ANST-501 Lessons

The professor is uncharacteristically quiet as she opens the doors to the classroom. She sits down at her desk and waits patiently as students settle into their chairs. On her desk is a thin sheet of some sort of metallic material with Greek lettering inscribed on it. Beside the sheet are a pair of dragonhide gloves.

Welcome back, students! I am pleased to see so many of you back in my classroom. I know many of you struggled with the essay from our second class, but we will discuss that further after today’s lecture. 

Today marks our last class on the topic of Greco-Roman magic and its practitioners. We are going to cover some specific examples of how magic was used in Greco-Roman times, and I have to warn you - none of them are particularly pleasant, or exclusively for the greater good! Also, on the topic of warnings, make sure you are taking excellent notes, as your midterms will be part of the next lesson’s assignments! Shall we get started?

Curse Tablets

Let’s have a look at what I have here on my desk:

This is a curse tablet from ancient Greco-Roman times, specifically somewhere between 375 and 350 BCE. I will show it to each of you more closely, but I warn you, please do not touch it, no matter how drawn to it you may feel!

As you can see, the tablet is very thin and is inscribed with mostly Greek letters, plus a few extra symbols. It’s also quite fragile due to its advanced age. The ban on touching it is a precautionary measure - not because of any magical traces - any previous enchantments have long since faded - but because of not only its age, but also the material from which it was made:lead. As you may or may not know, prolonged exposure, particularly ingestion, to lead can cause severe symptoms, including death. It’s best to exercise caution at all times, students; you never know what can happen if you are not careful.

Now that you have all had a chance to look at this particular example, let’s talk about curse tablets in general and their association with Greco-Roman magical practice.

Curse tablets were very common across the Roman Empire. They have been found all the way from the British Isles to Jerusalem, and pretty much everywhere in between.  As I have noted, they are composed of thin sheets of lead inscribed with both written words and various symbols. Less expensive curse tablets were also written on papyrus. To use a curse tablet, a resident of Rome simply paid a witch or wizard (who most likely was a charlatan, though at the very least was literate) to write one for them. Once purchased, the curse tablet would be rolled or folded five or six times, and then either nailed to a temple, shrine, tree, post, or alternately buried in a tomb, in the shrine itself, or tossed down a well.

 It would have been considered bad form to open someone else’s curse tablet after it had been placed, as they were considered a type of communication with the gods. And what was this communication, you ask? Curse tablets were basically a sort of prayer asking - and sometimes even begging - a god or gods to perform specific actions through an enchantment. The most common types of requests ranged from recovering lost or stolen property, affecting the outcome of chariot races (upon which many places were bet and many fortunes gained and lost), bringing back departed lovers (either from death or from the arms of another), or to quite literally curse someone who had offended or injured the person requesting divine intervention.

Now, the question that remains is if they worked. The simple answer is… not exactly. Most curse tablets were not infused with any sort of real magic. They were simply prayers written to the gods by those desperate to change their situation but who did not know how to make that change happen. The non-alphabetic “magical” characters that appear on this scroll and others (stars, windmills, arrows, etc.) were for show; they were not part of any runic language that we know of, and were not activated in any way. However, while not magical, these scrolls did at least serve a cathartic purpose to the purchaser as, in their mind, at least they had tried to do something. The gods had simply decided not to intervene on their behalf.

This is not to say that all curse tablets were fake - they were not. Real witches and wizards were quite capable of putting spells and enchantments - and sometimes even potions - on curse tablets that transferred something to the purchaser, whether increased luck or a hex of some sort. While not as common, they certainly packed a powerful punch!

More commonly, though, as has been mentioned in your History of Magic classes, the curses and desires written on these tablets were acted upon after the fact by witches and wizards who snuck into the temple areas, read the newest tablets (as they were full of tidbits of gossip and secrets), and sometimes decided to act upon what they had read. It was a bit of vigilantism, I will admit, but a very ingrained part of society at the time!

These witches and wizards often took these “orders” as a bit of fun to grant a request to someone, but just as often they might stumble upon a serious crime or devastating situation - such as a very ill child - and decide to intervene in a much more serious manner. Many Muggles found that their child who had been close to death the night before seemed miraculously recovered in the morning. All the child could tell them was that a kindly woman had made him drink something. Unsurprisingly, the Muggles would then credit a goddess with the miracle, when it really was a healer with a magical remedy who saved their child.

And so, curse tablets remain one of those pieces of history where magic was employed - but not exactly in the way that Muggles believed the magic of their gods worked.

Duelling Arenas

Let’s move on to a topic where magic use was the entire point of the task: duelling arenas.

Now, before we can talk about the arenas themselves, we need to be reminded of a few important pieces of history. First, the wand was invented in approximately 600 BCE. Secondly, the Romans were quite fond of their gladiatorial contests, plays, and other spectacles in venues such as the Colosseum. Other than the plays (although sometimes even those qualified), these events were rather bloody, involved a lot of death, and were attended by the public in the tens of thousands at a time.

I wish I could tell you that witches and wizards didn’t partake in similar activities, but that would be a lie - and that, my dear students, I would not do to you.

Now, witches and wizards would attend these spectacles at the Colosseum, however at some point around 100 CE, the wizarding population decided to have gladiatorial contests their own way - and wand dueling began in earnest. This is not to say that duelling had not occurred before 100 CE. It certainly had. In fact, it emerged quite quickly after the invention of the wand - if you give someone a new weapon, odds are they will find an excuse to use it.

It was the prevalence of the events in the Colosseum, however, that lead to what we now know as modern day duelling. Back to 100 CE, various witches and wizards decided that they could have their own Colosseum - in secret of course - where wand use was the one and only line of defense for the contestants. And so they met in secret for these events, their locations hidden from muggle view, but the intentions of the events remained the same - battles to the death.

Sometimes these battles were for judicial reasons - the contestants were magical criminals with a death sentence; only by killing their opponent day after day were they granted a stay of execution. Other contestants were simply there for the glory of battle and victory. The rules were vague, and quite often the spectators were also killed or injured from stray spells - especially if they were not so adept at shield charms!

Over time, the population grew weary of the violence. Rules had been put in place in terms of conduct of the contestants, and executions became an unpopular choice of punishment. Dueling arenas remained a form of entertainment for some time, but around 300 CE it ceased to be deadly. A clear winner or loser was proclaimed, but the injuries to the contestants - and the spectators - was significantly reduced! A list of acceptable and non-acceptable spells was created and, although it has changed a bit over time, dueling remains relatively true to - if not as deadly as - the way it began.

And so, my dear students, if you are involved in a dueling club today, may you thank your lucky stars that we live almost 2,000 years after these events and you will not be expected to die!

Magic Use in Greco-Roman Battles

If I said to you that the Greeks and Romans, both before and after they became one society, used magic in battles, what would you assume I meant? Most likely, you would think that they had witches and wizards on the front lines casting spells to obscure their forces from the opposite side, or even directly attacking. However, in actuality, magic in battle was much more subtle and behind-the-scenes.

We have discussed at length the prevalence of divination in Greco-Roman times, specifically alluding to the various types practiced in everyday life. Battle magic was equally influenced by divination. Using the various means available to them, the different branches of diviners sought both divine approval for battles, as well as guidance on when and where the battle should take place, who should champion the army, etc. The same methods we learned before would have been used: consulting the oracles, reading omens for the gods’ blessings on going to war, and so on. However, there were some divinatory practices almost entirely unique to warfare in ancient Greece and Rome.

You may now be asking yourselves if, most of the time, actual divinatory skill was being used to plan wars. In most cases, yes. While divine permission may or may not have been granted -- I fear we’ll never know that. The seers in a particular cult could see enough to make suggestions about whether a particular action was likely to succeed or not (and therefore was considered favorable by the gods). This was achieved through many means, including actual visions and also by observing what we would think of as more mundane things, such as the flight patterns of birds away from an oncoming storm. 

Another interesting, albeit not very flashy, way that divination was used in warfare was in the practice of arithmancy. Indeed, numbers have a place in battle for more than just counting enemy soldiers or survivors. They were also used to supplement battle strategy. The days and months were reduced via arithmancy to help determine which days to march or begin a specific battle. Of course, it was not always possible to choose the day that a battle started, but it was certainly considered, and actions that lead to starting battles on the most favourable days were priotitised. This was especially true in terms of the first official declaration of war. 

Arithmancy was also used alongside the practice of  “numbering” the soldiers in an army. Not how many soldiers there were all told (that hardly requires the use of magic), but essentially each soldier was given their own number, like a modern day Muggle “dog tag.” Arithmancy was used to put useful, beneficial or auspicious combinations of numbers together, thus creating platoons or ranks of soldiers. While it's unclear if there was indeed magic at work here, we can be sure that it did help in other ways. These numbers helped the captains and generals recognize and keep track of soldiers of incredible value and skill, rather than leaving them as unrecognizable individuals in masses of people. This allowed them to single these individuals ouf and place them in strategic positions, greatly affecting the outcome of the battle. Of course, a little arithmancy affecting the outcomes didn’t hurt either.

Conclusion

And that concludes our lesson for today. Life certainly was a bit different during Greco-Roman times, wouldn’t you say?

Your assignments for today include a quiz on today’s material, and time for you to study for your midterms. Yes, you heard me correctly! Your midterms are next week. Midterms will cover all of the material from the beginning of this year up until the end of today’s lesson. The midterm consists of two parts, including a long test with multiple choice, short answer, and true or false questions, as well as an essay. Both parts will be mandatory. You will also be required to write a short quiz on the material we will cover in Lesson Five, wherein we will begin discussing the Celts.

Good luck to all of you!

Image credits here and here
Original lesson written by Professor Liria Morgan