Born: Teos, Ionia, Asia Minor, c. 570 BC. Career: When the Persians invaded in about 540 bc, left for Thrace, where he helped compatriots found the Greek colony of Abdera; tutor to the son of the tyrant Polycrates at Samos; after Polycrates’ fall, invited to Athens by Hipparchus, son of the tyrant Pisistratus; may have gone to Thessaly after the assassination of Hipparchus in 514 bc. Honoured by statue on Acropolis. Died: c. 475 BC.
Publications
Verse
[Works], edited by T. Bergk, in Poetae lyrici Graeci, vol. 3, 1843, and in Anthologia lyrica, 1854; also edited by Valentino Rose, 1868,B. Gentile, 1948, and M.L. West, 1984; selections in Poetae Melici Graeci (with commentary), edited by Denys Page, 1962, Supplementum Lyricis Graecis, 1974, and in Greek Lyric Poetry (with commentary), edited by David A. Campbell, 1982.
Anacreon Done into English, translated by Francis Willis, Thomas Wood, Abraham Cowley, and John Oldham. 1683, reprinted 1923.
The Odes, translated by Thomas Moore. 1800; also translated by Erastus Richardson, 1928.
The Anacreonta, translated by P.M. Pope. 1955.
Critical Studies:
Anacreon et les poemes anacreontiques, edited by A. Delbaille, 1891, reprinted 1970; Sappho und Simonides by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 1913; Anacreon (in Italian) by B. Gentili, 1958; Greek Lyric Poetry by C.M. Bowra, 1961; The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (with Greek and Latin texts) by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, 1992; Anaqcreon Redivivus: A Study of Anacreontic Translation in Mid-sixteenth-century France by John O’Brien, 1995; Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces: Alcman, Stesichorus, Sappho, Alceaus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides by G.O. Hutchinson, 2001.
Anacreon composed various kinds of poetry, including iambics, elegies, epigrams, and choral maiden-songs, but he is most celebrated for his short lyric pieces. The setting for many poems is the aristocratic symposium, where wine and witty conversation flowed freely. Anacreon wrote mainly in the metre known as the ”anacreontic” (anaclastic ionic dimeter) or in a mixture of glyconic and pherecratean rhythms; his poetry represents the peak of technical skill in the Greek monodic tradition. The careful choice and deft positioning of words create a concise and symmetrical perfection of expression, as exemplified by poem 395:
My temples are already grey and my head white;
Graceful youth is no longer with me, my teeth are old,
And of sweet life no long time is now left:
So often I weep, terrified of Tartarus,
For the chasm of Hades is dreadful, and the road down is
Painful; and, for certain, he who goes down does not return.
Epithets and colours are judiciously chosen: the spear is ”tearful” and Eros is ”melting,” while nymphs are ”blue eyed,” Eros is ”golden-haired” throwing a ”purple” ball, and Persuasion shines ”silver.” Effective metaphors are found, such as the ”crown” of the city, referring to its walls, and also images, such as the leap from the Leucadian rock, ”into the grey wave, drunk with love.”
The subject matter of Anacreon’s lyrics is typical of the genre: love, wine, the onset of old age, and death. He generally eschews certain other topics, such as politics and warfare, which were so popular with poets like Alcaeus. In eleg. fragment 1, he makes clear his preference:
I do not like the man who, while drinking wine near a full
mixing-bowl, Speaks of strife and tearful war,
But whoever, by combining the shining gifts of the Muses and
Aphrodite, Recalls the lovely good cheer.
Personal invective in the tradition of Archilochus is represented by poem 388, which ridicules a certain Artemon, who used to go about in filthy clothes and hang around with whores: now he travels in a lady’s carriage, holding an ivory parasol. This piece indicates that Anacreon was well able to compose in the barbed style.
In the poems and fragments which survive, the poet is particularly concerned with the bittersweet experience of love with both boys and girls, as in poem 360:
0 boy with the girlish look,
1 am after you, but you do not notice, Unaware that you hold
The reins of my soul.
Several poems are addressed to Eros, the god of love, who is variously depicted as a boxer, a smith, and a dice-player (with dice called Madness and Confusion). In Anacreon’s verses, Eros is often a violent and disruptive force, envisaged as a personal opponent, who toys with and abuses his victims. Yet at the same time there is a general lightness of tone in the description of these little love affairs, befitting their sophisticated symposiastic context. Thus, even though the poet often names the objects of his passion, such as Cleoboulus, there is a sense that the romance is inevitably fleeting, and all part of the delightful intoxication induced by the ”honey-sweet wine.” After Eros, the deity most frequently mentioned is, appropriately enough, Dionysus.
Fragment 347 comes from a poem which appears to have been a not entirely serious lament for the lost locks of Smerdis, who has come back from the barber looking less beautiful than before:
Now you are bald and your hair, Having fallen into rough hands, Has flown down all at once Into the black dust,
Having miserably fallen upon the cut of the iron;
and I am worn away with anguish. . . .
Anacreon’s verses, then, are not simply frivolous, but lack the personal intensity of, say, Sappho. Their tone is usually ironic, which creates a distancing effect. Here, the cutting of a youth’s hair provokes an exaggerated and amusing reaction in his lover. The almost tragic tone of the lament sits incongruously with such a trivial event. Yet the falling of the severed hair into the black dust is symbolic of death, and the ”iron” suggests not only the barber’s blade, but also the sword of war. The cutting of the young man’s hair represents a rite of passage, and momentarily takes us away from the carefree atmosphere of the banquet to the harsh world of daily life and its conflicts. For the young Greek male, warfare was almost as inevitable as death itself. It is this co-existence of the light and the dark, of the comic and the serious, which gives Anacreon’s poetry its peculiar charm and which led to numerous imitations. Sixty of these are collected in a 10th-century manuscript of the Palatine Anthology and are known as the Anacreonta. None of the imitations is likely to be earlier than the Hellenistic period; while falling short of the original in linguistic virtuosity and versification, they are not without charm, and testify to the distinctive contribution of Anacreon to the Greek poetic tradition.
