Margites


The Margites is a comic mock-epic of ancient Greece 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 who was so dense he did not know which parent had given birth to him. His name gave rise to the recherché adjective margitomanēs, "mad as Margites", used by Philodemus.
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"; 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 the Suda. Harpocration, also writes that it is attributed to Homer. Basil of Caesarea writes that the work is attributed to Homer but he states that he is unsure regarding this attribution.
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:
In Oxyrhynchus, a few papyrus fragments were found and published. The collected fragments were included in volume II of Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati by M. L. West.
Due to the Margites character, the Greeks used the word to describe fool and useless people. Demosthenes called Alexander the Great Margites in order to insult and degrade him.