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Anacreon ( BC) was an Ancient Greece lyric poetry, notable for his and Erotic poetry. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets. Anacreon wrote all of his poetry in the ancient Ionic Greek. Like all early lyric poetry, it was composed to be sung or recited to the accompaniment of music, usually the lyre. Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and the observations of everyday people and life.
Anacreon spent time in Samos. According to Himerius, he was invited there to educate Polycrates, the future tyrant of Samos, who Strabo reports was one of the main subjects of his poetry. If Himerius is correct and Anacreon arrived on Samos before Polycrates became tyrant, this would have been before 530 BC. From Samos, Anacreon moved to Athens on the invitation of Hipparchus, presumably sometime after Hipparchus came to power in 528/7; according to Herodotus he was still on Samos in 522 when Polycrates was murdered.
Ancient sources do not record if or when Anacreon left Athens. He may have left after the assassination of his patron Hipparchus in 514, or the expulsion of Hipparchus' brother Hippias in 510, though there is some evidence of his presence in the city later than this. Two epigrams from the Greek Anthology suggest that he spent some time in Thessaly, though Gregory Hutchinson doubts this tradition.
Anacreon probably died at the beginning of the fifth century: Hutchinson says around 500, Bernsdorff suggests 495, and Campbell says 485. According to Valerius Maximus, he died by choking on a grape seed, though this is generally considered apocryphal. An epigram in the Greek Anthology says that his tomb was on Teos.
In keeping with Greek poetic tradition, his poetry relied on the meter for its construction. Metrical poetry is a particularly rhythmic form, deriving its structure from patterns of phonetic features within and between the lines of verse. The phonetic patterning in Anacreon's poetry, like all the Greek poetry of the day, is found in the structured alternation of "long" and "short" syllables. The Ionic dialect also had a tonal aspect to it that lends a natural melodic quality to the recitation. Anacreon's meters include the anacreonteus.
The Greek language is particularly well suited to this metrical style of poetry but the sound of the verses does not easily transfer to English. As a consequence, translators have historically tended to substitute rhyme, stress rhythms, stanzaic patterning and other devices for the style of the originals, with the primary, sometimes only, connection to the Greek verses being the subject matter. More recent translators have tended to attempt a more spare translation which, though losing the sound of the originals, may be more true to their flavor. A sample of a translation in the English rhyming tradition is included below.
Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those and amatory lyrics which are commonly associated with his name. Two short hymns to Artemis and Dionysus, consisting of eight and eleven lines respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed remains, as printed by recent editors. But hymns, especially when addressed to such deities as Aphrodite, Eros and Dionysus, are not so very unlike what we call "Anacreontic" poetry as to make the contrast of style as great as the word might seem to imply. The tone of Anacreon's lyric effusions has probably led to an unjust estimate, by both ancients and moderns, of the poet's personal character. The "triple worship" of the , Wine and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epigram, Greek Anthology. 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. His character was an issue, because, according to Pausanias, his statue on the Acropolis of Athens depicts him as drunk.Pausanias, Attica xxv.1 He himself strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for and Scythians.Fr. 64
Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which the Suda and Athenaeus mention as extant in their time, only the merest fragments exist today, collected from the citations of later writers.
A collection of poems by numerous, anonymous imitators was long believed to be the works of Anacreon himself. Known as the Anacreontea, it was preserved in a 10th-century manuscript which also included the Palatine Anthology. The poems themselves appear to have been composed over a long period of time, from the time of Alexander the Great until the time that paganism gave way in the Roman Empire. They reflect the light-hearted elegance of much of Anacreon's genuine works although they were not written in the same Ionic Greek dialect that Anacreon used. They also display literary references and styles more common to the time of their actual composition.
Anacreon was respected as a poet and included in the canon of nine lyric poets. The Hellenistic poet Callimachus' "Lock of Berenice" is an adaptation of a poem by Anacreon, Ovid and Propertius allude to him, and he was an important influence on Horace, who refers to him three times in his poetry and frequently alludes to his work.
The Anacreontea were the most important influence on Anacreon's later reception, with the edition of Henricus Stephanus in 1554 initiating a trend for short and playful "Anacreontic" poetry. In the early modern period, Anacreon's poetry was translated into Latin as well as into the vernacular, and poets started once again to adapt his works. The European Anacreontic movement reached its height in the eighteenth century, with Anacreontic groups in Germany, France, and Britain including the London Anacreontic Society (1772–1779).
In the visual arts, Anacreon was largely shown in a biographical or literary context: Raphael painted him in the company of Sappho in Parnassus, while a caricature by Honoré Daumier illustrates the ancient story that he choked to death on a grape seed. The ancient stereotype of Anacreon as the elderly, drunken poet of love was illustrated by Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Léon Gérôme.
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