The Greek Riddle: Considerations of Genre, Occasion,
and Poetics of the griphos

Alexander C. Loney (Duke University)

The riddle (griphos) has a rich and intricate history in Greek literature and folklore. Some riddles appear to reach deep into the Greek prehistory and the myth, such as the riddle of the Sphinx, first alluded to in Hesiod’s Works and Days (533), or the common-place riddle “I bore my mother,” attested in the Palatine Anthology (14.40,41) as well as in the folklore of numerous other cultures. While some riddles treat matters as profound as human mortality, other riddles seem merely to be quizzical takes on the mundane—artichokes, fish, and dates, to name a few. Nevertheless, riddles had significance. The great culture-heroes of Greece were said to have grappled with riddles: Homer died from an unsolved riddle and the legendary Seven Sages were credited with composing several riddles themselves, as well as participating in riddle-contests. The riddle eventually appears in the rhetorical tradition, where it is schematized as one of the seven types of allegory by the third-century grammarian, Marius Plotius Sacerdos, and likely before him by Philodemus.

Despite the great range and significance of riddles in Greece—in both “high” and “low” culture—they have received little systematic attention from scholars, with Schutz (1920) having made the last major study of riddles as such. This goal of this paper will be to lay out the principal contours of the Greek riddle in terms of genre, occasion, and poetics, with a view to how these categories of analysis coincide with or differ from the use of riddles in comparable cultures. Attention will be paid to how riddles are related to and differentiated from similar ancient word-puzzle forms, such as enigmas (ainigmata) and oracles (chresmoi). Furthermore, there will be some consideration of the character of the Greek riddle-tradition within a larger cross-cultural context.

This paper will discuss the genre of the preserved riddles in formal terms: the range of subjects, the length and form of the word-puzzles (typically epigrammatic), and the relative ease or obscurity of the answers. This paper will also discuss the range of occasions and contexts for the composition of riddles, not only their use as topoi in other genres, but also their social role in symposia and riddle-contests, as well as their appearance in literate forms, best seen in the collection of riddle-poems in book fourteen of the Palatine Anthology. This paper will also consider the poetic techniques employed in some typical riddles, including assonance, paronomasia, alliteration, juxtaposition, rhythmic balance, chiasmus, and parallelism. Finally, this paper will suggest in its conclusion a working definition of the Greek riddle.