Soon afterward, Nicholson published the Latin text with his translation. It was a letter between 2 early Christians, providing unique evidence of a busy, active, literate faith community. The writer, Vinisius, enjoined the recipient, Nigra, to be “strong in Jesus,” and warned her against welcoming an adherent of the Arian heresy (which argued that Christ, in human form, was not divine). The discovery was widely and enthusiastically covered in the newspapers, with only a few notes of caution sounded about the likelihood of Nicholson’s reading being accurate. There the matter rested for 90 years, until Tomlin decided to take another look at Nicholson’s photographs. As he studied them (the original artifact had, alas, disappeared), he found that Nicholson had made 1 disastrous error: he had read the entire inscription upside down. Tomlin published his own reading in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. The inscription was, in fact, a defixio, or curse tablet, 100s of which had been flung by ancient Roman visitors into the sacred spring of the goddess Sulis Minerva, in Bath. Often, these curses would be aimed at a thief, urging the goddess to visit all kinds of discomforts on the miscreant (“May he or she be unable to urinate,” for example). Nicholson’s lead tablet, Tomlin found, used a familiar formula. The thief of the unknown object—“whether they be man or woman, boy or girl”—was to be denied sleep until what had been taken was returned.

• Uncategorized