Il piede nella poesia enigmistica greca: tema e variazioni

The work of the editor of Greek texts consists, in a nutshell, in the study of manuscripts and the identification of the main variants. But the editor of riddles is faced with one more problem: What is to be meant, exactly, by variants? Many riddles, in their written version, have variants that go far beyond the simple difference of one or more words, because they concern the verses in which the solution (or one of the solutions) of the riddle itself: quite frequently the same riddles present either the same clues, but phrased very differently, or different clues, but formulated in the same way as other clues, making the editor’s job difficult. This article will present an overview of such situations, both in Greek puzzles and (demonstrating that this is a problem specific to this literary genre) in the Latin one.