Margites

The Margites (Greek: Μαργίτης) is a comic mock-epic of ancient Greece that is largely lost. From references to the work that survived, we know that its central character is an exceedingly dumb man 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. His name gave rise to the recherché adjective margitomanēs (μαργιτομανής), "mad as Margites", used by Philodemus.

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 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.

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.He knew many things, but he knew them badly…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…The fox knows many a wile;but the hedgehog's one trick can beat them all.

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.