The Romans Left Us Their Hate Mail

Around the year 100, at a damp fort in northern Britain just south of where Hadrian's Wall would soon rise, a woman named Claudia Severa dictated a party invitation. A scribe wrote most of it in a neat, trained hand. Then Severa took the pen herself and added a few words at the bottom in her own rougher script: sperabo te soror, "I shall expect you, sister," and a farewell calling her friend anima mea, "my dearest soul."

Those closing words are, as far as anyone knows, the earliest surviving writing in Latin by a woman. Not a poem, not a monument. A birthday invitation.

Set that tenderness beside the other voice the Romans left in the ground, and you have the two registers of everyday Roman life. From the sacred spring at Bath, a thief-curse: may he who carried off Vilbia from me become as liquid as water. The birthday card and the hate mail, written by the same civilization, dug up from the same wet British soil.

The letters nobody meant us to read

The birthday invitation is one of the Vindolanda tablets, thin postcard-sized leaves of wood written in ink, first uncovered in 1973 when an excavator noticed writing on what looked like a wood shaving. The British Museum now holds more than 1,700 of them, and the site keeps yielding more; a fresh batch turned up as recently as 2023.

What makes them precious is that they are utterly ordinary. These are not literary Latin polished for the ages. They are the paperwork and gossip of a frontier garrison. One tablet is essentially a care package note, thanking someone for a shipment that included socks, sandals, and two pairs of underpants, the small comforts a soldier needed against a British winter. Another is a snide military assessment of the locals, who are dismissed with the diminutive Brittunculi, "the wretched little Britons," said to fight without proper armor. It is the only tablet where that insult appears, so it tells us more about one officer's attitude than about Rome's, but it is a wonderfully human sneer to have preserved.

Read a stack of these and the frontier stops being a line on a map. It becomes a place where people were cold, wrote home, complained about the neighbors, and threw each other birthday parties.

Prayers to dissolve a thief

The curses are the other half of the picture, and they are, if anything, even more alive.

At Aquae Sulis, the hot spring the Romans built into a temple at Bath, worshippers threw folded sheets of lead and pewter into the water, inscribed with what scholars call defixiones, binding-curses. About 130 of them have been recovered. Almost all are what specialists gently term "prayers for justice": someone has been robbed, and they are asking the goddess Sulis to make the thief's life unbearable until the goods come back.

The scenarios are painfully relatable. A bather comes out of the changing room to find his cloak gone, and pays a scribe to curse whoever took it: let the goddess Sulis inflict death, and not allow him sleep or children, until he has brought my cloak to her temple. One tablet, to make the magic bite, is written with every word reversed, mirror-writing to trap a mirror-thief. Another lists the suspects by name, a whole little cast of a village's least-trusted residents.

There is a striking geographic quirk here. Of the "prayers for justice" known from the whole Roman West, the great majority come from Britain. For reasons no one fully understands, the provincials at the edge of the empire were unusually devoted to asking their gods to ruin the people who stole their laundry.

The scholarship keeps moving, too. A full edition of another curse hoard, the tablets from a temple of Mercury at Uley, was published only recently, adding fresh complaints, including what may be Britain's first documented case of stolen beehives.

Five words from the tablets

The everyday Latin under the literary canon is a fine place to begin a language, because it is the language people actually used:

• soror (SOR-or), sister, Severa's word for her friend.
• anima mea (AH-nih-ma MEH-a), "my soul," "my dearest soul," startlingly tender.
• defixio (deh-FIK-see-o), a curse tablet, literally a "fastening down."
• sollemnis (sol-LEM-nis), solemn, festive, the word for the birthday she is celebrating.
• Brittunculi (brit-TUN-cu-lee), "wretched little Britons," one officer's insult, frozen forever.

A caveat worth keeping, because honesty is the whole point: that Severa personally wrote her postscript is the careful judgment of the editors, not a certainty, and even the famous Vilbia curse is disputed, since "Vilbia" might be a stolen woman, or a stolen brooch, or a stolen knife, depending on which scholar you ask. The past does not hand itself over cleanly. But that messiness is exactly why the words themselves matter, and why reading them yourself, rather than trusting a summary, is the closest we get to standing in that steaming Roman bath-house. That is the kind of reading PRAVIEL is built to carry you toward.

Sources

• Claudia Severa's birthday invitation, Tab. Vindol. 291 (Roman Inscriptions of Britain)
• The Vindolanda tablets (British Museum)
• The Bath curse tablets (overview)
• The "Vilbia" curse, RIB 154 (Roman Inscriptions of Britain)
• The Uley Tablets, ed. Roger Tomlin (Oxford University Press, 2024)