On enigma as a rhetorical figure: a brief history in the rhetoricians, encyclopedists, and patristic commentators from Aristotle to Dante’s time, with a rhetorical analysis of the figure. Special attention is given to Augustine in the De trinitate XV on St. Paul’s well-known “in aenigmate” (I Cor. 13:12). Some implications of Augustine’s linking of the figurative and the figural (typological, historical) are considered, with a re-examination of Auerbach’s “Figura” on this question. The importance for our own reading of rhetoric in relation to history and poetry is stressed.