ISBN 978-0-9562057-1-1
Perhaps you are amused by clever spelling riddles. Perhaps you are interested in Roman history, or in the culture of the late Classical Age. Or you might just like to learn about the use of literary metathesis, a cryptographic technique that works in any written language to catch out many readers. Here is an age-old trick that leaves readers 'blind' to certain words or names which the original writer has arranged to conceal from view by dispersing their constituent letters within a short passage of literal text.
This book disentangles the hidden meaning behind each of 100 short Latin riddles from a little-known collection which has been preserved for more than 1500 years but whose full significance has long been overlooked.
Each riddle was prepared for the Roman feast of Saturnalia and later collected under the name 'Symphosius'. Hatfield's comprehensive analysis reveals the level of scholarship displayed by these remarkable writers... who from the outset develop their text in such a way that it includes all the individual letters readers will need to reconstitute for themselves those particular names or words which the writer has chosen to disperse.
J.H. Hatfield, a former Cambridge scholar, is an independent writer conducting research into the mindset and methods of poetic writers who have exploited the trick of metathesis... from ages past, and up to the present day.
Hardcover
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Product Details
Published: 1st October 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 448
ISBN: 978-0-9562057-1-1