The solution: a myopic eunuch, dimly descrying a bat that was clinging to
a fennel-stalk, threw a pumice-stone at it but failed to make a direct hit.
There is no reason to suppose that this delightfully silly conundrum is
much older than the fourth century , when it is first attested. Yet it has
some recognizably Indo-European features. With its narrative mode and
series of parallel members, in each of which something is mentioned only for
its essence to be apparently negated, it shows a more than casual formal
similarity to a widely diffused European riddle, first attested in a tenth-
century manuscript at Reichenau, about snow melting in the sun:
Volavit volucer sine plumis,
sedit in arbore sine foliis;
venit homo sine manibus,
conscendit illam sine pedibus,
assavit illum sine igne,
comedit illum sine ore.
There flew a bird without feathers,
settled on a tree without leaves;
there came a man without hands,
climbed the tree without feet,
roasted the bird without fire,
devoured it without a mouth.^83This in turn recalls the Latin herbal spell quoted in the last chapter, ‘Herds-
men found you, culled you without hands, cooked you without fire, ate you
without teeth.’ The subject matter of the three texts is so dissimilar that there
can be no question of one being modelled on another. Rather they are all cast
in the same inherited riddle form.
Further: the Greek riddle is based on an accumulation of apparent impos-
sibilities, things that both are X and are not-X. In each case the solution turns
out to be something on the margin between the opposed alternatives X and
not-X. We have here something deeply rooted in Indo-European structures
of thought and expression. In Chapter 2 we saw how pervasive was the use of
binary oppositions to express totalities, many of them taking the form ‘both X
and non-X’, which appeared to leave nothing unaccounted for. We saw too
that occasionally a pair of opposites (though not of the ‘X and non-X’ type)
was supplemented by a middle term, to stop a possible loophole. There are
stories from several Indo-European traditions in which a set of apparently
impossible conditions is laid down, framed in terms of exclusive polarities,
and they then turn out to be fulfillable by means of intermediates. Indra binds
(^83) Aarne (1918–20), iii. 1–48. Many of the variants have four lines, like the eunuch riddle, and
Aarne argues that this was the original form.
- Cosmos and Canon 369