Anacreon
(
Ανακρέων). A famous Greek lyric poet, born about B.C.
550, at Teos, an Ionian town of Asia, whose inhabitants, to escape the threatened yoke of
Persia, migrated to Abdera in Thrace, B.C. 540. From Abdera, Anacreon went to the tyrant
Polycrates of Samos, after whose death (B.C. 522) he removed to Athens on the invitation
of Hipparchus, and lived there, till the fall of the Peisistratidae, on friendly terms with
his fellow-poet Simonides, and Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. He is said to have died at
Abdera in his eighty-sixth year, choked by the stone of a dried grape. A statue of him stood
in the Acropolis at Athens in the guise of an aged minstrel inspired by the wine-god; for
Anacreon was regarded as the type of a poet who, in spite of age, paid perpetual homage to
wine and love. Love and wine and merry company formed the favourite subjects of his light,
sweet, and graceful songs, which were cast in the metres of the Aeolic poets, but composed in
the Ionic dialect. Besides fragments of such songs and of elegies, we have also a number of
epigrams that bear his name. His songs were largely imitated, and of such imitations we have
under his name a collection of about sixty love-songs and drinkingsongs of very various
(partly much later) dates, and of different degrees of merit. Of these, the renderings by
Thomas Moore are unsurpassed in grace and melody. The genuine fragments are contained in
Bergk's
Poetae Lyrici Graeci (4th ed. 1878). Translation edited by
Bullen
(N. Y. 1893).