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Article ID: CBB001863903

Socrates' Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything: Explaining the Arithmetical Riddles of AP 14 (2020)

Kwapisz, Jan (Author)

American Journal of Philology
Volume: 141
Issue: 3
Pages: 457-486
Publication date: 2020

DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2020.0023

URI: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/763627

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Book 14 of the Palatine Anthology comprises, alongside proper riddles and oracles, forty-five arithmetical epigrams. Long underrated as poetry, these deserve to be reappraised in light of a recent trend of unmasking a complex cultural agenda of ancient scientific literature. By focusing on two particularly elaborate epigrams (AP 14.1 and 4), this discussion sets out to explore these poems' self-aware engagement with various literary and cultural traditions. I argue that as poetry as much as pieces of an arithmological jigsaw puzzle, these are vehicles for an intricate, if not entirely serious, Platonizing and neo-Pythagorean program of uniting poetry and mathematics.

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