The Margites (Ancient Greek: Μαργίτης) is a comic mock-epic ascribed to Homer[1] 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 (from ancient Greek μάργος, margos, "raving, mad; lustful"), who was so dense he did not know which parent had given birth to him.
[3] It was commonly attributed to Homer, as by Aristotle (Poetics 13.92): "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 encyclopaedia called the Suda.
[6] Margites was famous in the ancient world, but only the following lines survive:[7][8] There came to Kolophon an old man and divine singer, a servant of the Muses and of far-shooting Apollon.
The fox knows many a wile; but the hedge-hog's one trick can beat them all.Due to the Margites character, the Greeks used the word as an insult to describe foolish and useless people.