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:
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.
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