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Full Description
Sicilian curse practices have often been misread through Athenocentric paradigms. This book repositions Sicily at the centre of inquiry, offering the first holistic analysis of legal curse tablets (defixiones iudiciariae) from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with particular focus on Selinous, Akragas and Kamarina. Moving beyond isolated textual readings, it situates these inscriptions within the legal, social and political environments that shaped their production. The study provides new editions and drawings of key tablets - revisited after decades of neglect - while addressing palaeographic, chronological and editorial issues. For the first time, it also assembles a complete set of images of all major examples, making them fully accessible. By embedding curses within civic life and predominantly elite rivalries, it reveals them as 'paralegal' instruments in the renegotiation of status, authority and power. Sicilian legal curses thus emerge as independent from, rather than appendices to, their better-known Attic and Athenian counterparts.
Contents
Introduction; 1. The Emergence of Sicilian Legal Systems: Written Laws and Dispute Resolution; 2. The Invention of Legal Curses Tablets: Politics and Law in Sixth-Century Selinous; 3. The Earliest Legal Curses from Ancient Sicily; 4. The Political Culture of the Elites: Mobility, Distress, and the Origins of Curse Practice; 5. The Politics of Legal Curses in the First Half of the Fifth Century; 6. The Evolution of Selinountine Legal Curses; 7. Demeter Malophoros and the Shift in Curse Practice; 8. From Tyranny to Legal Curses Tablets: The Socio-Political Evolution of Akragas; 9. Inscribed (In)justice: The Other Side of the Akragantine Elite; 10. When the Old Meets the New: Kamarina in the Late Fourth Century; 11. Towards a New Era of Legal Curse Practices; Conclusion.
