Aquae Sulis (Bath)

Most of what survives of Roman religion is official: temple dedications, state cult, inscriptions paid for by people who wanted to be seen paying for them. Bath is the great exception, because about a hundred and thirty curse tablets were thrown into the spring and stayed there.

The tablets are sheets of lead and pewter, hammered thin, scratched with a stylus, often rolled or folded, and dropped into the hot spring so that they passed to Sulis directly. They are not literary. They are complaints.

The commonest subject by far is theft, and specifically theft at the baths, where people had to leave their clothes. One asks the goddess to act against whoever stole a bathing tunic; another concerns a stolen pair of gloves; others name cloaks, a ploughshare, money, a bracelet. The writer typically hands the stolen item over to the goddess, it is now her property, so the thief has robbed her, and asks her to act until it is returned. The requested penalties are specific and unpleasant: that the thief lose his mind, or his blood, or the ability to sleep, or that he waste away.

Several list suspects by name, sometimes a dozen at once, which is a small social document each time: this is who had access, and this is who I think it was.

Why they matter more than the temple. They are written by ordinary people in ordinary Latin: some barely literate, some with British-influenced spelling, one in what appears to be British Celtic written in Latin script, which would be among the only written traces of the language. Together they constitute the largest body of everyday written Latin from Roman Britain, and they show what people actually wanted from a god: not cosmic order, but the return of a stolen cloak and something bad happening to whoever took it. They were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2014.

Sulis Minerva herself is worth noting as a genuine fusion rather than a takeover. The Romans did not replace the British goddess; they identified her with Minerva and kept the British name first in the compound. The temple pediment carries a head that everyone calls a gorgon and that is male, moustached and glaring, with snakes worked into the hair and beard, nothing like the Greek convention, and generally read as a Celtic deity rendered by a sculptor working in a classical idiom. The spring gave the Romans a hot mineral source of a kind they valued highly, and it gave the British a goddess who was already there.

Bath's temple worshipped a goddess with a merged identity, and a bronze head of her, buried for over a thousand years, resurfaced only when eighteenth century workmen happened to dig in the right spot.

One goddess, two names combined

The temple complex venerated Sulis Minerva, a deliberate fusion of the Roman goddess Minerva with Sulis, a pre-existing local Celtic deity associated with the hot spring itself, a common Romano-British pattern of pairing an imported Roman god with an established local one rather than replacing local worship outright.

A head found by accident

In 1727, workmen digging in Bath uncovered a gilt bronze head, generally identified as part of a cult statue of Sulis Minerva, a rare survival of a large-scale Romano-British religious sculpture that gives a direct physical sense of how the goddess was represented at the temple, found well before the main bathing and temple complex itself was more fully excavated in later centuries.

As this entry's companion article covers

The curse tablets recovered from the sacred spring, recording ordinary petitioners' requests for justice against thieves rather than lofty devotional prayer, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.