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Callimedon (Ancient Greek: Καλλιμέδων) was an orator and politician at Athens during the 4th century BCE who was a member of the pro-Macedonian faction in the city. None of his speeches survive, but details of his involvement in the controversies of his age are preserved by Dinarchus and Plutarch. He is described as brash and antidemocratic, and was surnamed ὁ Κάραβος (ho Kárabos)—"The Crayfish," "Crab" or, more likely, "Spiny Lobster"—because, according to Athenaeus, he was very fond of the food. Callimedon is best known today for the ridicule he was subjected to on the comic stage, where he was mocked for his gluttony and strabismus.
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Life and politics
The year of his birth is unknown, but Callimedon was probably born during the first quarter of the 4th century since he is named as a contemporary of Demosthenes by Athenaeus. He has been identified with a man called "Callimedon of Collytus, son of Callicrates," on a late fourth-century Attic inscription recording the lease of a mine. Nothing further is known of this Callicrates, but Callimedon's family appears to have been an influential and aristocratic one from Collytus, an Athenian neighborhood south of the Acropolis. His grandfather Agyrrhius had been a prominent (and pro-democratic) politician in the early fourth-century and was appointed strategos in 389. As a member of an elite family, Callimedon had access to the upper rungs of the Athenian social ladder and he appears to have been regarded as something of a local celebrity as a raconteur. He was a member of the dining club known as "the Sixty" which met in the Heracleion at Diomeia and whose collective wit was so famous that Philip II of Macedon was said to have paid the group a talent to send him a collection of their jokes.
Dinarchus reports that Demosthenes attempted to prosecute Callimedon in 324 for conspiring with Athenian exiles in Megara to replace the democracy with an oligarchy under Macedonian control.
Following the death of Alexander in 323, the democratic interests in the Greek cities once again attempted to unite against Macedon, and Callimedon fled Athens for the camp of Antipater.
A butt of jokes
Callimedon's grandfather Agyrrhius had been the butt of a fart joke in 388 (Aristophanes, Wealth 176), but the grandson's treatment at the hands of the comedians of his day was far harsher.