The Muse at Play: An Introduction -- I. Discourses of Play -- The Sympotic Tease -- "You Make Less Sense than a (New) Dithyramb": Sociology of a Riddling Style -- Magic Squares, Alphabet Jumbles, Riddles and More: The Culture of Word-Games among the Graffiti of Pompeii -- II. The Ancient Riddle: Theory and Practice -- What Has It Got in Its Pocketses? Or, What Makes a Riddle a Riddle? -- Technopaegnia in Heraclitus and the Delphic Oracles: Shared Compositional Techniques -- "Gods Cannot Tell Lies": Riddling and Ancient Greek Divination -- Were There Hellenistic Riddle Books? -- The Rhetoric of the Riddle in the Alexandra of Lycophron -- In scirpo nodum: Symphosius' Reworking of the Riddle Form -- III. Visual Poetry in the Text and on the Stone -- The Treachery of Verbal Images: Viewing the Greek technopaegnia -- Nicander's Aesopic Acrostic and Its Antidote -- Greek Acrostic Verse Inscriptions -- Sopha grammata: Acrostichs in Greek and Latin Inscriptions from Arachosia, Nubia and Libya -- IV. Case Studies -- Versus anacyclici: The Case of P. Sorb. 72v (= adesp. com. fr. 52 PCG) -- A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions -- Triple Tipple: Ausonius' Griphus ternarii numeri -- V. Playful Receptions -- The Aulularia inversa of Joannes Burmeister -- Waste of Time or Artistic Expression? Notes on poesis artificiosa of the Modern Era -- Note on Contributors and Editors -- Index of Passages Discussed -- General Index.