The Construction of Expertise in the Greek Arithmetical Epigrams

The Greek arithmetical epigrams preserved in Book 14 of the Palatine Anthology have variously been characterized as recreational texts of the riddle genre or educational texts of the Byzantine Rechenbuch type. While each interpretation provides a valuable perspective, neither fully succeeds in accounting for all of the poems’ literary and mathematical features, or in placing them into a coherent tradition with the only two other examples of the genre: Diophantus’ epigram from Book V of the Arithmetica and Archimedes’ Cattle Problem . This article proposes a different interpretive framework, examining the rhetorical dynamics and contextual implications by which these poems construct the relative technical expertise of their notional authors and readers, demarcate the boundaries between expert insiders and amateur outsiders, and position themselves in an exclusive and elite intellectual tradition. This insider/outsider framework reconciles the apparent contradictions between the recreational and educational interpretations and clarifies the intertextual references between the Anthology epigrams and the poems of Diophantus and Archimedes. It also opens the way for these epigrams to give insight into the social history of mathematics and Greek intellectual culture by illuminating one of the ways in which mathematicians constructed their in-group signifiers and engaged with the broader phenomenon of Greek literary science writing. Finally, it allows for a possible reconsideration of the historical reception of the epigrams, which has been overshadowed by a different set of insider/outsider logics rooted in Neoplatonist philosophical commentary.