The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry

430 Pages·2013·9.426 MB·English

by  Jan Kwapisz, David Petrain, Mikolaj Szymanski

The Muse at Play
Beiträge zur Altertumskunde
Herausgegeben von
Michael Erler, Dorothee Gall,
Ludwig Koenen, Clemens Zintzen
Band 305
De Gruyter
The Muse at Play
Riddles and Wordplay
in Greek and Latin Poetry
Edited by
Jan Kwapisz
David Petrain
Mikołaj Szymański
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-027000-6
e-ISBN 978-3-11-027061-7
ISSN 1616-0452
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet
über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Druck: Hubert & Co. GmbH und Co. KG, Göttingen
∞ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Preface
The essays collected in this volume are the fruit of a conference “(cid:439)(cid:442)(cid:447)(cid:445)(cid:428)(cid:3)
(cid:443)(cid:428)(cid:436)(cid:433)(cid:432)(cid:436). Greek and Latin Technopaegnia, Riddles, Acrostichs, Poetic
Puns, Metrical Curiosities, etc.”, held in May 2011 by the Institute of Clas-
sical Studies of the University of Warsaw. There were good reasons for
organising such a conference at this time. In recent decades there has been
a noticeable growth of interest in the obscure and the playful in ancient
poetry. However, in 2009, when our conference was first conceived, this
broad range of topics had not yet received an up-to-date, more comprehen-
sive treatment. Obviously, the appetite for such a treatment, at least the
appetite of the Hellenists, was fed when the monograph Technopaignia:
Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung was published in 2010 by Chris-
tine Luz, incidentally (or not so incidentally), one of the contributors to the
present volume. Yet after primi piatti there is always place for secondi, and
even for dolci. Our hope is that the present volume may be not only nour-
ishing, but also capable of stimulating the appetite for even further pursuits
in the spacious field we now enter.
Besides those (cid:477)(cid:479)(cid:470)(cid:474)(cid:459)(cid:656)(cid:464)(cid:473)(cid:471)(cid:478)(cid:463)(cid:476)(cid:3)who presented papers at the conference,
we would like to thank others who greatly contributed to the unique char-
acter, friendly atmosphere and, we will risk saying, overall success of the
scholarly event out of which the present volume grows: Tomasz Derda,
Emily Gowers, Joshua Katz, Margaret Malamud and Martha Malamud
were skillful (cid:468)(cid:473)(cid:475)(cid:479)(cid:480)(cid:459)(cid:745)(cid:473)(cid:467) of the conference sessions; Silvio Bär, Julia Doro-
szewska and Adam Łajtar showed no less skill in their role of formal re-
spondents; a team of members of research staff and PhD students from
Warsaw were of immense help at various stages of organising the whole
event. Finally, we are delightedly grateful to Joshua Katz for agreeing to
contribute the introductory piece, whose smallest merit is that it enables us
to keep these remarks as brief as they are.

The Greek font used in this volume is IFAOGrec Unicode, developed by
the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo.

Warsaw and Nashville, Jan Kwapisz, David Petrain,
August 2012 Mikołaj Szyma(cid:276)ski

Table of Contents
Joshua T. Katz:
The Muse at Play: An Introduction ....................................................... 1
I. Discourses of Play
Ewen Bowie:
The Sympotic Tease ............................................................................ 33
Pauline A. LeVen:
“You Make Less Sense than a (New) Dithyramb”:
Sociology of a Riddling Style ............................................................. 44
Rebecca R. Benefiel:
Magic Squares, Alphabet Jumbles, Riddles and More: The Culture
of Word-Games among the Graffiti of Pompeii .................................. 65
II. The Ancient Riddle: Theory and Practice
Christine Luz:
What Has It Got in Its Pocketses? Or, What Makes
a Riddle a Riddle? ............................................................................... 83
Lisa Maurizio:
Technopaegnia in Heraclitus and the Delphic Oracles:
Shared Compositional Techniques .................................................... 100
Frederick G. Naerebout & Kim Beerden:
“Gods Cannot Tell Lies”: Riddling and Ancient Greek Divination .. 121
Jan Kwapisz:
Were There Hellenistic Riddle Books? ............................................. 148
VIII Table of Contents
Christophe Cusset & Antje Kolde:
The Rhetoric of the Riddle in the Alexandra of Lycophron .............. 168
Erin Sebo:
In scirpo nodum: Symphosius’ Reworking of the Riddle Form ....... 184
III. Visual Poetry in the Text and on the Stone
Alexandra Pappas:
The Treachery of Verbal Images: Viewing
the Greek technopaegnia .................................................................. 199
Michael B. Sullivan:
Nicander’s Aesopic Acrostic and Its Antidote .................................. 225
Valentina Garulli:
Greek Acrostic Verse Inscriptions .................................................... 246
Rachel Mairs:
Sopha grammata: Acrostichs in Greek and Latin Inscriptions
from Arachosia, Nubia and Libya ..................................................... 279
IV. Case Studies
Krystyna Bartol:
Versus anacyclici: The Case of P. Sorb. 72v
(= adesp. com. fr. 52 PCG) ............................................................... 309
Jerzy Danielewicz:
A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions .............. 320
Dunstan Lowe:
Triple Tipple: Ausonius’ Griphus ternarii numeri ........................... 335
V. Playful Receptions
Michael Fontaine:
The Aulularia inversa of Joannes Burmeister ................................... 355
Table of Contents IX
Barbara Milewska-Wa(cid:296)bi(cid:276)ska:
Waste of Time or Artistic Expression? Notes on poesis artificiosa
of the Modern Era ............................................................................. 379
Note on Contributors and Editors ............................................................ 401
Index of Passages Discussed ................................................................... 405
General Index .......................................................................................... 417