This book exposes the modus operandi behind the Symphosius Aenigmata, a collection of 100 short Latin riddles preserved from the 5th century CE. These were riddles prepared in connection with annual celebrations for the Roman feast of Saturnalia.

The book takes a rigorous analytical approach, coming up with results which many will find surprising. For it becomes clear that there is far more to these clever riddles than most readers ever perceive. They turn out to be sophisticated spelling riddles which exploit the age-old trick of literary metathesis, a standard technique in the field of cryptography which is also known as transposition, or as anagrammatic dispersion.

Not only does this use of metathesis amount to a form of cryptography (hidden writing), at the same time it achieves the advantages of steganography (secret information concealed in plain sight). As a result an unsuspecting majority of readers will never even notice that anything has been concealed.

Taking each riddle in turn, this book shows how the composers of the Aenigmata have made extensive use of this remarkable poetic device. The evident purpose is to convey, but only to more observant readers, incremental information that reaches far beyond the literal sense of a given riddle. But it's information hasty readers are almost certain to overlook. Only when we succeed in framing and solving the spelling riddles are we then able to recover what the original writers have determined to conceal. In this way numerous ‘secrets’, preserved from the age of antiquity, are now revealed in this book.

But why is it important to understand the literary use of metathesis, as exposed and explained in this book? The answer is that we find almost exactly the same cryptographic technique deployed in other poetic works, ranging from the texts of the Hebrew bible to the 20th century works of T S Eliot in English.

In each case the purpose is the same, to convey a ‘secret’ component of meaning which the writer has determined to conceal. Indeed the Koine Greek texts of the canonical gospels are found to rely upon the same cryptographic technique to withhold from less observant readers (and from all who read only from translations) the vital secret component of the gospel message.