A Lead Curse for a Stolen Cloak

Marcus Valerius

Come closer, friend, and keep your voice down. Last time we were shouting over the stalls of the macellum. Today I'm showing you what a Roman does when the courts have nothing to offer him. Yesterday, at the Baths of Trajan, I hung my tunic and my good wool cloak on a peg and went in to sweat. When I came out, the peg was bare.

Marcus Valerius

Thieves at the baths are an old joke in Rome, and nobody laughs when it's his own cloak. I even have a suspect. A freedman named Felix was lingering by the pegs, very interested in other men's clothes. But I can't prove it. And what are my choices? I could go to the praetor, find an advocate, and wait for a hearing, over a cloak. A man like me has no patron to speak for him. By the time my case is called, the cloak would be on someone else's back, or in a rag bin.

Marcus Valerius

So I do what half my street does and none of them admits. The elder Pliny writes in his Natural History that there is no one who does not fear being spellbound by dread imprecations, written on lead or on clay. No one. Senator, baker, bath attendant, all of us. And think about what that means. A man only fears the curse that someone else is willing to buy.

Marcus Valerius

Now, the law is not friendly to this business. Rome has banned sorcery and evil charms, and the men who sell them don't hang a sign. I'm told of a man down a crooked lane, past the Subura, where the tenements lean together and shut out the sun. His shop smells of hot metal and old oil. Lead dust is grey on his fingers, and there's a shelf of scraps behind him. Some are cuttings off sheets, some are offcuts from the water pipes. Cheap and plentiful, he says. And fitting. Lead is cold and heavy and dull, and it belongs to the dead.

Marcus Valerius

He doesn't ask what I've lost. He asks for names. And he has his words ready, because he's written this a hundred times. Whether man or woman, whether slave or free, he mutters, with a gap in the middle where my enemy's name goes. He sells the same curse to the weaver who hates a rival weaver, and to the man dreading a witness in court, and to me. I only supply the cloak, the tunic, and Felix.

Marcus Valerius

He takes an iron stylus, and he scratches. It's an ugly, hurried sound, like a mouse in a wall. He writes in cursive, quick and cramped, and then he stops and asks me a question I don't expect. How hard do I want it to fall?

Marcus Valerius

That is the moment, friend. Because he can give me a great deal. He can turn the man's mind away from him. He can bind his tongue, his hands, his feet. He can list the body piece by piece, the liver, the lungs, the guts, the eyes, until Felix can neither speak nor sleep. Some men write their curses backwards, or upside down, or put in strange scratched marks that no one can read, so that everything in the victim gets turned around. The writer shrugs and says the gods can read them.

Marcus Valerius

And I think about my own liver. I think about a freedman lying awake in the dark with his guts burning, over a cloak, and I'm not sure I want that on me. So I tell him no. I don't want Felix wasted. I want my cloak. Let the god take the loss, I say, and let Felix feel it, until he brings the cloak and the tunic back. The writer nods like a physician hearing a sensible patient. The goods are handed to the god in the writing, he says, so a theft from me becomes a theft from the god, and the god does not like to be robbed.

Marcus Valerius

Then he rolls the lead, tight, and holds up an iron nail. Do I want it driven through? That's the old word, to fix, to fasten, to bind. I tell him once, through the name. He sets the point against the lead and strikes it with a hammer. I'll tell you, I flinched, as if it were Felix's hand on the bench.

Marcus Valerius

Now the hard part. A curse in my pocket is only a scrap of metal. It has to reach the underworld, Dis Pater, Proserpina, Hecate, and the way down is through the dark places. A grave is best, and best of all a grave of someone who died before his time, or by violence, because those restless dead can be sent on errands. But I'm no grave robber. So I go out at dusk, across the Campus Martius, to the fountain of Anna Perenna, north of the city, where the water goes into the earth and the nymphs listen.

Marcus Valerius

It's quiet there, and not empty. People have been here before me. There are lamps along the edge, some sunk in the mud, and I'm told some have a little rolled lead set in them as a wick. There are small lead cylinders, and a few little wax figures, bound and pierced. Coins glint on the bottom. Every one of them is somebody's cloak, somebody's rival, somebody's faithless lover. I'm not the only man in Rome with a bare peg.

Marcus Valerius

I kneel. I say Felix's name, low, and then my own, and I name the cloak and the tunic. Then I let go. The lead is heavier than it looks. It makes almost no sound, one small swallow in the black water, and the cold weight is gone from my hand.

Marcus Valerius

Walking home, I wait to feel something. Triumph, shame, anything. I feel nothing but the evening wind through my thin tunic. I don't know if Felix will sleep tonight, or ever hear of it. I only know that for the first time since yesterday I have done something, and that tomorrow I will go back to the baths and watch every man at the pegs.