Anacreon (born ca. 570 BC) was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets. Centuries: 7th century BC - 6th century BC - 5th century BC Decades: 620s BC 610s BC 600s BC 590s BC 580s BC - 570s BC - 560s BC 550s BC 540s BC 530s BC 520s BC Events and Trends 579 BC - Servius Tullius succeeds the assassinated Lucius Tarquinius Priscus as king of Rome. ... Lyric poetry is the purest form of poetry, which does not attempt to tell a story, as do epic poetry and dramatic poetry. ... Poets are authors of poems, or of other forms of poetry such as dramatic verse. ... The nine lyric poets were a canon of archaic Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study. ...

Life

He was born at Teos, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor. Little more is known of his life, but it is likely that he shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen who sailed to Abdera in Thrace, where they founded a colony, rather than remaining behind to surrender their city to Harpagus, one of Cyrus the Great's generals. Cyrus was, at the time (545 BC), besieging the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Anacreon seems to have taken part in the fighting, in which, on his own admission, he did not distinguish himself. Teos (or Teo), a maritime city of Ionia, on a peninsula between Chytrium and Myonnesus. ... Ionia (Greek Ιωνία; see also List of traditional Greek place names) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (now in Turkey) on the Aegean Sea. ... Anatolia (Greek: ανατολη anatole, rising of the sun or East; compare Orient and Levant, by popular etymology Turkish Anadolu to ana mother and dolu filled), also called by the Latin name of Asia Minor, is a region of Southwest Asia which corresponds today to the Asian portion of Turkey. ... Abdera, was a town on the coast of Thrace near the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. ... Thrace (Greek Θρᾴκη ThrákÄ“, Bulgarian Тракия Trakija, Turkish Trakya) is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe spread over southern Bulgaria, northeastern Greece, and European Turkey. ... Harpagus was a Median general in the 6th century BC. A courtier to Astyages, he is called the kingmaker for his defection to Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great), and, as such, is credited with having put Cyrus II on the throne. ... Cyrus the Great Cyrus II of Persia, widely known as Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Elder, (ca. ... Centuries: 7th century BC - 6th century BC - 5th century BC Decades: 590s BC - 580s BC - 570s BC - 560s BC - 550s BC - 540s BC - 530s BC - 520s BC - 510s BC - 500s BC - 490s BC Events and Trends 548 BC -- Croesus, Lydian king, defeated by Cyrus. ... Anatolia (Greek: ανατολη anatole, rising of the sun or East; compare Orient and Levant, by popular etymology Turkish Anadolu to ana mother and dolu filled), also called by the Latin name of Asia Minor, is a region of Southwest Asia which corresponds today to the Asian portion of Turkey. ...

From Thrace he removed to the court of Polycrates of Samos. 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-lyric poet, Horace, who was one of his great admirers, and in many respects 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, and other members of the brilliant circle which had gathered round Hipparchus. When this circle was broken up by the assassination of Hipparchus, Anacreon seems to have returned to his native town of Teos, where, according to a metrical epitaph ascribed to his friend Simonides, he died and was buried. According to others, before returning to Teos, he accompanied Simonides to the court of Echecrates, a Thessalian dynast of the house of the Aleuadae. Lucian mentions Anacreon amongst his instances of the longevity of eminent men, as having completed eighty-five years. If an anecdote given by Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. vii. 7) is to be trusted, he was choked at last by a grape-stone, but the story has an air of mythical adaptation to the poet's habits, which makes it somewhat apocryphal. Polycrates, son of Aeaces, was the tyrant of Samos from 535 BC to 515 BC. He took power during a festival of Hera with his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, but soon had Pantagnotus killed and exiled Syloson to take full control for himself. ... // English Secondary Schools In English Secondary Schools the Form Tutor is similar to an American Home Room Teacher. ... A tyrant (from Greek τύραννος týrannos) is a usurper of rightful power, possessing absolute power and ruling by tyranny. ... Bust of Herodotus Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἡροδοτος, Herodotos) was a historian who lived in the 5th century BC (484 BC-ca. ... ... Ode is a form of stately and elaborate lyrical verse. ... Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (December 8, 65 BC - November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading lyric poet in Latin, the son of a freedman, but himself born free. ... Hipparchus was one of the sons of Pisistratus who became tyrant of Athens when Pisistratus died in 527 BC. Hipparchus ruled jointly with his brother Hippias. ... The Acropolis in central Athens, one of the most important landmarks in world history. ... Peisistratos (also Pisistratus, Peistratus, or Pesistratus) is the name of a minor character in the Odyssey, and of a major Athenian ruler. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Thessaly (Θεσσαλια; modern Greek Thessalía; see also List of traditional Greek place names) is one of the 13 peripheries of Greece, and is further sub-divided into 4 prefectures. ... Lucian Lucian of Samosata (Greek, Λουκιανὸς Σαμοσατεύς, Latin, Lucianus; c. ... Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19c portrait. ... In Judeo-Christian theologies, apocrypha refers to religious Sacred text that have questionable authenticity or are otherwise disputed. ...

Anacreon was for a long time popular at Athens, where his statue was to be seen on the Acropolis, together with that of his friend Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. On several coins of Teos he is represented holding a lyre in his hand, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing. A marble statue found in 1835 in the Sabine district, and now in the Villa Borghese, is said to represent Anacreon. Satellite picture of the Acropolis The Acropolis of Athens, seen from the hill of the Pnyx to the west The Acropolis of Athens is the best known acropolis (high city) in Greece. ... Xanthippus was a Greek (possibly Spartan) mercenary general hired by the Carthaginians to aid in their war against the Romans during the First Punic War. ... Pericles, British Museum, London Pericles (ca. ... 1835 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... Sabine (in Latin and in Italian, Sabina) is a sub-region of Latium, Italy, on the North-East of Rome toward Rieti. ... Villa Borghese: the 19th century Temple of Aesculapius built purely as a landscape feature, influenced by the lake at Stourhead, Wiltshire Villa Borghese is a large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner in Rome, containing a number of buildings, museums and attractions. ...

Poetry

Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those bacchanalian 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 pagan 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 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 himself strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for barbarians and Scythians (Fr. 64). The Bacchanalia were wild and mystic festivals of the Roman god Bacchus. ... The Artemis of Versailles, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic marble sculpture, now at the Louvre Museum. ... Bacchus by Caravaggio Dionysus or Dionysos (Ancient Greek: Διώνυσος or Διόνυσος; also known as Bacchus in both Greek and Roman mythology and associated with the Italic Liber), the Thracian god of wine, represents not only the intoxicating power of wine, but also its social and beneficent influences. ... Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty. ... In Greek mythology, Eros was the god responsible for lust, love, and sex; he was also worshipped as a fertility deity. ... Bacchus by Caravaggio Dionysus or Dionysos (Ancient Greek: Διώνυσος or Διόνυσος; also known as Bacchus in both Greek and Roman mythology and associated with the Italic Liber), the Thracian god of wine, represents not only the intoxicating power of wine, but also its social and beneficent influences. ... For other uses see Muse (disambiguation). ... Athenaeus (ca. ... Barbarian was originally a Greek term applied to any foreigner, one not sharing a recognized culture or language with the speaker or writer employing the term. ... Scythia was an area in Eurasia inhabited in ancient times by an Indo-Aryans known as the Scythians. ...

Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which the Suda 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 printed from the MSS. by Henry Estienne 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 Abraham 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 periods--the oldest probably to Alexandrian times, the most recent to the last days of paganism. They will always retain a certain popularity from their lightness and elegance, and some of them are fair copies of Anacreon's style, which would lend itself readily enough to a clever imitator. A strong argument against their genuineness lies in the fact that the peculiar forms of the Ionic Greek, in which Anacreon wrote, are not to be found in these reputed odes, while the fragments of his poems quoted by ancient writers are full of Ionicisms. Again, only one of the quotations from Anacreon in ancient writers is to be found in these poems, which further contain no references to contemporaries, whereas Strabo (xiv. p. 638) expressly states that Anacreon's poems included numerous allusions to Polycrates. The character of Love as a mischievous little boy is quite different from that given by Anacreon, who describes him as "striking with a mighty axe, like a smith," and is more akin to the conceptions of later literature. Suda (Σουδα or alternatively Suidas) is a massive 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopædia of the ancient Mediterranean world. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Events February 12 - After claiming the throne of England the previous year, Lady Jane Grey is beheaded for treason alongside her husband. ... Abraham Cowley (1618 - July 28, 1667), English poet, was born in the city of London late in 1618. ... Antiquity and modernity stand cheek-by-jowl in Egypts chief Mediterranean seaport Located on the Mediterranean Sea coast, Alexandria (in Arabic, الإسكندرية, transliterated al-ʼIskandariyyah) is the chief seaport in Egypt, and that countrys second largest city, and the capital... Within a Christian context, paganism (from Latin paganus) and heathenry are catch-all terms which have come to connote a broad set of spiritual/religious beliefs and practices of a natural religion, as opposed to the Abrahamic religions based on scriptures. ... Ionic Greek was a sub-dialect of the Attic-Ionic dialectal group of Ancient Greek (see Greek dialects). ... Strabo (squinty) was a term employed by the Romans for anyone whose eyes were distorted or deformed. ... Polycrates, son of Aeaces, was the tyrant of Samos from 535 BC to 515 BC. He took power during a festival of Hera with his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, but soon had Pantagnotus killed and exiled Syloson to take full control for himself. ... The axe (or ax) is an ancient and ubiquitous tool that has been used for millennia to shape, split and cut wood, harvest timber, as a weapon and a ceremonial or heraldic symbol. ... Smith can refer to a person who practices smithing, to a very common family name or to part of a place name or location. ...

A Poem

The Wounded Cupid. Song

Cupid as he lay among
Roses, by a Bee was stung.
Whereupon in anger flying
To his Mother, said thus crying;
Help! O help! your Boy's a dying.
And why, my pretty Lad, said she?
Then blubbering, replied he,
A winged Snake has bitten me
Which Country people call a Bee.
At which she smil'd; then with her hairs
And kisses drying up his tears:
Alas! said she, my Wag! if this
Such a pernicious torment is:
Come, tell me then, how great's the smart
Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart!

Translated from the Greek by Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Robert Herrick (baptized August 24, 1591 - October 1674) was a 17th century English poet. ... Events June - Capture of Zutphen by the Dutch under Maurice of Nassau. ... Events February 19 - England and the Netherlands sign the Treaty of Westminster. ...

Weblinks

• Zweisprchige Textauswahl zu den griechischen Lyrikern mit zusätzlichen Hilfen

Poets named after Anacreon

• Anacreon of Painters, Francesco Albani
• Anacreon of Persia, Hafiz
• Anacreon of the Guillotine, Barere
• Anacreon of Sweden, Bellmann
• Russian Anacreon, Bogdanovich

Francesco Albani, or (Albano) (August 17, 1578 - October 4, 1660), Italian painter, was born at Bologna. ... Hafiz or Hafez (Arabic:حافظ), literally meaning guardian, is a term used by Muslims for people who have completely memorized the Quran. ... Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (September 10, 1755 - January 13, 1841) was one of the most notorious members of the French National Convention. ... Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795) Carl Michael Bellman   listen? (February 4, 1740 - February 11, 1795) was a Swedish poet and composer. ...

References

• This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.