In my paper, I hope to examine the interface between magic and writing in early Greek curses (c. 8th-6th centuries BCE). It has been suggested that the mass amount of curse tablets that have been found throughout the Greek and Roman worlds stem from a far earlier oral tradition of magic (Eidinow 141; Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 82-83). Literary evidence, such as Aeschylus’ Eumenides along with the Greek Magical Papyri both point to the oral tradition (Eidinow 141). In this way, my goal for this project is to examine what we know about this early period of written magic in order to explore the reasons behind why there might have been a shift from an oral tradition to a written one.
Our earliest forms of written magic come in a few extant examples of what are called ‘conditional curses’ (Eidinow 141). ‘Conditional curses’ “are intended to discourage those who are planning to do a crime” (Eidinow 140) often by stating that something (bad) will happen if the person reading does something that the curser does not want them to do (e.g. “if you do X, then X”).
Possibly the earliest example of these conditional curses, as well as of Greek writing in general, is the so-called ‘Nestor’s Cup’ (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 77). In 1954 during excavations of the late eighth century BCE Euboean colony of Pithekoussai, fragments of an unassuming proto-Corinthian cup with a three-line inscription were found in the grave of a cremated youth (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 77).