Riddle me this: is a riddle still a riddle if the riddle is solved before the reader reads the riddle? Or, to embrace the late antique practice of variatio and reframe the question: what is the point of a riddle whose title reveals its solution? If you have read through or dabbled in Symphosius’ Aenigmata, this anxious question has doubtless floated into mind. Each of his 100 hexametric tristich riddles is proudly fronted by a title that appears to solve the riddle. What mysteries then remain for the reader? Most previous interpreters have drawn attention to Symphosius’ intricate game of interweaving language and themes from one riddle to another, a complex game of catentatio, chain-like connection and variation.[1] Siegenthaler, however, takes a clue from Manuela Bergamin’s suggestive comments about allegoresis in her 2005 Italian commentary to argue that Symphosius offers the explicit, auto-solved riddles as departure points that are subsequently reworked and reused in latent—and more complex and interesting—ways.
First, Siegenthaler surveys the field in the introduction. We find a condensed history of riddles proper, beginning with Aristotle. The survey offers a heavy focus on definitions and examples provided by ancient grammarians, especially Tryphon’s description of the six mechanics for the intentional creation of riddling obscurity. Riddles, strictly understood, are not overly common in either Greek or Latin literature. There is good evidence that riddle collections were circulating by the Hellenistic period, but details are scanty, especially on the Latin side of the ledger. Symphosius’ riddles, therefore, emerges not only as antiquity’s most famous collection but also its first and most elaborate. Like Martial before him, Symphosius may have taken scattered prior poetic practice and synthesized it into a new genre, one that would be much imitated in the early medieval period.[2]
Who then was Symphosius? The prevailing opinion remains that a single poet named Symphosius composed these riddles in the late 4th or early 5th century CE, probably in Vandal-ruled north Africa.[3] Siegenthaler punts (“le problem reste ouvert”, 59) and, while acknowledging that the author’s date, location, and religion should affect interpretation, he claims space for informed hypotheses even in the absence of decisive evidence (60). N.B. this methodological claim grows in importance over the course of the book. After reviewing the structural elements of the collection and its literary and intertextual predecessors, Siegenthaler begins to grapple with his main interest: what do we make of riddles whose titles announce their solution? Differing from other scholars who had suggested that the titles recreate the performative sense of a symposium, or mark encyclopedic or rhetorical exercises rather true riddles, or encourage the defamiliarization of the mundane by complicating simple objects, or offer a base for allusive and lexical wordplay, Siegenthaler argues that the presence of titles belies the explicit setting of Saturnalian playfulness and points the reader towards a more contemplative and didactic experience (81). Sebo and Bergamin have previously discussed polysemy in these riddles,[4] and Bergamin has observed how Symphosius’ riddles are intentionally complicated by mythological references, ambiguous terms, strange anthropomorphization, titular polysemy, Christian symbolism, and paradoxical imagery. Thus, as Bergamin observed, riddle #1, on a stylus (Graphium), has obvious metapoetic implications intensified by an allusion to Horace, Satires 1.10.72. Through ambivalent terminology, it suggests the presence of more than one level of interpretation and so recapitulates the very nature of riddles. For Bergamin, this second level is predominantly Christian (a mole suggests both a blind man and a heretic; a rose is a rose… and St. Agnes).[5] Οne’s milage with such allegorical interpretations will vary, but Siegenthaler is fair and clear-eyed in evaluating such aggressive interpretations (89–96) before leading us down a different path.
Since the external context for Symphosius remains obscure, Siegenthaler turns instead to a reappraisal of intertextual elements (both looking towards classical and contemporary authors and forward to the reception of Symphosius in medieval works), as well as what he terms “intratextual” elements in which explicit elements advanced in one riddle are repurposed later to create a didactic progression from the concrete to the abstract (97). Siegenthaler is especially concerned with two axes of the intratextual: the first metapoetic, focusing on poetic composition (97–98); and the second metaliterary, embracing the “playful reflection on language, on grammar, and more generally on the form (or even on the formatting) of the text” (99).
It is in Chapter Two (“Analyses”) where this methodological rubber meets the road, as Siegenthaler analyzes roughly a third of the riddles in the collection, forming a kind of “selective commentary” (12). Siegenthaler’s thesis rests on teasing out how the serial reading of the riddles qua collection signals or activates the latent readings that he argues await beneath the explicit solutions stated by those troublingly revelatory titles. Most of his analyses of individual riddles and series of riddles open with a detailed exploration of how Symphosius’ catentatio provides more than thematic and linguistic ligaments between the riddling tristichs. These “Perspectives intratextuelles” thoroughly explore the interconnections between the riddles, building on previous insights, especially by Bergamin and Leary, to show how these hint to the reader that something else is at play. This survey of intraconnectedness is followed, rigorously, by elucidating how allusion further motivates or activates the latent puzzle (“Perspectives intertextuelles”). The first section of this chapter (“Jeux Poétiques,”) explores how Symphosius teaches his reader to recognize this latent level. After illustrating how the collection’s Preface and the riddle on “Chain” (#5) establish the ideal readerly context—playful and Saturnalian—and ideal readerly method—catentatio, or awareness of connections forwards and backwards—Siegenthaler demonstrates how these themes can be traced in subsequent riddles, which are both illuminated by and illuminate in turn their predecessors. Thus “Needle” (#55) expands “Chain” into the metaliterarily potent realm of textiles and weaving to suggest a level of precision, detail, and refinement obscured by the loose self-deprecation advanced in the Preface. The discovery of craft and refinement in self-professedly sloppy, haphazard, and light Latin verse will hardly surprise. But Siegenthaler mounts his defense of the collection’s more serious purpose with considerable evidence, such that even if every stroke might not persuade, one is impressed by the overall picture that is painted. Siegenthaler studiously draws in evidence from classical works, late antique analogues and influences, as well as grammarians and later authors whose reuse of Symphosian elements may point to previously overlooked insights into the riddles and the collection.
In Part 2 (“Jeux de langage,”) Siegenthaler proceeds to argue that Symphosius foregrounds ludic elements in certain riddles so that readers might recognize and understand them elsewhere (165). Words are deconstructed and reforged within individual riddles, e.g., P/ORCUS (#36), L/APIS (#74); homonyms are engaged, e.g., MA/ĀLUM (#84); and the practice of wordplay with letters established, e.g., BETA is both the vegetable and the letter. Titles also engage in anagrammatic wordplay, e.g., ARANea and RANA (#17, 19), MULA and MALUa (#37, 41) and PONS and SPONgia (#62, 63). Having established the general principal, Siegenthaler proceeds to explore these phenomena in many individual riddles. For example, in “Flint” (#76), Siegenthaler works out a detailed exegesis of the riddle’s multifold wordplay, tracing the controversy over the flint’s miraculous power through Lucretius to Lactantius. This is interesting in its own right but Siegenthaler repeatedly summons us to take Symphosius seriously, especially when he makes claims about language. So, when he says in this riddle that “intus is always present”, and intus appears in the first two lines of this riddle but seems missing in the third, Siegenthaler claims that Symphosius is inviting the reader to look more closely. Sure enough we find an anagram built off the end of lignis in the final line: nec ligNIS UT uiuat eget = INTUS (177). And, of course, the riddle’s title, SILEX, contains an anagram of lexis, or ‘reading’, and so a further key to this mode of interpretation (178).
Siegenthaler is careful to distance his method of anagrammatic interpretation from those advanced by Ahl and Saussure. Instead, he shows how Symphosius continually motivates the search for these latent word games through explicit signals to reader. Sometimes the signals are subtle. The unusual singular in the title of #79, Scopa (“Broom”) opens a passageway to a controversy about this solecism that runs through Quintilian (1.5.16), Donatus (4.393.14–16), and later grammarians, who often, tellingly associate it with the pluralized “ladder” (scalae), which happens to be the subject of the previous riddle. Sometimes the connections are less robust, as with the argument that the best solution to the cryptic number play in #96 is to imagine a three-handed teacher (251–252), or the imputation that scopa is also intended to recall Martilian epigrams on the mentula (191–197), one of a few obscene latent solutions that Siegenthaler suggests (also #94).[6] As with many such arguments, it isn’t that these are impossible, nor that Siegenthaler hasn’t displayed considerable cleverness and erudition in advancing the best possible argument for these associations. I suspect that individual readers will want to follow such speculation as far as they are comfortable. This is not a criticism, as much as a recognition of the very nature of associative reading that Siegenthaler is encouraging us to take in Symphosius’ collection, and how “regular” readers, seeking clever entertainment within the collection, have and will approach it.
Siegenthaler’s exegesis is modelled on the mode of reading that he recommends for Symphosius, that of a linear journey that requires re-reading and iterative, backwards-looking re-exploration (368–72). As examples of different latent solutions accumulate in the book, these proposed latent elements become more ludic, more metaliterary, and more obscure, building to several serial readings of riddles that manifest intricate word pictures or technopaignia (on which Siegenthaler gives a good overview, 351–368). Symphosius’ collection concludes with “Monument” (#100), an obvious metaliterary flourish that points to the presence of a backmasked telestich in #96–99: SAISITROTEIR = REITOR TISIAS. Is “Rhetor Tisias”, a sphragic sign of the real name of the collection’s author, or yet another riddle? Tisias, of course, was the legendary 5th century Syracusan to whom the formalization of rhetoric was attributed, and who maintained this reputation into late antiquity (e.g., Martianus Capella 5.433–434). Perhaps, Siegenthaler posits, the collection concludes with a lament about the degradation of rhetoric. Regardless, this telestich prompts a rereading of clues in the series that reveal the positive role that riddle(solving) can have for rhetoric. With this series as a model, Siegenthaler suggests other technopaignia: a backmasked acrostic in 13 or 16–17 (PEILION (IN ESSE)), a regular acrostic in 89–91 (PENDVNT), and most provocatively an acrotelestic in #1, TAVROD (“by the bull”, i.e., ‘by the plow’), whose evocation of careful literary revision contrasts with the claim in the Preface that these riddles are the product of spontaneous, sodden inspiration. Siegenthaler suggests other possible technopaignia but with proper, gradated circumspection. Taken together, these illustrate how the Aenigmata forge a signposted journey that becomes more complex and rewarding through rereading, as the reader is taught how to recognize and access the more playful, latent layers of the collection.
Armed with these detailed and synoptic interpretations, the reader may then read the riddles with fresh eyes, in Latin or in Siegenthaler’s new prose translations into French that serve as “working versions” (“de travail”) in support of his analyses (111). Because of the previous efforts of Bergamin (and to a lesser extent Leary), Siegenthaler only modifies the text in a handful of places (primarily in the last decade of the riddles).
This work is a revision of the author’s dissertation, bringing with it the superabundance of detail one would expect. The volume concludes with a substantial bibliography, and two indices: one of passages (including a helpful separate section on epigraphical sources) and the second of general headings. In an age when many print books are increasingly flimsy, insubstantial things, Schwabe deserves kudos for continuing to produce substantial, durable objects, with good quality paper and clear printing, that should withstand the rigors of rereading, as anyone who seeks to plumb Sympwhosius’ depths will surely do.
Notes
[1] Leary, T. J., Symphosius: the Aenigmata. An Introduction, Text and Commentary (London 2014), 13–26 [BMCR 2014.10.16]; Bergamin, M., Aenigmata Symposii La fondazione dell’enigmistica come genere poetico (Firenze 2005), xxxiii-xxxix; Bergasa, I. and Wolff, É., Épigrammes latines de l’Afrique vandale (Paris 2016), lxi–lix; Sebo, E., « In scirpo nodum: Symphosius’ Reworking of the Riddle Form », in : Kwapisz, J. et al. (éds.), The Muse at Play, Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Berlin 2013), 184–195, esp. 187–188.
[2] Bergamin 2005, xx; Sebo 2013, 1985.
[3] Bergamin 2005 demurs, noting certain Gallic aspects of the work.
[4] Sebo 2013, 194–195; Bergamin 2005, xxvii-xxviii.
[5] Siegenthaler provides a handy summary of Bergamin’s Christocentric interpretations on p. 87.
[6] In #94, on a one-eyed luscus, Siegenthaler claims that Symphosius reworks Martialian obscenity related to these figures in the riddle’s opening line, literally, “there is only one eye in him” (unus inest oculus) could be read as a cacemphaton through an amphibolia ex diuiso as: unus inesto culus or “there will be only one ass in him” and so offers the solution of “the eunuch” for the question in the next line—i.e., where will he who sells his ass find a penis? (225).