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). Ancient Greece is the term used to describe the Greek-speaking world in ancient times. ... Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher and poet, was born at Gadara in Coele-Syria early in the 1st century B.C., and settled in Rome in the time of Cicero. ...

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 Sudas. 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). Bust of Homer in the British Museum For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... Aristotle, marble copy of bronze by Lysippos. ... Map of the Aegean Sea, showing the location of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey) Halicarnassus (; modern Bodrum; see also List of traditional Greek place names), an ancient Greek city on the southwest coast of Caria, Asia Minor, on a picturesque and advantageous site on the Ceramic Gulf (Gulf of Cos, Gulf... Sudas is a king from the Rig Veda. ... Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter in poetry or a rhythmic scheme. ... An iamb is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. ...

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")

Aristotle, marble copy of bronze by Lysippos. ... Statue of a philosopher, presumably Plato, in Delphi. ... Atilius Fortunatianus, Latin grammarian, lived in the 4th century AD. Fortunatianus was the author of a treatise on metres, dedicated to one of his pupils, a youth of senatorial rank, who desired to be instructed in the Horatian metres. ... Zenobius was a Greek sophist, who taught rhetoric at Rome during the reign of Hadrian (AD 117-138). ...

References

• Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, New York 1898.
• Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon revised ed, Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1940.