INTRODUCTION

This collection of essays arises from the ‘Curses in Context’ project, which was funded primarily by the Neubauer Collegium of the University of Chicago, with important help in this instance from an anonymous East Coast friend. Under the aegis of this project, we have in the past organized a series of international conferences with a number of aims: to encourage archaeologists, historians, and epigraphists to give thematic papers on the regional and local features of the curse tablets from the relevant areas; to provide a venue for the presentation of newly discovered curse tablets; and to share techniques for their conservation and photography.1 For the first three meetings, we roughly divided the world of curse tablets into three regional and temporal areas where they appear to be most popular: the first conference, in Lonato, focused closely on those curse tablets that were inscribed in Latin, Oscan, Etruscan, or Iberian language and were discovered on the Italian peninsula or in the Western Roman Empire;2 the second conference, in Paris, primarily dealt with Greek curses from the eastern half of the Empire;3 and the third, in Athens, with Greek curse tablets of the classical and Hellenistic periods.4 Versions of the papers printed here were almost all delivered at the fourth and final conference, held at the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Neubauer Collegium, both of the University of Chicago.5 The purpose of this final conference was to address more general and overarching questions. We asked the participants – more