Sarah Breitenfeld (University of Washington)
If identifying enslaved individuals in the epigraphic record is difficult (Chanoitis 2018), identifying
enslaved women is even more challenging. Not only do few primary sources make their status clear, but
due to their intersectional identity as both women and enslaved people (Crenshaw 1991), enslaved
women continue to be overlooked in scholarship that focuses on gender or enslavement. For this reason, I
assert, curse tablets provide an exciting opportunity to access information about this marginalized group.
Originating in Athens, curse tablets were a ritualized and performative medium of violence (Riess 2012),
whereby individuals used inscribed pieces of lead to influence their victims, often calling on deities for
assistance. Though few curses tablets make clear the status of the individuals involved, whether as agents
or targets of the curse, contextual clues can allow us to find enslaved and manumitted women throughout
this genre, and particularly on tablets that deal with sexual relationships. Though earlier scholarship
characterizes these curses as spells written by men against women living in their natal homes (Winkler
1991, Graf 1997, Faraone 1999), more recent work has established the prevalence of sex laborers in this
epigraphic genre. Dickie 2000 has argued for the increased use of curse tablets by hetairai in the late
Classical and early Hellenistic periods, while Eidinow 2007 and Pachoumi 2013 have demonstrated that
women from a wide variety of social statuses, including sex laborers, appear as both victims and
petitioners of these items. On the premise that sex laborers in Attica were commonly enslaved and
manumitted women (Glazebrook and Henry 2011), I use the 4th century BCE Attic curse tablet DT 68 as a
case study for how curse tablets communicate one form of violence these women experienced. I argue not
only that enslaved and manumitted women were victims of Attic curse tablets, but that these same
marginalized women could use curse tablets themselves to respond to their violent circumstances.
My paper is structured in two parts. First, I examine Theodora, the target of DT 68, as an enslaved or
manumitted woman. In particular, I outline evidence for her involvement in the sex industry, including
her multiple male sex partners and the explicit emphasis on sexual intercourse in the text of the tablet. A
contemporary Boeotian curse, DT 86, targeting a woman named Zois, serves as a point of comparison.
Second, I consider the possibility that DT 68 was composed against Theodora by a rival enslaved or
manumitted sex laborer. Through this reading, I track evidence for marginalized women using curse
tablets and relationship spells in an attempt to improve their social standing. I incorporate the narrative of
the enslaved woman in Antiphon 1 to corroborate this interpretation. In this way, curse tablets like DT 68
demonstrate that enslaved and manumitted women could become not just the victims of others’ violence,
but agents in their own lives.