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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 Deiliad, worse than they are. Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5)

Hegemon of Thasos, but established at Athens, Greek writer of the old comedy.

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.

He was nick Fake on account of his fondness for that kind of pulse. Hegemon lived in the time of the Peloponnesian war, and was contemporary with Cratinus, when the latter was an old man, and with Alcibiades. His parody of the Gigantomachia was the piece to which the Athenians were listening when the news was brought to them in the theatre of the total failure of the expedition to Sicily, and when, in order not to betray their feelings, they remained in the theatre to the end of the performance. 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).

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