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This book's concern is with notoriously obscure ancient
poets-riddlers, whom it argues to have been an essential, albeit
necessarily marginal, element of the literary landscape of
Antiquity, which, in addition, exerted subtle yet lasting influence
on European culture. The three first essays in this book trace a
direct line of influence between the early Hellenistic scholar-poet
Simias of Rhodes, the late Republican Roman experimentalist Laevius
and Constantine the Great's virtuoso panegyrist Optatian Porfyry,
whereas the fourth essay discusses the preservation and
transformation of the model invented by Simias in Byzantium. The
Appendix reflects on the triumph of this intellectual paradigm in
Neo-Latin Jesuit education by investigating the case of a
peripheral yet highly influential Central European college at the
turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book is at
once a contribution to the scholarship on the reception of
Hellenistic poetry and to the study of ancient 'technopaegnia'
(i.e. playful poetry) and their cultural influence in Antiquity,
Byzantium and post-mediaeval Europe.
In May 2011, a conference on riddles and word games in Greek and
Latin poetry took place at the Institute of Classical Studies of
the University of Warsaw. The conference was intended as an open
forum where specialists working in different fields of classical
studies could meet to discuss the varied manifestations of riddles
and other technopaegnia - both terms being understood broadly to
encompass the full range of play with language in classical
antiquity, in keeping with the use made of the two terms in ancient
and early modern theoretical discussions. This volume offers
revised versions of the papers presented during the conference.
Contributions by scholars from Europe and the USA treat a number of
interconnected topics, including: ancient and modern attempts to
formulate a definition of the riddle; poetic games at Greek
symposia; experimentation with language in late classical poetry;
riddles in the book cultures of the Hellenistic age and late
antiquity; the functions of word games carved in stone, written on
papyrus, or inscribed on the wall as graffiti; authors famed for
their obscurity, such as Heraclitus and Lycophron; wordplay in
Neo-Latin poetry; oracles, magic squares, pattern poetry,
palindromes and acrostichs.
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