ANACREON

(B.C. 562?-477)

[Illustration:  Anacreon]

Of the life of this lyric poet we have little exact knowledge.  We know that he was an Ionian Greek, and therefore by racial type a luxury-loving, music-loving Greek, born in the city of Teos on the coast of Asia Minor.  The year was probably B.C. 562.  With a few fellow-citizens, it is supposed that he fled to Thrace and founded Abdera when Cyrus the Great, or his general Harpagus, was conquering the Greek cities of the coast.  Abdera, however, was too new to afford luxurious living, and the singing Ionian soon found his way to more genial Samos, whither the fortunes of the world then seemed converging.  Polycrates was “tyrant,” in the old Greek sense of irresponsible ruler; but withal so large-minded and far-sighted a man that we may use a trite comparison and say that under him his island was, to the rest of Greece, as Florence in the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent was to the rest of Italy, or Athens in the time of Pericles to the other Hellenic States.  Anacreon became his tutor, and may have been of his council; for Herodotus says that when Oroetes went to see Polycrates he found him in the men’s apartment with Anacreon the Teian.  Another historian says that he tempered the stern will of the ruler.  Still another relates that Polycrates once presented him with five talents, but that the poet returned the sum after two nights made sleepless from thinking what he would do with his riches, saying “it was not worth the care it cost.”

After the murder of Polycrates, Hipparchus, who ruled at Athens, sent a trireme to fetch the poet.  Like his father Pisistratus, Hipparchus endeavored to further the cause of letters by calling poets to his court.  Simonides of Ceos was there; and Lasus of Hermione, the teacher of Pindar; with many rhapsodists or minstrels, who edited the poems of Homer and chanted his lays at the Panathenaea, or high festival of Athena, which the people celebrated every year with devout and magnificent show.  Amid this brilliant company Anacreon lived and sang until Hipparchus fell (514) by the famous conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  He then returned to his native Teos, and according to a legend, died there at the age of eighty-five, choked by a grape-seed.

Anacreon was a lyrist of the first order.  Plato’s poet says of him in the ‘Symposium,’ “When I hear the verses of Sappho or Anacreon, I set down my cup for very shame of my own performance.”  He composed in Greek somewhat, to use a very free comparison, as Herrick did in English, expressing the unrefined passion and excesses which he saw, just as the Devonshire parson preserved the spirit of the country festivals of Old England in his vivid verse.