Getting even with your enemies was a serious business in ancient Rome, but if you couldnt exact revenge personally, you could always ask on the gods to help you out. The middlemen in this conversation were called Curse Tablet Scribes, and it was their job to spend all day listening to people moan about the various wrongs they had endured. The scribe would then take each persons request for vengeance and etch a curse onto a sheet of soft lead, which would be nailed to the wall of the nearest temple. If the curse needed to be extra-effective, it would be written backwards. These curses would wish for all manner of gruesome punishments, including blindness, madness, and the hope that intestines would be eaten away. One of these sheets was discovered in Jerusalem in 2013. The curse is directed at a person called lennys and appears to be about a legal case: "I strike and strike down and nail down the tongue, the eyes, the wrath, the ire, the anger, the procrastination, the opposition of Iennys".
