L.'s new commentary on the Aenigmata of Symphosius appears at an opportune moment. Riddles and other phenomena of verbal play have lately received extended treatments in C. Luz's Technopaignia (2010) and J. Kwapisz et al., edd., The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (2013). Symphosius is a key figure in the ancient riddle's development: his collection of 100 riddles, each consisting of three Latin hexameters preceded by a lemma with the answer, set the standard and served as inspiration for later such collections in Latin and in Old English. Yet the only other modern commentary in English is R. Ohl's of 1928 (The Enigmas of Symphosius); in 2005, M. Bergamin published an Italian commentary that is particularly full on the manuscript tradition (Aenigmata Symposii). L. delves deeper than previous commentators into the ordering of the riddles as he develops his argument that the collection exhibits a carefully considered structure at every level. His commentary, which helpfully translates each riddle at the head of the relevant section, is an indispensable guide to Symphosius and more than makes the case that this author of one of the earliest extant riddle collections deserves further attention and study.
The introduction efficiently discusses author and date (Symphosius may be from North Africa and probably wrote in the late-fourth, early-fifth century c.e.), then turns to the literary background. The Xenia and Apophoreta are major influences: like Martial, Symphosius has collected short poems of uniform length, equipped them with lemmata that offer the ‘answers’, and introduced the series with a longer preface that claims the Saturnalia as the occasion for their composition. The dramatic setting is appropriate – at Saturnalian symposia, gifts were exchanged and riddles posed – but after the preface Symphosius' riddles do little to keep this setting in view, and unlike Martial they do not indulge in the obscenity sanctioned by the holiday. L. attractively suggests that the riddles with their lemmatised solutions mimic exchanges of questions and answers by guests at a banquet, so that there is a distant connection with Plato's Symposium and a closer one with Macrobius' Saturnalia. Because each riddle is preceded by its solution, L. also moots the idea that ‘the reader of the Aenigmata is not in fact meant to solve the riddles at all’ (p. 13). This seems all but certain, and crucial: the lemma-riddle structure saves readers from boggling over solutions as they savour the poet's virtuosity in negotiating the constraints of his chosen form and arranging his riddles into sequences that require us to ponder the significance of each poem's placement. The longest section of the introduction, on order and arrangement, contains a useful table that sets out L.'s views on the collection's structure (pp. 15–26): I will treat this in more detail below.
After brief sections on style, metre, literary allusions and Nachleben, the introduction concludes with details on the Latin text, which is ‘intended primarily to serve the reader's convenience’ (p. 32). For MSS readings L. relies on the apparatus in Bergamin (op. cit.). For his base text he follows Shackleton Bailey's 1992 Teubner of the Latin Anthology, but he has thoroughly reconsidered that edition's editorial choices and prints a list of his text's differences on pp. 36–7. The Latin text itself has no apparatus, but textual variants and conjectures are reported in the lemmata of the commentary.
The commentary provides the background needed for each poem, often citing images and extant examples of the object described in a riddle. It attends scrupulously to the formal artistry of individual lines: Symphosius is fond of arranging word pairs symmetrically around a strongly marked third-foot caesura. L. also has a keen ear for the effects of wit and paradox that frequently characterise these riddles (see, e.g., the note on Aenig. 43.3). The notes intermittently engage with Bergamin's thesis that Christian symbolism influences some riddles: L. rejects this notion and insists that parallels with Christian authors reflect common debts to a shared literary tradition (see especially p. 4, with n. 36).
Symphosius begins his collection with a writing implement (Aenig. 1, graphium), and ends in Horatian mode with the monument that outlasts death (Aenig. 100, monumentum). One of L.'s most important contributions is his attempt not only to formulate the principles that underlie this artistic arrangement of the riddles, but also to show in detail how these operate throughout the collection (not just at beginning and end). L. identifies two principles (pp. 14–15): (1) riddles are grouped by theme: for example ‘writing equipment’ (Aenig. 1–3); (2) each riddle is obligatorily linked with the riddle that directly precedes and the one that directly follows: for example Aenig. 2 must link with Aenig. 1 and 3. The second principle requires the most detailed demonstration. In his introduction to each poem, L. traces the riddle's connections with its immediate neighbours: these connections may involve ‘generic associations, verbal connections, word play and etymologizing, literary allusions or associations and shared or related content’ (p. 15). Sometimes the links are so close that a riddle cannot be understood without one of its partners (e.g. Aenig. 46.3), but as L. acknowledges, the contextual links are often more subtle, and not all are equally convincing; readers will also notice further connections that L. does not highlight. But the commentary successfully establishes that this is the reading process the collection demands: we must be as attentive to the sequence as we are to the individual riddle.Footnote 1
One topic I missed in the commentary was a fuller discussion of the enunciative situation set up by Symphosius' riddles (who is speaking, who being addressed, etc.). The subjects of the riddles most often speak in the first person, a phenomenon that L. calls ‘personification’ (see index s.v. figures of speech: personification). Pragmatically, the first person indicates to readers the thing whose identity they are notionally being asked to guess. But a few riddles do not use the first person in this way: L. signals these in the commentary and lists them in the introduction (p. 27 n. 116)Footnote 2 but does not consider the reasons for the deviation. Second-person forms, by contrast, are rare in the collection. In the last line of the preface, Symphosius addresses an anonymous ‘lector’ and asks pardon for the verses that follow. Otherwise the riddles address a singular ‘you’ just four more times (in Aenig. 14, 31 [30], 94, 96), and three of these instances coincide with lack of personification (94) or unusual uses of the first person (31 [30], 96). The pragmatics of Symphosius' riddles, and of the riddle collections he inspired, would merit further research.
None of these points detracts in the least from L.'s book, which is as well edited (typos are few) as it is excellent. It will become the standard commentary on Symphosius.
