Philogelos (Ancient Greek: Φιλόγελως, "Love of Laughter"), also titled or subtitled The Jests of Hierocles and Philagrius, is a Greek-language book published in late antiquity that is the oldest known surviving collection of jokes.
[1] Authorship of the Philogelos is traditionally attributed to two men, Hierocles and Philagrius (also spelled Hierokles and Philagros), who are otherwise unattested and have no known works.
The first joke in the collection has long been described as incomprehensible, nonsensical, or missing a punchline:A scholar ordered a silversmith to prepare a lantern.
"[6]The most common interpretation, first argued by Giovanni Pontano, was simply the scholar giving the silversmith a bizarre and useless answer.
[6] However, a 2013 paper by Egizia Maria Felice, Professor of Classics at the University of Reading, argued that the word for lantern (Ancient Greek: λύχνος) also refers to an edible species of fish (albeit different from a modern lanternfish), as attested in Strabo's Geographica.