Batrachomyomachia

The Batrachomyomachia (in Greek old Βατραχομυομαχία / Batrakhomuomakhía ), literally “the battle of frogs and the rats”, is a comic epopee parodying Iliade .

It counts 303 hexameters dactylic. It was largely allotted, in the Antiquité, with Homère. Plutarque ( De Herodoti malignitate , 43), makes of it him the work of called a Pigrès d' Halicarnasse, brother of Artémise Ire of Carie - dating much later.

Its preamble declares:

“By beginning my first column, I beseech the ronde
Héliconienne to gain my heart, so that I sing!
On my knees, I come to entrust my poem to the tablettes
- Infinite Fight, work of Ares amateur of tumult -
And I request the mortals to want to open their oreilles
With the combat which the rats delivered among frogs,
By imitating work of the Giants resulting from the Earth… ”
(transl. Brownish Philippe)

If the poem starts well with the traditional call to the Muses, the listener is invited either to intend a Aède to sing, but to listen to somebody lira. For the remainder, work parodies very narrowly the Iliade , using and deceiving the Homeric epithet , so much so that two of the heroes, Psicharpax (“Rognequignon”) and Physignathos (“Maxigoître”) present one to the other as do it Diomède and Glaucos at the time of song VI (v. 199-236).

Very appreciated with the the Middle Ages and the Rebirth, it was translated into Italian by Giacomo Leopardi, and into French by Jean Boivin, Leconte de Lisle and recently by dactylic Philippe Brunet in Hexamètres.

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