Hegemon of Thasos

Hegemon of Thasos, Greek writer of the old comedy, nicknamed ~ae~ from his fondness for lentils.

Hardly anything is known of him, except that he flourished during the Peloponnesian War. According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5) he was the inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording in well-known poems he transformed the sublime into the ridiculous.

When the news of the disaster in Sicily reached Athens, his parody of the Gigantomachia was being performed: it is said that the audience were so amused by it that, instead of leaving to show their grief, they remained in their seats.

He was also the author of a comedy called Philinne (Philine), written in the manner of Eupolis and Cratinus, in which he attacked a well-known courtesan. Athenaeus (p. 698), who preserves some parodic hexameters of his, relates other anecdotes concerning him (pp. 5, 108, 407). Fragments in T Kock, Conjicorum Atticorum fragmenta, i. (1880); BJ Peltzer, De parodica Graecorum poesi (1855).

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.