Even a classroom comedian knows that an explained joke is never funny, and our profession has never lacked pedagogues whose anti-Midas touch can make Homer dreary, Aeschylus dry and Plautus heavy. The volume in question stems from a conference entitled ΜΟϒΣΑ ΠΑΙघΕΙ held in Warsaw in May 2011, and I approached it with a sense of unappealing duty inspired by the prospect of professors, in close proximity, all explaining jokes. I expected forced interpretations, amusements that do not amuse and claims that uninspiring texts mean more than they seem to, all phrased in jargon that means less than it seems to. I resolved to be unforgiving, and some of the articles lived up to my expectations.
Some of them, however, did not. There are a number of interesting articles, but I shall restrict myself to the ones that impressed me the most, in the order in which they appear, in the hope of alerting scholars to some very worthwhile material that should not be missed.
E. Bowie offers consolation to every student who has been bewildered by the brief Greek lyric poems that seem to take so much for granted in so short a space: the authors, he suggests, may on occasion be playing with us, and our aporia is part of their fun. P.A. LeVen makes a similar argument for the more serious ‘new’ dithyramb of late classical Athens: its enigmatic references can be seen as a way of engaging the audience in the text, requiring a constant effort to keep up with the performance. The obscurity, however, resulted from a few simple strategies, and the audience could get a feel for the text without getting every reference. Neither Bowie's symposion nor LeVen's orchestra was a place where everything was understood; but the difficulties and ambiguities were part of the game.
C. Luz, whose Technopaignia (2010) has made her a major authority on ancient wordplay (half the papers here cite her), uses Book 14 of the Greek Anthology to develop a typology for a riddle. Riddles tend to use metonymy, puns and paradox to mislead the would-be solver; the solutions are usually everyday objects, but some of the most intriguing ones describe mythical characters. For each of these rather vague-sounding generalities Luz provides entertaining examples that make her meaning crystal-clear, ending with a definition (‘a description … which disguises … by certain means or devices with the aim to puzzle the recipient…. [W]e find characteristic ways of thinking and speaking which are specific to riddles’, p. 98) that succeeds, to her mind and to mine, in explaining why, when Bilbo Baggins asks, ‘What have I got in my pocket?’, Gollum is right to claim, ‘Not fair!’
F.G. Naerebout and K. Beerden, in an important article, argue that the riddling oracles of literature were a literary convention entirely at variance with actual practice: the actual oracular responses that we have – and they are more than a few – indicate ‘that the daily practice of divination must have been a riddle-free and even unambiguous affair’ (p. 135). The obscure riddles of literature, they claim, reflect a real fear that no amount of clarity could entirely erase: the fear that one might misinterpret an oracle and stumble, like Oedipus, into the very thing one was trying to avoid.
K. asks a straightforward question, ‘Were There Hellenistic Riddle Books?’, and gives a straightforward answer: yes. On the way he provides the tantalising facts about a few candidates, reminding us how much of the literature of Greece and Rome is vanished forever.
V. Garulli offers a mini-corpus of fourteen acrostic verse inscriptions, admittedly incomplete but broad enough to give a taste of the genre and raise some questions about its rationale. Intriguing is her suggestion that ‘the acrostics could have functioned as a socially-oriented abstract for the whole inscribed texts, especially for readers who were not native or good speakers of the Greek language, [who] could perhaps be satisfied with catching the short message of the acrostic’ (p. 274). Acrostic funerary inscriptions are not uncommon in Israeli cemeteries, and I confess that although Hebrew is my everyday language, I sometimes note the acrostic without bothering to read the poem itself. R. Mairs, immediately after Garulli's article, uses her own set of acrostics (many the same as Garulli's) to investigate their differing styles and purposes, and proposes that their authors, on the fringes of empire, are asserting their Helleno-Roman identity – a claim which is not necessarily at variance with Garulli's claim that they are designed with people of uncertain literacy in mind.
M. Fontaine is bold enough to announce ‘the rediscovery of a Neo-Latin masterpiece’ (p. 355), in which Joannes Burmeister, a Lutheran minister and Latinist, adapted Plautus' Aulularia to tell the story of Achan, the man who stole the consecrated spoils of Jericho (Joshua 6:16–19, 7:6–26). Fontaine found the 1629 book in the Royal Copenhagen library, and he promises us a forthcoming edition and translation; for this conference he restricts himself to the ‘wordplay’ aspect of the text, which takes Plautus' text almost line-by-line and subverts it to tell a different tale, with a different moral and – most difficult of all – a very different atmosphere. Whether the Aulularia Inversa is indeed a masterpiece may be known to those who saw Fontaine's translation produced at Brown in the spring of 2011; the rest of us, who will be able to judge only when his promised edition appears, have had our appetite whetted.
These are not the only good articles in the book, and there were a few that seemed to justify my original pessimism. But a book of conference proceedings that can produce the intriguing, often persuasive and occasionally far-reaching contributions summarised above has nothing to be ashamed of.
