The Margites () is a comic mock-epic ascribed to HomerHenry George Liddell, Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Margites that is largely lost. From references to the work that survived, it is known that its central character is an exceedingly stupid man named Margites (from ancient Greek , margos, "raving, mad; lustful"), who was so dense he did not know which parent had given birth to him.Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books, New York: Random House, 2005. His name gave rise to the adjective margitomanēs (), "mad as Margites", used by Philodemus.Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon revised edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940.
The work, among a mixed genre of works loosely labelled "Homerica" in antiquity, 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"—and Harpocration.Harpokration, Lexicon of the Ten Orators, § m6 Basil of Caesarea writes that the work is attributed to Homer but that he is unsure regarding this attribution.Advice to Young Men on Greek Literature, Basil of Caesarea, § 8 However, the massive medieval Greek encyclopaedia called the Suda attributed the Margites to Pigres, a Greek poet of Halicarnassus.
It is written in mixed hexameter and iambic lines, an oddity characteristic also of the Batrachomyomachia (likewise attributed to Pigres), which inserts a pentameter line after each hexameter of the Iliad as a curious literary game.Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, New York, 1898.
Margites was famous in the ancient world, but only the following lines survive:
Due to the Margites character, the Greeks used the word as an insult to describe foolish and useless people. Demosthenes called Alexander the Great Margites in order to insult and degrade him.Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon, §160Plutarch, "Life of Demosthenes", §23
References
Bibliography Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Margites, . West, M.L. Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. .