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came an inevitable cropper. A carved frieze depicts Herakles with the scallywags trussed up by their ankles, hanging upside down.
    With
The Cercopes
the audience is permitted a double empathy: we can enjoy their shameless pranks and outrageous antics, as well as the satisfaction of seeing their eventual comeuppance. Where the sympathies lie with
Margites
is far less clear. The heroes of
The Iliad
and
The
Odyssey
are far from perfect. Achilles is petulant and inhumane, Odysseus is untrustworthy and vengeful. But a flawed hero can nonetheless be a real hero—a flawed schmuck seems, frankly, unimaginable. What could we have learned if the
Margites
had been spared! Did the Greeks laugh at or with or in a wholly different preposition? Did they yearn, in a rebuke to their entrenched sophistication, for a fool who muddled through? Did they mock the afflicted or smirk at the affected?
    Of all the lost books, the
Margites
is the least explicable, the most tantalizing. Its author was esteemed beyond measure. It was unique among his works. But perhaps—just perhaps—its loss should not be mourned too deeply. What is gone must be reinvented. In the absence of a comedy by the greatest poet of all time, successive generations have been free to imagine sarcastic, sentimental, whimsical, serious, gentle, and black comedies, wit and smut, slapstick and riddle. An explosion of new forms may be worth one extinction.

Hesiod
    {
seventh century
B.C.E.}
    HOMER IS ONLY ever glimpsed in his work. At the opening of the
Theogony,
one of the two extant works attributed to the Boeotian poet Hesiod, the poet himself appears. Although the bulk of the poem is an elaborate catalogue of the genealogy of the gods, it opens with a scene describing how, on Mount Helicon, the Muses taught the shepherd Hesiod how to sing, swiftly shifting their address to the first-person poet. “They gave me a staff of blooming laurel,” he says, and “breathed a sacred voice” into him.
    But scholars from the earliest days have wondered how much of the work attributed to Hesiod was actually written by him. Longinus was so offended by a line about the snot-nosed goddess Trouble that he thought fit to exonerate the actual Hesiod from being the author of the lost work from which the line came, the
Shield of Herakles.
Of the two poems we have, the
Theogony
and
Works and Days,
most contemporary scholars would like at least one to be by Hesiod.
    So the appearance of Hesiod in the
Theogony
might be thought to clinch the case. But on grounds of style, diction, and the fact that it is occasionally rather gauche and boring, translators and critics have been loath to believe it can be by the same author as
Works and Days.
Nonetheless, the Greeks thought they were written by one author, and we shall proceed as if Hesiod wrote both poems.
    Works and Days
is strikingly dissimilar to the
Theogony.
It begins with two origin myths that account for the state of mankind. First, the reader is told about Pandora’s box, and the unleashing of manifold pains, cares, and diseases on humanity. Then we learn about Zeus’ fivefold attempts at creation: the gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron races, of which, Hesiod gloomily informs us, he belongs to the ferrous species, and would rather have died sooner or not been born yet.
    The later parts of the work offer agricultural maxims, interspersed with autobiographical asides, and the whole is cast as an epistle to his cheating brother Perses, who would do well to listen to some homespun advice. No one can argue with “Wrap up warm to prevent gooseflesh” or “Invite your friends, not your enemies, to dinner,” though “Don’t piss facing the sun” and “Never have sex after funerals” seem more peculiar prohibitions.
    The writer of
Works and Days
is not some autodidact, spinning his gripes and saws into a more mnemonic form. He tells us he won a poetry competition at the funeral games