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.
