Chapter 11

To Homer were popularly ascribed certain burlesque poems in which Aristotle (_Poetics_ iv) saw the germ of comedy. Most interesting of these, were it extant, would be the _Margites_. The hero of the epic is at once sciolist and simpleton, “knowing many things, but knowing them all badly”. It is unfortunately impossible to trace the plan of the poem, which presumably detailed the adventures of this unheroic character: the metre used was a curious mixture of hexametric and iambic lines. The date of such a work cannot…