The thirteen chapters explore three major issues. The first concerns the processes through which the division of labour and specialization created distinctions between unskilled and skilled labour. The second theme focuses on the major advantages that treasured skills offered to those individuals and groups that possessed them, and the ways in which individuals and states recruited and bargained with skilled labourers. The third is the extent to which it is possible to use the concept of professionalization to describe the process by which some ancient occupations came to constitute professions. The volume examines various case studies: while in some instances it is possible to describe such forms of skilled labour as professions (doctors, sculptors, musicians, actors), in other areas (athletes, soldiers) such a label is highly misleading. Particularly valuable in this respect is the exploration of the impact of various factors and processes on the extent of professionalization of different occupations.

My first title in fact comprises two independent books. Within a section dedicated to Graeco-Roman art and archaeology, the subject may come as something of a surprise: the case study is not ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’, nor does it derive from the extended Mediterranean. Rather, From Memory to Marble analyses the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, inaugurated in 1949. Elizabeth Rankin and Rolf Michael Schneider have delivered a pair of volumes almost as monumental as the installation they describe, the first examining the context, origin, and legacy of the building's frieze, the second cataloguing its twenty-seven scenes. One of the many remarkable aspects of these two books is that both have been made available as free downloads. But what really stands out in the analysis is the ‘unconditional collaboration’ (5) between an art historian and a classical archaeologist: on the one hand, the project showcases how a broader art-historical training can enrich the traditional sorts of questions posed by classical archaeology, especially when it comes to issues of pictorial narrative; on the other, it demonstrates what classical archaeological formalism can offer to contemporary art history, and indeed larger debates about cultural history and contemporary identity politics. The result will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the legacy of classical ideas and imagery in South Africa.

As Andrea Nightingale notes in her persuasive new monograph, scholars often seem reticent to acknowledge the theological context within which Plato develops his metaphysics. By analysing and emphasizing the language of divinity applied to the forms, soul, and cosmos across four dialogues, the Symposium, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, Nightingale builds a case for rehabilitating Plato's status as a fundamentally ‘theological philosopher’. She argues that the tendency to sideline Plato's theological thinking compromises our reading of the dialogues: ‘To understand his philosophy, we need to locate his ideas in the context of Greek religious discourses and practices’ (8). Nightingale achieves this in two ways. The first is by offering brief but useful explanations of key Athenian rituals and belief sets, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, epiphany, and Orphism. The second is by analysing allusions to and adaptations of these practices and ideas within the dialogues. Her conclusion is that, via his explanation of knowledge, psychology, and metaphysics in terms of the divine, Plato develops a novel conception of human beings, and philosophers in particular, in terms of their relation to the divine.

While this issue's selection of books on classical reception is diverse in subject area and methodology, one theme they all share is a focus on place and space. The Classics in South America by Germán Campos Muñoz and Time and Antiquity in American Empire by Mark Storey are particularly focused on Classics and the spatiality of empire. South America's location beyond the extent of the world known to the Roman Empire provided an interesting point of departure for the classically inclined inhabitants of the continent as they considered continuities and disjunctures with the time and space of classical antiquity. Campos Muñoz's second and third case studies discuss an array of material and literary evidence in examining how both colonial and anti-imperial activities were framed with respect to ancient history and epic. We see how a sixteenth-century Spanish nobleman celebrated becoming Viceroy of Peru in a procession through a triumphal arch adorned with Latin hexameter and classical motifs. Similarly, Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary and subject of classical odes celebrating his liberation of South American territories, enjoyed classicizing triumphs and parades (140). These contrasting case studies show the ongoing significance of the Roman Empire to South America, even as its imperial status changed dramatically.

One of the more salient features of Greek and Roman literature is its archival impulse expressed in the tendency to incorporate lists, enumerations, and catalogues. From Homer's manifold catalogues, via classical historiographers, to Roman poets and beyond, catalogues and lists seem ubiquitous in ancient literature, and ancient authors catalogued all sorts of items: from ships, to war dead, to dog names, to mention but a few. But not only so in literature: in documentary sources with their lists of magistrates, victors, tributes, taxes, and more, we witness the same appetite for creation of order and taxonomy. This is the phenomenon that the edited volume Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond tackles in sixteen chapters, prefaced by a substantial introduction penned by the editors. As they observe, lists are indeed fashionable in literary studies these days, and the volume aims to provide a theoretically informed overview of the variety of lists and catalogues in ancient literature. The first of the four sections consists of two wide-ranging and inspired papers that provide a theoretical background: Mainberger's piece looks for a site of meaning in a list by analysing, no less, the table of contents of the very volume in which the article is printed, while von Contzen tackles ontological problems and establishes a set of criteria for the assessment and description of a list, before turning to the pragmatics and highlighting the effects that lists may have in the moment of reception: ‘the list is a narrative fascinosum, a literary form that startles and entertains; that attracts and repels at the same time’ (51).