British Latin: The Text, Interpretation and Language of the Bath Curse Tablets

Britain is now the main source of new Latin. Among British finds there are 130 curse tablets from the Sacred Spring at Bath, of roughly the second to fourth centuries A.D., some of them reasonably preserved, others fragmentary. These have recently been published by R.S.O. Tomlin, in a wide-ranging edition. An examination of Tomlin's elegant drawings of the tablets will make obvious to anyone the difficulty of reading the script, and Tomlin has done a remarkable job in elucidating the texts. He has also provided an extensive introduction, with a classification of formulae and linguistic phenomena, and a detailed commentary. The language of the tablets is of some interest. Various new usages make their appearance, and it is not fanciful to find the odd phenomenon which may have been characteristic particularly of British Latin. Here I offer a few new readings, some new interpretations, and a more extensive discussion of the Latinity than that attempted by Tomlin.