ANACREON

born c. 582 BC, , Teos, Ionia [now Sighajik, Turkey] died c. 485 ancient Greek poet who was, after Archilochus, the most important writer of personal lyric poetry in the Ionic dialect. Only fragments of his verse have survived. Anacreon's working life was mainly associated with the courts of tyrants who were important patrons of art and literature in the 6th century BC. He spent much of his life at the court of Polycrates of Samos, and later he lived at Athens, writing under the patronage of the tyrant Hipparchus. His popularity in Athens continued even after Hipparchus' assassination in 514. Though Anacreon may well have written serious poems, those that were quoted by later writers are chiefly in praise of love, wine, and revelry. Anacreon disliked the excessive and the unrefined, however, and his treatment of these subjects is unusually formal and elegant. His language and use of metre are smooth and simple, while his outlook is one of ironic enjoyment of life. Ancient Greek scholars in Alexandria had an edition of his work consisting of five books of verse, of which various fragments are extant. Anacreon's poetic sentiments and style were widely imitated by Hellenistic and Byzantine Greek writers, though they tended to exaggerate the strain of drunken eroticism and frivolity present in his work. There thus arose the Anacreontea, a collection of about 60 short poems composed by postclassical Greek writers at various dates and first published by Henri Estienne as the work of Anacreon in 1554. These had a great influence on Renaissance French poetry. The word Anacreontics was first used in England in 1656 by Abraham Cowley to denote a verse measure supposedly used by the ancient Greek poet and consisting of seven or eight syllables with three or four main stresses. Anacreon himself, it should be noted, composed verse in a variety of Greek lyric measures. Robert Herrick, William Oldys, and William Shenstone wrote original Anacreontics in English, and Thomas Moore provided perhaps the finest translation of the Anacreontea in 1800 under the title Odes of Anacreon. The Anacreontea also influenced Italian and German literature.