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This chapter deals with the riddles, a very popular poetic genre in Greek and Byzantine literature, starting with the most famous “neck-riddle” (Oedipus’ enigma) and the three conundrums attributed to Cleoboulina, the daughter of Cleobulus, one of the seven wise men. It analyses riddles as a figure of speech very close to metaphor, from Tryphon’s treatise On tropes to the later Byzantine treatises by Gregory of Corinth, Cocondrios, and George Choiroboskos. It reviews the collections of Athenaeus (Deipnosophists 10) and Constantine Cephalas (Palatine Anthology 14), and the most significant Byzantine authors of riddles (John Mauropous, John Geometres, Christopher Mitylenaeus, Michael Psellus, Basilius Megalomites, Eustathius or Eumathius Macrembolites, Manuel Moschopoulos, Euthymios Tornikios, Theodorus Aulicalamus, and John Eugenikos). The last part surveys the first printed editions of Greek riddles from Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’ s Libellus in quo aenigmata pleraque antiquorum explicantur to the third volume of the Anecdota Greca published by Jean-François Boissonade, the starting point of the modern story of Greek riddles.

One of the last examples of the long success of the plot of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in modern literature is the controversial novel The kindly ones, written (in French) by the American-born author Jonathan Littel in 2006 and translated into English in 2009. The chapter deals with the quite hidden (but consistent) connections between the mythical story as told by the Greek playwright in the fifth century BCE and the dramatic events that mark the personal and public life of the protagonist of the 1000-pages book, the SS-officer Maximiliem Aue, who eventually succeeds in escaping the pursuit of the Erinyes, the goddesses of revenge. At the end of the novel, in the town of Berlin invaded by the Russian soldiers, the Erinyes become, as in the outcome of the Greek tragedy, Eumenides – this is in fact the meaning of the title, in all the main translations (Les Bienveillantes, Le benevole, Die Wohlgesinnten, Las Benévolas, As Benevolentes, etc.). Simone Beta is Full Professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Siena. His research centers on Greek and Roman drama, wine and symposium, epigrams and riddles, and the reception of classical antiquity. He has written Il linguaggio nelle commedie di Aristofane: parola positiva e parola negativa nella commedia antica (Rome 2004), Il labirinto della parola: enigmi oracoli e sogni nella cultura antica (Turin 2016) and Io, un manoscritto: l’Antologia Palatina si racconta (Roma 2017). With L. Della Bianca he has written Il dono di Dioniso. Il vino nella letteratura e nel mito in Grecia e a Roma (Rome 2015); with F. Puccio, Il dono di Afrodite. L’eros nella letteratura e nel mito in Grecia e a Roma (2019). He has published an anthology of Greek sympotic epigrams (Vino e poesia. Centocinquanta epigrammi greci sul vino, Milan 2006) and translated Sophocles’ Antigone (Milan 2020) and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Milano 2020). Keywords: Aeschylus, Orestes, Erinyes, World War II, Nazism, Frammenti sulla Scena (online), N. 1 (2020) - Volume speciale - Il teatro della 'polis' tra intrattenimento e politica - Atti del convegno internazionale (Pisa 2019)