From Homer to John Eugenicus: the long journey of riddles through Greek and Byzantine literatures

This essay deals with the story of riddles, a quite peculiar poetic genre, in Greek and Byzantine literature. It starts with the most famous “neck-riddle” (Oedipus’ ainigma) and the three conundrums attributed to the shadowy figure of Cleoboulina (the daughter of Cleobulus, one of the seven wise men); it mentions the long discussion on riddles as one of the so-called figures of speech (a trope very close to metaphor), since Tryphon’s treatise On tropes to the later Byzantine treatises by Gregory of Corinth, Cocondrios, and George Choiroboskos; it discusses the collections of Athenaeus (in the tenth book of the Deipnosophists) and Constantine Cephalas (the fourteenth book of the Palatine Anthology); it quotes the most significant authors of Byzantine riddles (John Mauropous, John Geometres, Christopher Mitylenaeus, Michael Psellus, Basilius Megalomites, Eustathius or Eumathius Macrembolites, Manuel Moschopoulos, Euthymios Tornikios, Theodorus Aulicalamus, and John Eugenikos. The last part surveys the first printed editions of Greek riddles, from Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’ s Libellus in quo aenigmata pleraque antiquorum explicantur to the third volume of the Anecdota Greca published by Jean-François Boissonade, the starting point of the modern story of Greek riddles.