An enigmatic literature: Interpreting an unedited collection of byzantine riddles in a manuscript of cardinal bessarion (marcianus graecus 512)

Among the treasures of the Palatine Anthology, the most peculiar gems are the epigrams of book 14, a collection of riddles, oracles, and mathematical problems. But while the Delphic oracles are quoted by many authors and while some of the riddles have a long tradition, the conundrums that defy the reader by playing on the letters of words are the first examples of a kind of erudite amusement that becomes more and more popular in the Byzantine era. These poems form a corpus of riddles that have been published either separately or together (the edition by C. Milovanović), but nobody has been able to provide answers to the following questions: Who were their authors? Why were they written? What circulation did they have? In this essay I will try to answer some of these questions through my own edition, translation, and commentary of the riddles concealed in the pages of the Marcianus Graecus 512, a small manuscript of 269 pages written at the end of the Thirteenth century.