I

An inscribed dedication to Jupiter Optimus Maximus from Tuder (modern Todi), datable to the late first century c.e., has frequently appeared in modern scholarship as a testimonium for Roman magical curses.Footnote ¹ The inscription, long known to scholars — it was recorded by Cyriac of Ancona in the fifteenth century — is now in the Museo Civico in Todi (inv. 993). Although the text is largely still legible, the post-ancient reuse of the stone in both the wall of the San Fortunato church and a public building hampers our understanding of the format or original context of the stone.Footnote ² The inscription has been chiselled out of a larger marble monument, very likely a statue base, and only the inscribed face and the cornice at top and bottom remain intact.Footnote ³ With the addition of a partial dating formula, recorded only in a humanist manuscript (AE 1985, 364), the text reads:

FIG. 1. CIL 11.4639, Museo Civico, Todi (PG). (Photo: author with permission of the Comune di Todi)

The text has invited use as ‘background’ for the material evidence for ancient magic and as evidence in debates over the kind of situation when magical attacks might be deployed in Roman culture, especially by slaves.Footnote ⁵ For example, in recent discussions, the story behind the Tuder inscription has been adduced as analogous to the situation that produced three lead tablets from Ampurias that curse public officials.Footnote ⁶ These approaches are dependent on a reading of the text as a transparent document of the event described: a public slave had cursed the decurion order at Tuder; the curse tablets, placed in tombs, had been discovered; and their servile author was unmasked.Footnote ⁷

In contrast with these readings of the text, this article presents a new interpretation of this inscription from Todi as an accusation of witchcraft: a rhetorical text aimed at propagating a particular version of events among the local community.Footnote ⁸ As such, it is less useful as evidence for the practice of magic, but significantly more valuable as a witness to the broader social history of Roman Italy.Footnote ⁹ Since the anthropological work of Evans-Pritchard and its application to early modern England by Thomas and Macfarlane, accusations of magical attack from a wide variety of societies have been analysed as valuable indicators of social tensions and anxieties.Footnote ¹⁰ Recent work has emphasised the contingency of the social forces that produce such accusations: to give just a limited selection of examples, scholars have connected accusations with inter-clan conflict and disparate impacts of post-colonial economies in Africa, the effects of communal fission and frontier conflict in colonial New England, and the consequences of low fertility and cultural change in early modern German lands.Footnote ¹¹ On the model of these studies of more recent periods, asking why the dedicator was moved to set up this inscription and why he expected his story to make sense to contemporaries can help us better understand the social world of imperial Italy.Footnote ¹²

Studying the non-metropolitan social history of Italy between the reigns of Augustus and Diocletian is challenging: in contrast to the dynamic change visible for the previous centuries, the limitations of the literary evidence (especially for the world beyond the villa) and the apparently static and homogeneous society of the towns and countryside beyond the capital makes it hard to know what questions the historian should ask.Footnote ¹³ With the obvious exception of the Vesuvian cities, the evidence, largely epigraphic and archaeological, has encouraged historians to study regularities: the forms of imperial governance, especially in relation to local elites, or broad patterns found across Italy, like recent work on settlement and the institutions shared between towns.Footnote ¹⁴ This unusual inscription from Todi, if read in the way proposed in this article, presents us with a moment of individual agency and the chance to write a local history of mentalities. After a discussion of the features of the text that encourage a reading in terms of an accusation, this article addresses three areas where Primigenius’ text can be grounded in the experience of a freedman in late first-century Tuder: the anxieties generated by slavery and manumission, the sense of the power of writing and lived religion in the shadow of Roman imperial ideology.

II

Inscribed Latin dedications to deities mostly simply record the names of the deity and the dedicator and give a short indication of the fact of dedication.Footnote ¹⁵ On this ground alone, this inscription is rather exceptional, since the unusual circumstances behind the dedication are spelled out: ‘by his divine power, the god unearthed and redeemed the names of the decurion order, which had been cursed by attaching them to tombs in an act of unspeakable banditry of a most wicked public slave, and freed the colony and its citizens from fear of danger’. A dedicatory text was not just a record of a gift to the gods; inscribed dedications in Roman sanctuaries could also function as acts of communication aimed at other worshippers.Footnote ¹⁶ In this context, the departure from the regular formula for dedications encourages a close reading of this text as a communicative act aimed at other inhabitants of Tuder.

Beyond the departure from the generic norms, the language of the text points towards an understanding of this monument as a rhetorical address to the community.Footnote ¹⁷ Cancrius Primigenius’ inscription uses high-register and hyperbolic language to tell the brief story. The relevant Latin terms (infandus, latrocinium and sceleratissimus) are extremely rare in inscribed texts; the term latrocinium, as applied to a particular action, is unique to this inscription.Footnote ¹⁸ This language is analogous to the rhetoric found in two distinct contexts: Roman political invective and petitions addressed to imperial officials that articulate the wrongs which communities or individual citizens suffered. The former is known to us through several speeches by Cicero, which provide examples of accusations of latrocinium and abound in superlative adjectives.Footnote ¹⁹ The orator uses language remarkably similar to the inscription from Todi in the oration De domo sua, as part of an attack on the efforts of the tribune Clodius to consecrate a temple on the site of the then exiled Cicero's house: ‘Do you think that the immortal gods … wished to move into a man's home — a house that had been besieged and ruined by the impious banditry of a most wicked man?’ (‘deos immortalis existimatis … in eius domum adflictam et eversam per hominis sceleratissimi nefarium latrocinium inmigrare voluisse?’).Footnote ²⁰

Petitions to emperors or officials constitute the other set of material that employs similar rhetoric. One example in Latin — the majority are preserved in Greek — to the emperor Commodus from the peasants of an imperial estate in North Africa (181–182 c.e.) parallels one element of Primigenius’ language: the actions of the wrongdoer violate justice (contra fas).Footnote ²¹ In Egypt, where papyri allow a glimpse of petitions made by individuals, the claim that opponents acted ‘in the manner of bandits’ has been called a ‘stock formula’.Footnote ²² Both oratorical invective and petitions to officials were discursive genres that aimed to convince audiences of the speaker's perspective and to create communal narratives around specific people and events.Footnote ²³ In this light, the parallels with the language of Primigenius’ dedication offer justification for reading this text as a public accusation of witchcraft. Cancrius Primigenius invested significant resources in this inscription — perhaps working with a scribe educated enough to redeploy Ciceronian language — and we can read it as a serious attempt to publicise a particular story to his own community.Footnote ²⁴

The substance of the charge is carried in a single compressed phrase, ‘defixa monumentis ordinis decurionum nomina’. For understanding the story, the two key terms are the participle defixa, from the verb defigere, and the noun monumenta. The latter word often connotes the visible parts of tombs and we can support that meaning here with the material evidence for curses on lead tablets that have frequently been found in gravesites elsewhere in the Roman world.Footnote ²⁵ Defigere had a general literal sense of ‘fasten into, fix into’, which had acquired a broader sense of ‘fix’ or ‘arrest’ in a metaphorical sense — the verb can describe both trees fixed into the ground and the idea of being stunned by a wonder.Footnote ²⁶ By the first century c.e., it had also come to signify ‘curse’; we can find defigere in this sense in Seneca and Pliny, without any specific reference to a particular technology of cursing (the word defixio for lead curse tablet, widely used in modern literature, is only attested in a late glossary).Footnote ²⁷ Ovid in Amores 3.7 — worried that his failure of sexual performance means he has been bewitched — asks whether a sorceress has cursed (defixit) his name written in red wax.Footnote ²⁸ As Audollent perceived, defigere had no parallel in Greek — the cursed person is pierced and fixed, not simply bound (as in the Greek καταδέω).Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, some curse tablets were pierced with nails, an actualisation of the verb.Footnote ³⁰ As most translators of this inscription have noticed, the use of the verb with the dative plural monumentis implies that the discovered curses were attached to the tombs when deposited, perhaps by nails.Footnote ³¹ We can push this further: in Primigenius’ inscription and the Ovidian passage — the earliest datable text to use the word in this sense of cursing — defigere might have a further connotation derived from the act of writing the names. The names are fixed into the writing material, lead or wax, both of which required the effort of firmly scratching a stylus into that material, just as the bearer of the names should be transfixed. The accusation of defixa nomina in our inscription relies on the idea that the writing of the names, the deposition of the tablets and the cursing of their referents were all analogous in a physical sense: the translation suggested here of the key phrase, ‘names of the decurion order, which had been cursed by attaching them to tombs’, attempts to render these overlapping connotations in English.

This article takes this interpretation of the document as a starting point: Primigenius’ text is a witchcraft accusation, albeit a short one compared to examples from other cultures, and he must have wished that his story would ring true for readers in Roman Tuder. We can never know how widely accepted his tale was or how it may have related to other speech acts (accusations, defences, counter-charges) within the town, but it is the attempt itself that can shine light on the social history of early imperial Italy.

III

Witchcraft ‘is a function of personal relations’, writes Evans-Pritchard.Footnote ³² The accusation from Tuder can support the observation. As we have seen, the dominant scholarly reading of the inscription has assumed the guilt of the slave; if we turn from reading the text as a fragment of narrative realism, we can look instead to the social forces that produced Primigenius as an agent of accusation and the accused as a plausible malefactor.

Who was Cancrius Primigenius? His self-presentation reveals both his legal status as a freedman, the former slave of a certain L. Cancrius Clemens, and his claims to a prominent place in the local community and a relationship with the decurion order itself.Footnote ³³ He was barred by law from access to the order; instead, like many other successful freedmen in early imperial Italy, he relies on other titles: sexvir et Augustalis et Flavialis.Footnote ³⁴ Scholarly debate about what lies behind the terms se(x)vir and Augustalis has come to a consensus that these titles refer to membership in a loyalist civic institution that offered some status and prestige. The more unusual title of Flavialis, which is only found in inscriptions from northern Italy and adjacent territories and from the decades at the end of the first century after Vespasian's death in 79 c.e., not only gives us a strong indication of the date of the text but also suggests Primigenius’ participation in civic displays of loyalty to the Flavian ruling house.Footnote ³⁵ Entry into these groups was the prerogative of the decurion order and involved the payment of an entry fee; for participants, who were often freedmen, these groups offered a status within the local hierarchy. In the case of Cancrius Primigenius, he emphasises not only his membership and status as a sexvir and Augustalis and Flavialis, but also grounds that status as an exceptional grant of honours by the decurion order.

Primigenius boasts that he was ‘first of all’ (‘primus omnium’) to receive these honours from the order.Footnote ³⁶ The claim to primacy mimics elite Roman discourse — in the Republic, the aristocratic claim to be first in achievement or honours underwrote competitive assertion of personal and familial distinction.Footnote ³⁷ In the early imperial period, the phrase is found in inscriptions that underline the exceptional status of the imperial family, including in Augustus’ Res Gestae, where the emperor claims to have been the first to pay for rather than confiscate the land for citizen colonies, and in a pair of inscriptions that attest to the exceptional designation of Gaius Caesar as consul at age nineteen.Footnote ³⁸ The words also began to appear in inscribed records of acts of local euergetism at the end of the first century, the principal field for the assertion of status among the municipal elite, suggesting that aristocratic and imperial claims to distinction had come to be appropriated by people lower on the social pyramid. Civic patrons boast that they are the first to buy grain for the people or to put on specific forms of spectacle. By using this language of civic primacy, therefore, Cancrius Primigenius claims distinction within the social order at Tuder.

Reading Primigenius’ inscription, it is easy to recall Petronius’ Trimalchio and his freed friends. Trimalchio himself claims in his proposed epitaph to have been made a sevir in absentia; another Petronian freedman boasts that he was made a sevir without paying the entrance fee.Footnote ³⁹ Petronius’ novel is not satisfactory evidence of the actual subjectivities of freedmen, but does reflect an elite response to the sort of freed self-advertisement that we find in Primigenius’ text.Footnote ⁴⁰ In reality, a freedman like Primigenius was in a constrained position — he could not rely on the traditional means of distinction in the community; instead, as the dedication explicitly attests, he was reliant on the recognition of the decurion order and validated by it.Footnote ⁴¹ In reciprocity, Primigenius’ text publicises both an attack on the order itself and the declaration of gratitude for Jupiter's intervention for their safety.

As for the accused, we are told only that he was a ‘most wicked public slave’ (‘sceleratissimus servus publicus’). Our task is not to search for this individual slave, but to understand why such a person would have ‘made sense’ as a culprit to Primigenius and, perhaps, other members of the community in Tuder. Municipal slavery is well attested in inscriptions from the early imperial Italian cities. In his recent detailed study of this evidence, Alexander Weiss finds that the most common jobs filled by these slaves were as treasurers and archivists, tasks that required numeracy and literacy and placed the slaves at the centre of local civic life.Footnote ⁴² In these scribal roles, duties like the drafting of the town's album of decurions would have been the domain of literate public slaves, just as literate slaves drafted documents and kept records for private masters. I will return to the possible connection between this role and the specific accusation in the next section.

To focus, for now, on the social relations implied in the text, Primigenius’ accusation is grounded in the Roman imagination of the clever, resistant slave.Footnote ⁴³ The cunning slave as a potential opponent of the moral order is visible in several ‘public scripts’ of Roman culture, including most famously, the complex representations of cunning slaves in Plautine comedy.Footnote ⁴⁴ The conception of the tricky and sometimes dangerous slave was not contained within the Roman theatre. A Latin proverb declared ‘there are as many enemies as there are slaves’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Legal texts in the Digest imagine the cunning (calliditas) of a slave as a legal problem. For example, in discussion of the action for corruption of a slave, Ulpian lists the qualities of a corrupted slave that can justify such a suit, including seditiousness and a dedication to evil arts (malis artibus).Footnote ⁴⁶ Several scholars have raised the possibility that Ulpian is talking about the use of witchcraft here.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even taking into account the chronological and generic diversity of this evidence and their questionable value as witnesses for the actions of real slaves, these texts attest to a widespread opinion held by free Romans on the treacherous potential of the enslaved.

We should, therefore, understand the identities of accuser and accused in terms of the ideologies and statuses produced by the institution of slavery. On the one hand, by inscribing the accusation, Cancrius Primigenius, asserted his social position in the face of potential prejudice and demonstrated his loyalty to the decurions; on the other, the accused public slave played the role of a cunning and servile wrongdoer. In support of this interpretation of the accuser and accused, the inscribed text deploys the Latin lexicon of freedom and liberation to describe the actions of Jupiter, who ‘by his divine power, unearthed and redeemed the names of the decurion order … and freed the colony and its citizens from fear of danger’ (‘decurionum nomina numine suo eruit ac vindicavit et metu periculorum coloniam civesque liberavit’). The verb vindicare, translated here as ‘redeem’, refers here to the release of the curse but carries with it a common meaning of asserting the freedom of an individual. As Primigenius may have known at first hand, the Roman ceremony of manumission vindicta involved a fictive declaration that the slave was in fact a free man.Footnote ⁴⁸ The public slave, by implication, had not just cursed the decurions, but enslaved them. The verbal resonance is continued in the word liberare, ‘free’, used for the god's delivery of the colony and its citizens from fear. In combination with liberare here, the word ‘citizens’, cives, is marked: the men of Tuder were free, not just freed from fear. Metaphorical use of manumission language had long been used in Roman political discourse — including by the emperors — but the social identity of the inscriber makes the deployment of this language particularly marked: one of the citizens of Tuder, Lucius Cancrius Primigenius, had now been freed, at least metaphorically, for a second time.Footnote ⁴⁹

IV

The agents involved are not the only elements of the accusation that shine light on social tensions in Tuder: the substance of Primgenius’ story suggests anxieties around the power of literacy in early imperial culture. We do not know what the evidence (if any) for the supposed ritual attack looked like. What we do have, however, is the form in which this attack was presented to a contemporary audience: Cancrius Primigenius focuses on the written names of the victims as the focus of the curse and as the object of Jupiter's redemption.Footnote ⁵⁰ Examples of accusations from other societies demonstrate that the specific alleged wrong-doing of the witch reveals socially-contingent fears.Footnote ⁵¹ In the case of Tuder, I suggest that Primigenius’ emphasis can tell us something about how the dependence of the social order in an early imperial town on literacy could also be a source of fear. The Roman imperial attitude to literacy has often been seen as positive, especially as a mark of acculturation: this section aims to explore the inscription as a case where a different attitude is apparent.Footnote ⁵²

Primigenius’ highlighting of written names can be paralleled as a particular feature of other accusations of ritual attack from the period. In his account of the affair of Scribonius Libo, accused of conspiracy against Tiberius, Tacitus writes that the most damning charge was that Libo had written sinister marks against the names of the Caesars and several senators in a notebook.Footnote ⁵³ In his story of the death of Germanicus during the same reign, he stresses that the evidence for ritual attacks found in the walls of the deceased's Syrian residence included ‘spells, curses and the name of Germanicus engraved in lead tablets’.Footnote ⁵⁴ We have already seen how Ovid in Amores 3.7 fears that his name has been cursed by a saga. This was not just an outsider perspective: names are a central syntactic feature of almost all the curse tablets found in the ancient Mediterranean — sometimes these tablets are just lists of names.Footnote ⁵⁵ Beyond this general tendency, however, early and high imperial curse tablets in Latin explicitly make the names themselves the object of cursing, by binding the names (nomina) or by making clear the synecdoche between written name and the object of the curse.Footnote ⁵⁶

This awareness of the power of written names to do harm is the dark side of the significance of materialised names in early imperial culture.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is a banality to point out that so much of Roman literacy was concerned with writing names, particularly in public contexts. Even accounting for the more complex texts written on perishable materials — legal documents, personal letters, literary texts — which may have only been handled by the very small group of literate people, their pervasive presence on stone, on walls and on objects made names a central object of the relatively-new Roman ‘literate habit’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In functional contexts, like manufacturing of ceramics, metals, building materials and even loaves of bread, written names asserted ownership or claims to payment or, with a pair of names as consular dating formula, the date of manufacture.Footnote ⁵⁹

In other contexts, the writing of names was an integral part of claiming distinction and preserving memory. Only a few of the 120 Latin inscriptions known from Todi are not chiefly presentations of names — in some cases because they are fragmentary or damaged.Footnote ⁶⁰ Even at a distance, Primigenius’ own cognomen (also his slave name) is the most legible word in his inscription after the first three lines, because of the choice by the mason to allot it a separate line with spacing on either side. In other texts from the city, names feature prominently on the stone dedications to the gods, on honorary inscriptions for prominent citizens and municipal patrons and, above all, on epitaphs. In these cases, the names are semantically and conceptually the key component of the texts — the element that was to be remembered. In the Satyrica, for instance, Petronius’ Trimalchio plans a sundial for his funerary monument, so that ‘whoever checks the time, whether he wishes to or not, will read my name’.Footnote ⁶¹ This attitude was not confined to a fictional character or prose: in a rich study, Sanders has pointed out what he calls ‘the cult of the name’ in Latin verse epitaphs.Footnote ⁶² The exceptional preservation of the names of endorsers and candidates in painted electoral notices on the streetscapes of Pompeii can indicate the importance of names for self-promotion even in local politics.Footnote ⁶³ We lack Pompeian conditions in Umbria, but an inscription from near Tuder asks would-be scriptores to pass on: ‘May your candidate become what he seeks to be, and may you be long-lived, writer! Pass by this monument!’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Names used to claim social distinction competed with names as markers of memory.

In the municipal context, Primigenius’ accusation probably evoked one particular list of written names on display in the town: the album of decurions.Footnote ⁶⁵ The jurist Ulpian tells us that the rights of town councillors were dependent on the appearance of their name in an album:

We lack any preserved examples of curial alba from the first century, presumably because the whitened boards were made from organic material, but examples from later periods and from other social organisations match this formula. The title of a third-century example on bronze from Canusium in Apulia reads: ‘When Marius Maximus for the second time and Roscius Aelianus were consuls [i.e. 223 c.e.], M. Antonius Priscus and L. Annius Secundus, the duumviri quinquennales, attended to the inscription of the names of the decurions (nomina decurionum) in bronze.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Both functional and symbolic, the album enabled members of the council to assert their high status and guaranteed their legal rights. The importance of the album can also be understood from a response in the Digest by another jurist, Modestinus. He says that having the name on the album is not enough, in order to be a decurion, one must also be legally entitled to membership of the order; the fact that this was subject to a juristic response implies that in a legal dispute someone had argued that a name on an album alone could guarantee a place in a city council.Footnote ⁶⁸

The written names of the decurions on the album constituted a public definition of the order and may even have been the principal representation of the council within the town. As mentioned above (Section III), the evidence for public slaves suggests that literate record-keeping for the community — such as writing up the album — was routinely their responsibility. In this light, the phrase ‘names of the decurion order’ in Primigenius’ text rather than simply ‘names of the decurions’ may have reinforced the threatening possibility that a slave, who could never have joined that order, had perverted the authorised written list of decurions, the album. The similarity between legal tabulae and magical tabulae that Elizabeth Meyer has observed became uncanny: the technology that supported the social order could be used to subvert it.Footnote ⁶⁹

V

Fighting witchcraft often requires divine help. In an inscription from Ephesus, for instance, an oracle of Apollo addresses the people of a city in Asia Minor.Footnote ⁷⁰ The city, perhaps to be identified with Sardis, has been suffering a plague brought on by witchcraft, in the form of wax models. Apollo instructs the city to set up a statue of Artemis Soteira carrying torches that will burn up the wax.Footnote ⁷¹ We find a nexus between divine revelation of the witchcraft, by Apollo, and defence, by Artemis. From further east, the protocol of a first-millennium b.c.e. Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft ritual called Maqlu (‘Burning’) shows a similar reliance on a phalanx of deities to thwart a magical attack.Footnote ⁷² These examples from elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East can draw our attention to the religious logic represented by Cancrius Primigenius’ dedication: if the content of the accusation and the identity of the accused reveal social anxieties at Tuder, the addressee of the dedication reveals both assumptions about the forces of order, especially divine power, and, as we shall see, the local reception of imperial theological discourse.

Primigenius gives credit for both the revelation and redemption of the cursed names to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Custos Conservator (‘Jupiter the Best and Greatest, Guard and Saviour’). As in the oracle text from Ephesus, this saved the whole town: the dedication marks the acquittal of a vow for the safety of the colony, decurion order and people of Tuder, which Jupiter is said to have fulfilled by saving the whole colony from fear of harm. The rhetoric of the inscription, which aligns Primigenius with the god as the parallel grammatical subjects of the short text, suggests that the freedman intended to claim some reflected glory, but the deity is credited as the actor who actually resisted the ritual attack by disinterring the curse tablets. We have evidence from elsewhere in antiquity for a belief that revelation and perhaps destruction of the tablets or voodoo dolls could cancel a curse.Footnote ⁷³ In the case of Tuder, we do not know how the curse tablets actually came to light — Dessau's idea that the freedman was responsible rationalises away the story and Fear's suggestion of a fortuitous lightning strike is prima facie improbableFootnote ⁷⁴ — but it is worth asking why Primigenius assigned the role of protector to this particular god. In particular, this means understanding the epithets by which Primigenius specifies the deity.Footnote ⁷⁵ This dedication is the only one from the Empire that addresses Jupiter with this combination of names, so we can understand the articulation as a meaningful act of bricolage — not just replication of tradition — by the freedman.Footnote ⁷⁶

Jupiter Optimus Maximus, worshipped at the huge temple on the Capitoline Hill, was the preeminent deity in Roman public cult. The first public act of every year was a sacrifice by the consuls on the Capitoline; the consuls also made vows on behalf of the Roman people, which were promises of further sacrifice in exchange for the security of the state.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the imperial period, these vows were also made for the safety of the emperor.Footnote ⁷⁸ As such, he guaranteed the political order of the Empire. This connection was reinforced during the rule of the Flavian dynasty (69–96 c.e.): members of the dynasty twice rebuilt Jupiter's temple after fire and used these construction projects as part of their political legitimation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Domitian deepened this connection by inaugurating a new athletic festival for Jupiter at Rome, on the model of the Greek Olympics.Footnote ⁸⁰ There may also have been a local dimension to Primigenius’ dedication to the god in the guise of Optimus Maximus: the god, popular throughout the Empire, seems to have been a regular part of religious life in colonies.Footnote ⁸¹ A passage by the Christian polemicist Tertullian implies that, on the model of Rome, annual vows to Jupiter for safety also took place in colonial temples.Footnote ⁸² In light of this kind of colonial worship, the people of the colony at Tuder, including the freedman dedicator, could count on Jupiter Optimus Maximus as protector of empire and of colony.

Primigenius, however, did not choose to make his dedication to the god in his Capitoline aspect alone; the additional epithets of Custos and Conservator (‘Guard and Saviour’) help explain why he understood Jupiter as the divine agent to protect Tuder. Implicit conceptions of divine functions in Roman polytheism were often founded on linguistic grounds and the epithets here indicate how Primigenius understood Jupiter's intervention as guardian when he protected Tuder from harm. A Severan-period dedication by the decurion order at Sicca Veneria in North Africa to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Conservator makes clear the possible connection between that epithet and divine intervention: ‘because the safety of the imperial family was conserved (ob conservatam … salutem), when the plots of public enemies had been discovered.’Footnote ⁸³ Such direct links are not always clear. In the second and third centuries, the cult of Jupiter Conservator was particularly promoted on imperial coinages, though without any particular narrative attached.Footnote ⁸⁴ One repeated coin type shows Jupiter Conservator holding his thunderbolt out over the emperor, suggesting the god's personal protection for the monarch.Footnote ⁸⁵

Primigenius’ choice to combine Jupiter Conservator and Custos also stems from a more proximate influence: the religious politics of the Flavian emperors.Footnote ⁸⁶ In December 69 c.e., the future emperor Domitian had been trapped in a small house on the Capitol during a phase of urban combat in the civil war of that year. Footnote ⁸⁷ He was smuggled out to safety wearing the dress of a priest and appears to have given credit to Jupiter for this escape. Afterwards, he built a shrine to Jupiter Conservator with an altar that depicted his deliverance. When he finally came to power in his own right, he constructed a larger temple to Jupiter Custos, in which the statue of the god held an image of the emperor in his lap. Inhabitants of the Empire did not have to go to Rome to witness the link between god and ruler: images of both Jupiter Conservator and Jupiter Custos circulated on coinage issued in his name.Footnote ⁸⁸

In joining Custos and Conservator with the other persona of the god that was particularly promoted by Domitian, Optimus Maximus, Primgenius placed Tuder under the protection of the god who had delivered Domitian from the opponents of the Flavian house. In this light, the freedman's self-presentation as a Flavialis, perhaps even the first one in his community, supports the idea that he was concerned to align himself with the ruling regime. Archaeological evidence suggests that Augustales, a closely related institution, were highly involved in cult for emperors: for instance, three statues of Domitian adorned the meeting-house of the Augustales at Misenum.Footnote ⁸⁹ This institutional affiliation does not mean that we should view the identity of Primigenius’ addressee as simply a rote replication of political ideology; rather, the inscribed text asserts the reality of Jupiter's intervention to save the city ‘by his divine power’ (numine suo) and the purposeful appropriation of the Domitianic stories of Jupiter's favour and aid.Footnote ⁹⁰

If this was the case, Primigenius placed his faith in the Jupiter that had been legitimised by the imperial centre and so offers an excellent example of receptivity on a local level of imperial ‘ideology’. Such provincial replications of monarchic discourse have often been seen as reciprocal acts of loyalty directed towards the centre; more recently, Carlos Noreña has argued that we should also understand them as acts of legitimation of the local social order. One of the key modes for this latter function, he argues, was ‘the regular blurring of the lines between divine, imperial, and local authority’ by placing local elites alongside gods and members of the imperial family.Footnote ⁹¹ In the case of the inscription from Tuder, Domitian's Jupiter, as Optimus Maximus, Custos and Conservator, was now co-opted by Primigenius as the saviour deity of the colony and the freedman advertised himself alongside the god, just as the emperor himself had on the Capitoline Hill.

VI

By setting aside the established reading of this inscription as a piece of evidence for the practice of cursing, this extended study of Primigenius’ text has treated it as rhetorical and, for that reason, expressive of both his individual perspective and the social context in which he aimed to convince others. Removal of the text from the dossier of material that illuminates the social context of curse tablets does come at a cost: we have lost a valuable example of a resistant subaltern. Instead, on the analogy with public witchcraft accusations in non-Roman societies, we are compensated with a view of how one man responded to the pressures, anxieties and sources of hope in a town in early imperial Italy. The short inscription is, without doubt, an exceptional text and the reading advanced here suggests that it also represents a different phenomenon to the claims, found on both epitaphs and in literary texts, that cursing was the cause of some specific misfortune.Footnote ⁹² This exceptionality, when combined with a disciplined comparative method, is what gives it such value to the social historian: it allows us to shift our attention from structure to agent. Primigenius inscribed his monument with the traces of life in a society founded on the hierarchy between free and slave, dependent on writing to mark status, and ruled by a monarchy that made significant claims to divine support.