Margites

The Margites, a comic mock-epic of Ancient Greece,

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is about an idiot named "Margites" (Greek μάργος "raving, mad; lustful") who was so dense he didn't know which parent had given birth to him. His name gave rise to the recherché adjective, margitomanes used by Philodemus (Liddell, Scott, 1940).

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It was commonly attributed to Homer, as by Aristotle: " His Margites indeed provides an analogy: as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies, so is the Margites to our comedies. (Poetics 13.92); but the work, among a mixed genre of works loosely labelled "Homerica" in Antiquity, was more reasonably attributed to Pigres, a Greek poet of Halicarnassus, in the massive medieval Greek encyclopedia called Sudas. It is written in mixed hexameter and iambic lines, an odd whim of Pigres, who also inserted a pentameter line after each hexameter of the Iliad as a curious literary game (Peck 1898).

Related Topics:
Homer - Aristotle - Homerica - Pigres - Halicarnassus - Sudas - Hexameter - Iambic

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Margites was famous in the ancient world, but now only the following lines survive:

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:Him, then, the Gods made neither a delver nor a ploughman,

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:Nor in any other way wise; he failed every art.

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::as quoted by Aristotle

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:He knew many things, but he knew them badly...

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::as quoted by Plato

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:There came to Colophon an old man and divine singer,

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:a servant of the Muses and of far-shooting Apollo.

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:In his dear hands he held a sweet-toned lyre...

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::as quoted by Atilius Fortunatianus

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:The fox knows many a wile;

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:but the hedgehog's one trick can beat them all.

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::as quoted by Zenobius (attributed simply to "Homer")

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