The Muse at Play (eBook)

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Jan Kwapisz and Mikolaj Szymanski, University of Warsaw, Poland; David Petrain, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, USA.

The Muse at Play: An Introduction 11
I. Discourses of Play 41
The Sympotic Tease 43
“You Make Less Sense than a (New) Dithyramb”: Sociology of a Riddling Style 54
Magic Squares, Alphabet Jumbles, Riddles and More: The Culture of Word-Games among the Graffiti of Pompeii 75
II. The Ancient Riddle: Theory and Practice 91
What Has It Got in Its Pocketses? Or, What Makes a Riddle a Riddle? 93
Technopaegnia in Heraclitus and the Delphic Oracles: Shared Compositional Techniques 110
“Gods Cannot Tell Lies”: Riddling and Ancient Greek Divination 131
Were There Hellenistic Riddle Books? 158
The Rhetoric of the Riddle in the Alexandra of Lycophron 178
In scirpo nodum: Symphosius’ Reworking of the Riddle Form 194
III. Visual Poetry in the Text and on the Stone 207
The Treachery of Verbal Images: Viewing the Greek technopaegnia 209
Nicander’s Aesopic Acrostic and Its Antidote 235
Greek Acrostic Verse Inscriptions 256
Sopha grammata: Acrostichs in Greek and Latin Inscriptions from Arachosia, Nubia and Libya 289
IV. Case Studies 317
Versus anacyclici: The Case of P. Sorb. 72v (= adesp. com. fr. 52 PCG) 319
A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions 330
Triple Tipple: Ausonius’ Griphus ternarii numeri 345
V. Playful Receptions 363
The Aulularia inversa of Joannes Burmeister 365
Waste of Time or Artistic Expression? Notes on poesis artificiosa of the Modern Era 389
Note on Contributors and Editors 411
Index of Passages Discussed 415
General Index 427