16. The Margites is a lost epic comedy by Homer that disappeared thousands of years ago
Commonly attributed to the legendary Greek author Homer, with its existence and authorship testified to by Aristotle in his Poetics, the Margites is an ancient epic play that has since been largely lost. Believed to follow the story of an eponymous central character possessed with exceeding stupidity, who was unaware which parent had given birth to him, little about the comic mock-epic has survived to the modern day. Written in mixed hexameter and iambic lines, only four sections of verse as quoted by ancient contemporaries of the play provide us any insight into the nature or context of the classical work.
Unquestionably famous throughout the ancient world, with the phrase “mad as Margites” becoming a known saying within the Hellenistic sphere, as Aristotle poignantly described Homer’s lost creation: “as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies, so is the Margites to our comedies”. Given the illustrious reputations of Homer’s other epic works, notably the aforementioned Illiad and Odyssey, which stand among the greatest works of the ancient world, the loss of a further cultural masterpiece reputedly by the same author which arguably laid the foundations of future works of its genre is a tremendous loss to classical literature.