Women as legitimate adversaries: The evidence of Selinountine legal curses

This article analyses two Selinountine legal curse tablets (or defixiones iudiciariae): BETTARINI 15 (late sixth century Bce) and 20 (early fifth century Bce). The former preserves the earliest known instance of a woman being targeted in a Greek legal curse, while the latter expands the picture by situating women alongside male adversaries within elite networks of xenia. A combined philological, onomastic, and socio-political approach shows that these texts were instruments of litigation in which gender, ‘class’, and ethnicity intersected in recognizable ways. Their sophisticated language, applied equally to men and women, demonstrates that women could act as visible participants in trials. Commissioned by elite litigants and crafted by ‘specialists’, these curses reflect the extent to which women's social and political capital made them legitimate threats in the courtroom and, for that very reason, potential targets of curses.