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Hegemon of Thasos

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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Greek writer of the old comedy, nicknamed (Daicrl 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, Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta, i. (1880); B. J. Peltzer, De parodica Graecorum poesi (1855).