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 disastrous defeat of the Sicilian Expedition 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.

Criticisms

In Aristotle's Poetics, Aristotle states "Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Diliad, worse than they are."