Hegemon of Thasos

Who is Hegemon of Thasos?

Hegemon of Thasos was a Greek writer of the Old Comedy. Hardly anything is known of him, except that he flourished during the Peloponnesian War. According to Aristotle 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, written in the manner of Eupolis and Cratinus, in which he attacked a well-known courtesan. Athenaeus, who preserves some parodic hexameters of his, relates other anecdotes concerning him. Fragments in T Kock, Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta, i.; BJ Peltzer, De parodica Graecorum poesi.