It was in August 2019 that I first came across the collection of one hundred short riddles in Latin ascribed to Symphosius.
My earlier work on analysing the Septuagint version of the Hebrew bible and Greek texts of the Christian gospels had left me familiar with certain instructive metaphors invoked there. The metaphors appear to be aimed at prompting the reader to recognise and retrieve words or names the writer has concealed by dispersing the letters to spell them into the finished text
I was familiar too with the compositional method used to achieve such concealment. Long established in the field of cryptography, it is known from Greek as metathesis, from Latin as transposition, or otherwise as anagrammatic dispersion. It's a trick available to any writer who wishes to conceal an additional component of meaning within a superficially innocent passage of text. Importantly, it's also a trick that goes unnoticed by many readers... who as a result are left at a loss for full understanding.
Upon first encountering the Symphosius riddles, I was surprised to find that a number of these special metaphors deployed in the Greek texts of the four canonical gospels play the same part in these riddles too, but worked now in Latin. I list here some particular points that caught my attention:
Finally, I was quick to notice that Riddle #94 ( One-eyed Garlic Seller ) invokes the very same 'selling and buying' metaphor that we find deployed at multiple points in the Koine Greek texts of the four canonical gospels. It's an important metaphor because it teaches by example the process of anagrammatic exchange which readers are expected to implement in order to recover those words or names for which the writer has chosen to disperse the individual letters within his final text.
Accordingly the first step for the reader to take is to 'sell' (or 'trade in') selected words from the finished text, obtaining in exchange (as if a mix of loose coins) the letters previously used to spell those words. A selection of these letters may now be used to 'buy' (or 'reconstitute') one or more further words. But these are not 'new' words construed at random.
Instead they are 'old' words... words chosen in advance by the original writer and which the reader at some point has already been directed to find. Such texts function in this way as a literary treasure hunt where readers are expected to 'find' for themselves those otherwise secret words or names which the original writer has first decided upon... before he adds further letters to the mix, ultimately rearranging all the letters so that the word(s) to be hidden are now fully dispersed in the finished text.
I shortly purchased copies of the books on the Symphosius riddles by Leary (2014) and Sebo (2018). Neither of these writers makes any mention of metathesis. Accordingly I set out to analyse the Symphosius collection for myself, aiming to discover to what extent the same compositional principle that prevails throughout the gospel texts has also been adopted for preparing these Saturnian riddles in Latin.
By deploying standard analytical techniques, including letter frequency analysis, I found I was able to explain numerous features of these riddles which hitherto have lacked the attention they now appear to deserve.
This book is the outcome. I hope you may be as much intrigued as I have been myself, and that the book may help to fill what I perceive as an unfortunate shortfall in knowledge concerning the forms of poetic construction embraced and exploited by educated writers from ages past.
J.H. Hatfield : June 2025