Hegelochus
Ἡγέλοχος
(Ἡγέλοχος), an Athenian tragic actor, who incurred the ridicule of the comic poets, Plato, Strattis, Sannynon, and Aristophanes, by his pronunciation of the line of Euripides (Eur. Orest. 269)--
Ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλήνʼ ὁρῶ
The scholiasts tell us that the sudden failure of the actor's voice prevented him from indicating properly the synaloepha, and that thus he altered γαλήνʼ, a calm, into γαλῆν, a weasel. The incident furnishes a proof that elided vowels were not completely dropped in pronunciation. (Aristoph. Frogs 304; Schol. in loc.; Schol. in Eurip. Orest. 269.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.