Searching for More Insurance for the Future
through Preliminary Expiations and Curses
The votive relationship already encompasses an anticipatory component for what is
to be, when periodical vows are pronounced. As for more hypothetical risks or unknown
destiny, Romans had other, no less voluntary, means.
Pietas, depicted on coins by cult objects or as a female figure sacrificing over an
altar with a fire (Siebert 1999; LIMC, s.v. “Pietas”), had such an importance in Roman
daily life that possible faults, hence impiety, were a permanent matter for carefulness
(Cic. Leg.2.22). Expiatory rites were a means to prevent unconscious intrusions into
the gods’ realm, while keeping nevertheless the largest possible area free for action:
for instance when a peasant wanted to clear part of a sacred grove (Cato, Agr.139),
or a sacred grove had to be cleaned out (CFA94, II.7– 8). These piaculaworked as
a guarantee for the current action, in the same, although inverse, way as curses could
stamp an action as an impious one a priori, through the ritual context. Many of
these curses come from imperial Anatolia; they aimed to protect the integrity of tombs
against any material spoliation or undesired inhumation. According to each curse,
possible violators of these memorial places had to pay a penalty to the imperial fiscus,
and/or the community (Strubbe 1997: nos. 113, 125, 72ter), and/or the main local
temple (nos. 121, 114), at least. More dramatically, divine anger was called down
upon them in order that they would be destroyed: “may he not know the pleasure
of children and of life, may the earth be not accessible and the sea not navigable,
but may he die with all sufferings, childless and destitute and deformed” (Strubbe
1997: no. 285; 1991). These recurrent formulae are highly informative. Scholars have
rightly underlined that the declaration by itself plays a performative role, recalling
procedures usually coined as “magical,” mainly defixiones(Gager 1992).
Versnel (1991) magisterially demonstrated that these texts are a ritualized form
of “the appeal to justice.” The issue is not to get assistance from superior powers
in a contest with a rival to be superseded or destroyed; it is to call on the gods as
“judges and witnesses” (Cic. Leg.2.16), relying on a belief in their perfect justice.
Oaths were taken for a similar purpose, and perjurers had to reckon with divine
punishment. In the middle of the first century ce, the juridical power, Nemesis,
who had kept her Greek name, had a statue on the Capitol in Rome, close to Jupiter,
the god of oaths, and to Fides as personification of good faith (Plin. Nat.28.22).
Already back in the second century bce, Plautus (Curculio268 –9) made fun of so
many perjurers praying Jupiter Capitolinus to protect them. Funerary curses were
intended to make active in advance the equal justice of the gods, and they likewise
used contract formulae: “They will pay back (apodôsousi), retaliate with blood and
death” (Strubbe 1999: no. 127). This might explain why public fines were supported
by a cosmic sanction.
Appeals to divine justice were even more frequently made in the whole empire in
cases of anonymous aggression, mainly from thieves. These prayers are different from
defixiones(Versnel 1991). They are better classed with deuotio, for they appear as a
contract with an auxiliary deity. A coat was stolen: Deuoueo eum qui caracellam meam
286 Nicole Belayche