1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hegemon of Thasos

HEGEMON OF THASOS, Greek writer of the old comedy, nicknamed Φακῆ 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).