Ara

About Ara

Ara, in Greek religious and mythological thought, denotes a formal curse — a ritually potent invocation of divine punishment directed against a wrongdoer and backed by the Arae, female spirits of curses associated with the underworld. The word derives from the verb araomai (to pray, to curse) and occupies a precise position in the Greek vocabulary of supernatural harm, distinct from both the informal oath-curse (horkos) and the retributive wrath of the gods (menis). An ara carries supernatural force because it calls upon chthonic powers — the Erinyes, the dead, the earth itself — to enforce justice when human institutions fail.

The ara's power depended on the speaker's moral position. Curses spoken by the dying carried the greatest weight, as the dying person stood at the threshold between the mortal world and the underworld, with direct access to the chthonic powers who would enforce the curse. Parental curses against children possessed comparable force, drawing on the deeply held Greek belief that the parent-child bond was a channel of supernatural authority. The wronged — suppliants denied protection, hosts whose hospitality was violated, the unjustly condemned — also possessed heightened cursing power, because their suffering created a moral imbalance that the cosmic order was obligated to correct.

Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE) provides the fullest dramatic treatment of the ara's operation. Oedipus's curse upon his sons Eteocles and Polynices — that they would divide their inheritance with the sword — functions as the primary engine driving the play's action. The curse does not operate through mechanical causation but through a supernatural logic in which the spoken word, empowered by the speaker's authority and suffering, reshapes reality. Eteocles recognizes the curse's force and yet cannot evade it, producing the tragic paradox that defines the Theban cycle.

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE) depicts the ara at its most concentrated: the dying Oedipus pronounces curses against both sons and blessings upon Athens, distributing his supernatural authority across multiple recipients. His position — blind, exiled, sacred to the Eumenides — maximizes the ara's potency. The Athenians who shelter him receive blessing; the sons who dishonored him receive destruction. The mechanism is the same in both cases: the ritually empowered word of a figure at the boundary between life and death.

The Arae themselves — the spirits who enforce curses — were closely related to the Erinyes (Furies) in function, though their precise genealogy and identity vary across sources. In some traditions, the Arae are indistinguishable from the Erinyes; in others, they represent a broader category of chthonic enforcement agents. Their association with the underworld anchored the ara in the geography of death and judgment, connecting it to the broader Greek system of postmortem justice.

The defixio tradition provides material evidence for the ara's practical use. Thousands of lead curse tablets survive from the fifth century BCE onward, inscribed with formal invocations against enemies, legal opponents, and romantic rivals. While many address mundane concerns, the ritual framework draws on the same theological infrastructure as the mythological ara: the conviction that language directed toward chthonic authorities compels supernatural action. The tablets were deposited in graves, wells, and underworld sanctuaries, physically routing the curse downward to the powers who would enforce it.

The Story

The most sustained narrative treatment of the ara operates through the Theban royal house, where Oedipus's curse against his sons drives an entire cycle of destruction.

The sequence begins with Oedipus's discovery of his true identity — that he has killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. When this truth emerges, Oedipus blinds himself and eventually goes into exile. During this period of degradation, his sons Eteocles and Polynices fail to honor or protect him. The precise nature of their offense varies by source: in some versions, they imprison him in Thebes and serve him from Cadmus's table service, reminding him of his cursed lineage; in others, they simply neglect him, allowing the former king to beg for sustenance while they compete for his throne.

Oedipus's response is the paradigmatic ara. He calls upon the chthonic gods — the Erinyes, the spirits of the underworld, the earth itself — to ensure that his sons will divide their inheritance by the sword. The curse specifies the mechanism of its fulfillment: they will fight each other for the kingship and both will die. The power of this curse derives from multiple sources — Oedipus is a father cursing his children, a wronged man invoking justice, and a figure sacred to the underworld who carries the pollution of parricide and incest.

In Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, the curse has taken on a life of its own. Eteocles, who holds the throne of Thebes, learns that seven champions march against the city's seven gates — and that his brother Polynices leads the assault against the seventh gate. Eteocles recognizes what is happening: the curse is arranging circumstances so that the brothers will confront each other personally. He could assign another defender to the seventh gate and avoid the fratricidal encounter, but the curse's power operates partly through its psychological grip — Eteocles feels compelled to face his brother, knowing the outcome. The brothers kill each other in single combat, fulfilling the ara exactly.

Sophocles extends the curse's narrative in Oedipus at Colonus, set at the sacred grove of the Eumenides in Colonus near Athens. Polynices visits his father to seek his blessing before marching on Thebes, knowing that Oedipus's supernatural authority has grown during exile. Instead, Oedipus delivers a devastating curse: Polynices will never take Thebes, and both brothers will fall by each other's hand. The scene is built on the collision between Polynices's desperate need and Oedipus's implacable fury — a father who has become a conduit for supernatural vengeance.

The Homeric tradition preserves earlier forms of the ara. In the Iliad (9.453-457), Phoenix tells Achilles the story of how his father Amyntor cursed him with childlessness for sleeping with his concubine. Phoenix's barrenness is not a natural condition but a supernatural imposition — the ara of a father against a son, enforced by the Erinyes who "fulfill the curses of fathers." This passage establishes the Erinyes as the specific enforcement agents of parental curses, a role they maintain throughout Greek literature.

The dying curse functions as a special category of ara, drawing power from the liminal position of the speaker. Meleager's mother Althaea curses her son by calling upon the Erinyes after he kills her brothers in the Calydonian boar hunt dispute. In some versions (Homer, Iliad 9.566-572), Althaea strikes the earth with her hands — the gesture of summoning chthonic powers — and prays to Hades and Persephone for Meleager's death. Her prayer is answered; Meleager dies. The physical gesture — beating the ground — connects the verbal curse to the underworld's geography, sending the message downward to the powers who will enforce it.

The civic dimension of the ara appears in the practice of public cursing ceremonies. Athenian assemblies included ritual curses against anyone who would deceive or betray the city. These civic arae borrowed the religious mechanism of the private curse and applied it to the political sphere, creating a supernatural deterrent against treason that supplemented human systems of justice.

The structural logic of the ara extends beyond individual episodes to shape entire mythological cycles. In the House of Atreus, the ancestral curse originating in Tantalus's crimes transmits from parents to children across centuries. Pelops curses his charioteer Myrtilus; the curse passes to Atreus and Thyestes; their conflict generates the curse Thyestes pronounces over the cannibal feast; this falls upon Agamemnon, whose murder generates the vengeance cycle culminating in Orestes' matricide and trial. Each link constitutes a new ara, provoked by the consequences of the previous one, creating a self-perpetuating system. Aeschylus's Oresteia traces this cascade through three plays, demonstrating that resolution requires not individual action but institutional innovation: the Areopagus court transfers enforcement authority from the Erinyes to human jurisprudence, offering a civic alternative to perpetual curse and counter-curse. The resolution Aeschylus proposes in the Eumenides suggests that the cycle of cursing can be broken only through the creation of new institutions capable of absorbing the supernatural energy that the ara generates.

Symbolism

The ara symbolizes the Greek understanding that language possesses performative power — that certain words, spoken under certain conditions by certain speakers, do not merely describe reality but alter it. This conception of potent speech distinguishes the ara from mere anger or wish: the curse is effective because it engages supernatural mechanisms that operate independently of the speaker's continued will.

The ara's association with the dying and the wronged symbolizes the moral economy of Greek thought. Suffering creates authority; the person who has been harmed acquires a power that the person who has prospered does not possess. This inversion of worldly power relations — the blind, exiled Oedipus is more supernaturally potent than any king — reflects a Greek conviction that moral injury generates its own compensatory force. The cosmic order does not tolerate permanent imbalance; the ara is the instrument through which balance is restored.

The chthonic orientation of the curse — its dependence on underworld powers, its association with the earth, the dead, and the Erinyes — symbolizes the Greek understanding that justice has a vertical dimension. Surface-level social arrangements may be unjust, but beneath the visible world, ancient forces track moral debts and enforce payment. The ara reaches downward into this subterranean justice system, bypassing human institutions that have failed the wronged party.

The parental curse carries specific symbolic weight, representing the corrupted channel of generational authority. Parents, in Greek thought, possessed natural authority over children that was simultaneously social (the father's legal power), biological (the blood-bond), and supernatural (the ability to bless or curse). When a parent curses a child, this authority is inverted — the channel that should transmit blessing transmits destruction. The Erinyes' role as enforcers of parental curses identifies them as guardians of the generational order, punishing not merely the offense but the violation of a natural hierarchy.

The civic ara — the public curse against traitors — symbolizes the sacralization of political community. By invoking divine powers against those who would betray the polis, the Athenians declared that the social contract was not merely a human arrangement but a divinely sanctioned order. Betrayal was not just a political crime but a metaphysical transgression, subject to the same supernatural enforcement as parricide or the violation of hospitality.

The physical gestures associated with the ara carry symbolic force: beating the ground opens a channel to underworld powers, raising hands addresses celestial authorities, and tearing garments signals the dissolution of social order. These constitute a ritual vocabulary that accompanies the verbal curse and amplifies its efficacy, connecting the speaker's body to the cosmic geography of justice.

Cultural Context

The ara was embedded in Greek religious practice as a specific ritual form with rules governing its deployment, recipients, and enforcement.

Greek legal culture recognized the curse as a legitimate form of supernatural recourse. When human courts could not provide justice — when the wrongdoer was too powerful, the crime too hidden, or the victim too weak to prosecute — the ara offered an alternative channel to divine judgment. This is why the dying and the exiled possessed the greatest cursing power: they were precisely the people whom human justice systems had failed or could no longer serve.

The Erinyes, as enforcing agents of the ara, were worshipped and propitiated under euphemistic names — the Eumenides ("Kindly Ones"), the Semnai Theai ("Revered Goddesses"). Their cult at Colonus, where Sophocles set Oedipus's final scene, indicates that the Athenians maintained an active relationship with these powers. The cult was not merely fearful but transactional: the Erinyes could bless as well as curse, and their favor was sought through offerings of honey, water, and flowers without wine.

The defixio tradition — curse tablets inscribed on lead and deposited in graves or chthonic sanctuaries — represents the material culture of the ara. Thousands of these tablets survive from the fifth century BCE onward, inscribed with curses against personal enemies, legal opponents, and romantic rivals. While many defixiones are mundane, invoking harm for petty reasons, the practice rests on the same theological foundation as the mythological ara: that written or spoken language, properly directed toward chthonic powers, can compel supernatural action.

The Theban mythological cycle, in which the ara reaches its fullest expression, served as a vehicle for Athenian tragic reflection on the nature of inherited guilt and the limits of human agency. The Theban royal house — Laius, Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone — is defined by a cascade of curses that pass from generation to generation, each ara generating the conditions that provoke the next. This cascading structure made the Theban cycle the premier narrative vehicle for exploring whether human beings can escape the consequences of ancestral crime.

The connection between the ara and supplication (hiketeia) was integral to Greek religious thought. The suppliant who was rejected or harmed gained the power to curse, because the gods of supplication — Zeus Hikesios and the Erinyes — guaranteed the suppliant's rights. This link between vulnerability and supernatural power created a system of moral deterrence that supplemented, and sometimes contradicted, the power dynamics of Greek social life.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

What happens when the wronged speak against the powerful — and the human courts cannot or will not act? The ara is the Greek answer: a ritually charged invocation that routes justice through chthonic channels, bypassing terrestrial authority. This pattern — the curse as legal appeal to a higher court — appears worldwide, and the differences in how it operates reveal fundamentally different assumptions about where divine authority locates itself.

Hebrew Bible — The Imprecatory Psalms (Psalms 109, 137, c. 6th–4th century BCE)

The imprecatory psalms of the Hebrew Bible — particularly Psalm 109, which calls for the enemy's children to wander and beg, his wife to become a widow, and his posterity to be cut off — function as formal curse invocations directed toward God rather than toward chthonic spirits. The structural parallel to the ara is precise: the wronged person calls upon a supernatural power to enforce justice that human authorities cannot or will not deliver. The divergence is in the address: the psalmist appeals to YHWH as a personal divine advocate, while the Greek curser appeals to the impersonal chthonic enforcement powers (Arae, Erinyes). Biblical imprecation is prayer addressed upward; Greek ara invocation is directed downward. Both recognize that the wronged need supernatural allies — they disagree on which direction justice lives.

Yoruba — Epe, the Formal Curse (Ifa Corpus, Odù Ogunda Meji)

In Yoruba tradition, epe (formal curse) is a ritual speech-act with defined social conditions: it requires that the curser have suffered genuine wrong, that the curse be pronounced publicly and clearly, and that the invoked orishas be named as witnesses and enforcers. The parallel to the Greek ara is close: both require moral legitimacy in the curser (the wronged party), both invoke specific supernatural agents as enforcers, and both carry the assumption that supernatural justice corrects what human justice fails to address. The divergence is in the orisha system's specificity — different offenses require different orishas (Ogun for oath-breakers, Shango for unjust rulers), while the Greek Erinyes are more generalized enforcers of blood guilt and violated obligation. Yoruba tradition distributes curse-enforcement across a specialized pantheon; Greek tradition concentrates it in the Erinyes as a class.

Roman — Devotio (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 8.9-10, c. 27–25 BCE)

The Roman devotio — the ritual self-cursing through which a commander consecrated himself and the enemy forces to the gods of the underworld — is structurally related to the ara but inverted in direction. Where the ara is a curse pronounced against another, the devotio is a curse voluntarily accepted by the curser: the commander formally curses himself alongside the enemy, binding both to destruction by the same chthonic powers. Livy's account of Publius Decius Mus (340 BCE) describes the formula in detail — the commander invokes Janus, Jupiter, Quirinus, the Manes, and the underworld deities to receive himself and the enemy. The shared assumption between devotio and ara is that chthonic authority can be invoked through ritual language; the divergence is in purpose. The ara is a claim against an aggressor; the devotio is a sacrifice of the self as the price of collective victory.

Irish — The Geis as Prospective Curse (Tochmarc Étaíne / Táin Bó Cúailnge, c. 8th–12th century CE)

The Irish geis (plural: geasa) is a ritualized prohibition placed on a person that functions as a prospective curse — the prohibition's violation triggers the supernatural consequence automatically, without further invocation. Cú Chulainn's geasa (never refuse a meal offered in hospitality; never pass a cooking fire without eating; never be the last to leave a battlefield) are inherited obligations whose violation triggers his downfall in the Táin. The parallel to the Greek ara is in the supernatural automation: once the violation occurs, the chthonic powers act. The divergence is temporal: the ara is invoked retroactively against a specific wrong already committed; the geis is established prospectively against a class of future behaviors. Greece enforces the past; Ireland constrains the future.

Modern Influence

The concept of the ara has exerted influence on Western thought through multiple channels, including literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy of language, and legal theory.

In literature, the family curse as a narrative engine derives directly from the Greek ara. William Faulkner's cycle of Yoknapatawpha County novels — particularly Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Sound and the Fury (1929) — employ a structure of inherited transgression and generational destruction that mirrors the Theban cycle. Thomas Sutpen's ambition generates consequences that cascade through subsequent generations, destroying his descendants through mechanisms that echo the ara's logic: the founding crime creates conditions that compel future actors toward ruin.

Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) transplanted the Oresteia's curse structure to Civil War-era New England, making the family curse an explicit dramatic mechanism. The Mannon family's inherited guilt and compulsive self-destruction follow the pattern of the Greek ara, though O'Neill substituted Freudian psychology for divine enforcement.

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud's concept of the repetition compulsion — the tendency to repeat traumatic patterns across generations — has been connected to the ara by classical scholars. The mechanism by which parental trauma transmits to children, generating destructive patterns that the recipients cannot consciously control, mirrors the supernatural logic of the Greek curse. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's concept of the "transgenerational phantom" — unresolved parental secrets that haunt descendants — represents a psychoanalytic reformulation of the ara's intergenerational operation.

In philosophy of language, J.L. Austin's speech act theory — particularly the concept of the performative utterance, a statement that changes reality rather than describing it — has been retroactively applied to the Greek ara. The curse is the paradigmatic performative: it does not represent a wish but enacts a transformation in the moral order of the cosmos. Austin's distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts maps onto the Greek distinction between the pronouncement of the curse and its enforcement by the Erinyes.

In legal theory, the ara's function as an extrajudicial mechanism of supernatural justice has been compared to concepts of natural law and moral realism — the philosophical position that moral facts exist independently of human convention and that violations of the moral order carry inherent consequences regardless of human legal systems.

Modern fantasy literature frequently employs curse mechanics that derive from the Greek ara. The binding curses of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, the generational curses of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and the ancestral doom traditions of numerous fantasy settings all draw, directly or indirectly, on the Greek understanding that spoken words can obligate supernatural powers to act.

Primary Sources

Seven Against Thebes 655–719 (467 BCE) by Aeschylus delivers the most concentrated dramatic treatment of the ara in the surviving corpus. When Eteocles learns that Polynices leads the assault on the seventh gate, he recognizes that his father Oedipus's curse — that the brothers would divide their inheritance by the sword — is arranging the catastrophe. Lines 655–719 trace Eteocles' anguished recognition of the curse's operation, his inability to evade it despite awareness, and his decision to face Polynices himself. The text demonstrates the ara's psychological dimension: the curse does not merely predict doom but psychologically compels the cursed toward the fulfillment they might otherwise avoid. The standard edition is Alan H. Sommerstein's Loeb Classical Library volume (2008).

Oedipus at Colonus 1354–1396 (401 BCE, posthumous) by Sophocles presents the ara at its most theatrically concentrated. At Colonus, the dying Oedipus — sheltered in the sacred grove of the Eumenides, spiritually empowered by his proximity to the underworld — pronounces formal curses against both Eteocles and Polynices after Polynices's visit seeking his blessing. Oedipus's triple authority as dying father, wronged suppliant, and figure sacred to chthonic powers gives the ara its maximum charge. The passage is the paradigmatic demonstration that the ara's efficacy scales with the speaker's moral injury and liminal position. The Loeb Classical Library edition by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1994) and the Hackett edition translated by Paul Woodruff (2007) are both standard.

Iliad 9.453–457 (c. 750 BCE) by Homer provides the earliest surviving literary account of the parental ara and identifies its enforcement agent. Phoenix tells Achilles how his father Amyntor cursed him with childlessness for sleeping with his concubine, invoking "the Erinyes who fulfill the curses of fathers" to ensure the punishment. These five lines establish the Erinyes' institutional role as enforcers of paternal cursing authority and anchor the ara in the Homeric cosmological framework two centuries before Aeschylus's dramatizations. The standard edition is Richmond Lattimore's University of Chicago Press translation (1951).

Iliad 9.563–572 (c. 750 BCE) contains the parallel maternal curse: Althaea beats the earth with her hands, summoning the Erinyes, and prays that her son Meleager will die for killing her brothers. The physical gesture — striking the ground to route the invocation downward — is the earliest literary description of the cursing ritual's embodied dimensions, showing how the spoken word was accompanied by gestures that connected the speaker's body to the chthonic powers below. This passage complements the Phoenix episode by establishing that maternal as well as paternal cursing authority was recognized in the earliest literary stratum.

Eumenides 307–396 (458 BCE) by Aeschylus establishes the Erinyes' self-description as enforcers of blood guilt and curses. In their binding song around Orestes, the Erinyes articulate their function: they pursue those guilty of blood-crimes within families, enforcing the curses that the dead and the wronged have pronounced against the living. Lines 307–396 provide the theological statement of the ara's cosmic backing. The resolution of the play — Athena's court acquitting Orestes and the Erinyes accepting civic roles as the Eumenides — constitutes the mythological narrative of how the ara's enforcement was institutionally redirected from chthonic vengeance to civic jurisprudence. The Sommerstein Loeb (2008) is standard.

Hesiod's Theogony 183–187 (c. 700 BCE) records the origin of the Erinyes — born from the blood of Uranus when Cronus castrated him, dropped into the earth. This genealogy places the enforcement agents of the ara among the oldest cosmic forces in Greek mythology, predating the Olympian order. Their antiquity grounds the ara in a justice system older than Zeus, one that the new divine order accommodates rather than abolishes. The Loeb Classical Library edition by Glenn Most (2006) is standard.

Significance

The ara occupies a central position in Greek moral and theological thought because it embodies the culture's conviction that the cosmos is governed by principles of justice that operate independently of human institutions.

The ara's theological significance lies in its revelation that language has supernatural efficacy. Greek religious thought treated the spoken word — particularly the spoken word of the wronged, the dying, and the sacred — as a form of action that engaged divine powers in the enforcement of justice. This understanding of language as performative rather than merely descriptive pervaded Greek culture from Homeric oaths to Athenian court proceedings, and the ara represented its most concentrated expression.

The concept's ethical significance centers on its inversion of worldly power. In a culture that valued strength, status, and political authority, the ara granted disproportionate power to the weak, the dying, and the dispossessed. A blinded exile (Oedipus) could destroy kings through the force of his curse; a dying mother (Althaea) could kill her warrior son. This inversion served as a moral deterrent: the powerful could not harm the weak with impunity because the weak possessed a form of supernatural recourse that no human power could block.

The ara's narrative significance within Greek mythology is structural. Without the mechanism of the family curse, the Theban cycle, the House of Atreus, and multiple other mythological sequences lose their causal architecture. The ara is the engine that drives intergenerational tragedy, connecting Laius's crime to Oedipus's downfall to the brothers' mutual destruction to Antigone's death. Each curse generates the conditions for the next, creating a chain of causation that spans centuries and generations.

For the history of Western literature, the ara established the template for inherited doom narratives. The concept of a founding transgression whose consequences ripple through subsequent generations — the structural DNA of tragedy from Aeschylus through Shakespeare to Faulkner — originates in the Greek understanding of the curse as a persistent, self-propagating force that human will alone cannot neutralize.

The ara's significance extends to Greek jurisprudence, where formal cursing practices intersected with legal procedure. Athenian courts employed ritual curses in oath-taking, and perjurers were subject to supernatural punishment through the self-curse embedded in their oath. This juridical function demonstrates that the ara bridged religious practice and legal procedure, operating within institutional frameworks of Greek civic life. The concept bridges the gap between private grievance and cosmic enforcement, giving individuals a mechanism to engage divine powers on their behalf when human institutions prove inadequate.

Connections

The ara connects to the Erinyes (Furies) as its primary enforcement mechanism. The Erinyes' origin — born from the blood of Uranus during his castration by Cronus — places them among the oldest beings in Greek cosmology, and their function as enforcers of curses predates the Olympian divine order.

The Theban mythological cycle is the primary narrative vehicle for the ara. Oedipus's curse against his sons drives the action of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles' Antigone, making the ara the causal backbone of the entire cycle.

The House of Atreus provides a parallel curse narrative. The ancestral curse on the Atreids — originating in Tantalus's crimes, reinforced by Pelops's curse on Myrtilus, and culminating in the cycle of murder from Atreus through Agamemnon to Orestes — demonstrates the ara's capacity to propagate across multiple generations.

The concept of miasma (pollution) is closely related to the ara, as both involve supernatural contamination that adheres to individuals and transmits across generations. The cursed individual carries a form of spiritual pollution that affects those around them, connecting the ara to Greek purity regulations and rituals of purification.

The suppliancy tradition (hiketeia) intersects with the ara through the mechanism of divine protection for the wronged. The rejected suppliant gains cursing power because the gods of supplication guarantee the suppliant's rights — making the ara a weapon available to those whom human systems of justice have failed.

The trial of Orestes in Aeschylus's Eumenides represents the mythological resolution of the conflict between the ara's logic and the emerging institution of civic justice. Athena's establishment of the Areopagus court — which acquits Orestes of matricide — represents the transfer of curse-enforcement authority from the Erinyes to human legal institutions, though the Erinyes are placated rather than abolished.

The Homeric oath tradition connects to the ara through the mechanism of self-cursing. When Homeric heroes swear oaths, they invoke destruction upon themselves if they break their word — a form of self-directed ara that demonstrates the curse's versatility as a moral instrument.

The ara connects to the Greek concept of pollution (miasma), as both involve supernatural contamination adhering to individuals and families across generations. A curse generates miasma; miasma invites further cursing; the cycle perpetuates until purification or institutional intervention breaks the pattern. The relationship between ara and miasma explains why cursed families experience cascading disasters. The suppliancy tradition further reinforces this connection, as rejected suppliants gain cursing power precisely because the gods of supplication guarantee their rights and enforce the obligations that host communities owe to the vulnerable.

Further Reading