Margites

The Margites, a comic mock-epic of Ancient Greece, is about an idiot named "Margites" (from ancient Greek μάργος margos, 'raving, mad; lustful') who was so dense he did not know which parent had given birth to him.^[1] His name gave rise to the recherché adjective, margitomanes used by Philodemus.^[2]

It was commonly attributed to Homer, as by Aristotle (Poetics 13.92): "His Margites indeed provides an analogy: as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies, so is the Margites to our comedies"; 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.^[3]

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 2309, 3693 and 3694). The collected fragments were included in volume II of Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati by M.L. West.

References

1. ^ Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books, New York: Random House, 2005.
2. ^ Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon revised edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940.
3. ^ Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, New York, 1898.

Bibliography

• Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Margites, v. 2, page 949.
• West, M.L. Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-19-814096-7.