The Book of Lost Books Read Online Free Page B

properly and absolutely a
Dunciad;
which tho’ now unhappily lost, yet is its nature sufficiently known by the infallible tokens aforesaid. And thus it doth appear, that the first Dunciad was the first Epic poem, written by
Homer
himself, and anterior even to the Iliad and the Odyssey.
    This was reason enough for Pope to produce his own
Dunciad,
from the Preface to which the above words are taken.
    Can we tell from the title what the book was about? The definition of madness is never fixed, but fluid, shaped by its culture and dependent on what is considered sane, reasonable, or self-evident. A rational, scientifically minded Greek of the fifth century B.C.E. could maintain that when a woman had a nosebleed, it meant her menstruation had got lost, that the Sun gave birth to maggots in dung, and that a tribe of one-eyed men called the Arimaspi lived in the extreme North. Madness encompasses murderous rage and inappropriate levity, fearfulness and fearlessness, silence and babble. The title could suggest just about anything.
    All that is left of Homer’s comic epic are a few lines, pickled in other works. The Scholiast, writing on Aeschines, gives a thumbnail sketch that fits with his etymologically unfortunate name: “Margites . . . a man, who, though fully grown, did not know if his mother or father had given birth to him, and who would not sleep with his wife, saying he was afraid she would give a bad account of him to his mother.” At this point,
Margites
seems to coincide with Nietzsche’s description of the comedy of cruelty, as Schadenfreude. We laugh, because we know we are superior to poor Margites, for whom the birds and the bees are mysteries.
    Plato and Aristotle each record a snippet of the poem. From Plato’s fragmentary
Alcibiades
we learn that “he knew many things, but all badly.” This Margites is a quack, a clown, a halfwit. It is not his innocence in a chaotic world that forms the comedy, but the chaos of his half-baked theories and half-assed ideas. Aristotle, in the
Nicomachean
Ethics,
offers a different hint: “the gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft.” Odd. Odd indeed. Aristotle’s Margites is an idiot, he has no function, no social reason. He’s a spare part, an appendix. A vague imputation of laziness hangs over this creature who is confused by the difference between spades and hoes.
    Is this a naïve Stan or a flustering Ollie? Was he the stooge, the kid from the sticks, the fish out of water, the innocent abroad, or the country cousin? Zenobius presents, again, an illustration. “The fox knows many a ruse, but the hedgehog’s single trick beats them all,” a phrase also attributed to Archilochus. Is Margites the fox or the hedgehog? Nowhere in the extant extracts is there the sense that Margites is a cheat, a con, or a wily individual. Zenobius suggests something else: the wise little man. Chaplin. Forrest Gump. Candide. The Good Soldier Schweik. Homer Simpson.
    The
Margites
is not the only comic epic that existed. Arctinus of Miletus, the author of the lost
War of the Titans
and a continuation of
The
Iliad,
may be the author of
The Cercopes.
The
Suda
records that
    these were two brothers living upon the earth who practiced every kind of knavery. They were called Cercopes (or “The Monkey-Men”) because of their cunning doings: one of them was named Passalus and the other Acmon. Their mother, a daughter of Memnon, seeing their tricks, told them to keep clear of Black-bottom, that is, of Heracles. These Cercopes were sons of Theia and Ocean, and are said to have been turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus. Liars and cheats, skilled in deeds irremediable, accomplished knaves. Far over the world they roamed deceiving men as they wandered continually.
    This form of comedy seems subtly different from the
Margites:
this is a pair of rogues, a couple of tricksters. We know they