Everything about The Margites totally explained
The
Margites, a comic mock-epic of
Ancient Greece,is about an idiot named "Margites" (Greek
μάργος "raving, mad; lustful") who was so dense he didn't know which parent had given birth to him. His name gave rise to the recherché adjective,
margitomanes used by
Philodemus (Liddell, Scott, 1940).
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. (
Poetics 13.92); 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 (Peck 1898).
Margites was famous in the ancient world, but now only the following lines survive:
» 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")
Further Information
Get more info on 'Margites'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://margites.totallyexplained.com">Margites Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
