Kidnappers?
Scholars have debated what ‘vilbia’ could have been, and there is still no agreement. There are a few options. Initially it was assumed that Vilbia was the name of a woman, and that this curse was issued by a man who had lost his wife to another man. But would he have had such a long list of suspects in that case?
Then it was said that the latin verb involavit (has stolen) could only signal the theft of an object, not a person. The conclusion was that Vilbia was still a woman, but a slave woman, meaning that she could have been addressed as an object, a possession. If this theory is right, we would have a Roman kidnapping on our hands.
However, the newest theory suggests that ‘vilbia’ was really just a word in the local language for some sort of pointed object, maybe a brooch. A bit less exciting than a kidnapping, but a lot more likely in context.
Discussions like this make it clear how difficult translating a tablet like this really is. Besides the use of unknown words, there is another aspect of this curse that has made translation very difficult…