Margites

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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 did not know which parent had given birth to him.^{[citation needed]} His name gave rise to the recherché adjective, margitomanes used by Philodemus.^[1]

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.^[2]

Margites was famous in the ancient world but only these following lines passed from Medieval tradition:

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")

Fortunately in Oxyrhynchus, a few papyrus fragments were found and published (P.Oxy 3693 and 3694).

References

Bibliography

• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Margites, v. 2, page 949.

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