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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: ALM-ANC |
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ANACREON , Greek lyric poet, was born about 56o B.C., at Teos, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor. Little is known of his life, except a few scattered notices, not in all cases certainly authentic. He probably shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen, who, when Cyrus the Great was besieging the Greek cities of Asia (545), rather than surrender. their city to his general Harpagus, sailed to Abdera in Thrace, where they founded a colony. Anacreon seems to have taken part in the fighting, in which, on his own admission, he did not distinguish himself, but, like Alcaeus and Horace , threw away his shield and fled. From Thrace he removed to the court of Polycrates of Samos, one of the best of those old " tyrants," who by no means deserved the name in its worst sense. He is said to have acted as tutor to Polycrates; that he enjoyed the tyrant's confidence we learn on the authority of Herodotus (iii. 121), who represents the poet as sitting in the royal chamber when audience was given to the Persian herald. In return for his favour and protection, Anacreon wrote many complimentary odes upon his patron. Like his fellow-lyrist, Horace , who was one of his great admirers, and in many respects of a kindred spirit, Anacreon seems to have been made for the society of courts. On the death of Polycrates, Hipparchus, who was then in power at Athens and inherited the literary tastes of his father Peisistratus, sent a special embassy to fetch the popular poet to Athens in a galley of fifty oars. Here he became acquainted with the poet Simonides
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worship " of the Muses, Wine and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epigram (Anthol. iii. 25,51), may have been as purely professional in the two last cases as in the first, and his private character on such points was probably neither much better nor worse than that of his contemporaries. Athenaeus remarks acutely that he seems at least to have been sober when he wrote; and he him-self strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for barbarians and Scythians (Fr. 64). Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which Suidas and Athenaeus mention as extant in their time, we have now but the merest fragments, collected from the citations of later writers. Those graceful little poems (most of them first printedfrom the MSS. by Henry Stephens in 1554), which long passed among the learned for the songs of Anacreon, and which are well-known to many English readers in the translations of Cowley and Moore, are really of much later date, though possibly here and there genuine fragments of the poet are included. Modern critics, however, regard the entire collection as imitations belonging to different periodsthe oldest probably to Alexandrian times, the most recent
The best edition of the genuine fragments of Anacreon, as well as of the Anacreontea, is by Bergk (Poetae lyrici greeci, 1882). He includes in an appendix a similar collection of imitations from the Anecdota graeca of P. Matranga (185o), which had their origin in the beginning of the middle ages, and resemble the Christian anacreontics of Sophronius. End of Article: ANACREON If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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