Margītēs

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

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 Suda. 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).

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

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

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

as quoted by Aristotle

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

as quoted by Plato

There came to Colophon an old man and divine singer,

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

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

as quoted by Atilius Fortunatianus

The fox knows many a wile;

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

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

References

• Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, New York 1898.
• Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon revised ed, Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1940.
• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Margites, [1]

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