The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Anacreon
ANACREON. The Anacreon of history was born at Teos in Asia Minor (hence Byron's "Teian muse") in the 6th century B.C. and, driven thence by the Persian invasion, lived at the courts of Polycrates of Samos and Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens. He sang in a variety of lyric measures of love and wine and revelry, and also wrote hymns to the gods and some serious epigrams in the Greek sense of the word. The Alexandrian scholars possessed his poems in five books, of which about 15 pages of fragments remain. Here are two specimens in rough renderings:
| Love's purple ball my heart hath hit And with a dainty-slippered chit He lureth me to play. But she from Lesbos' island rare Disdainful views my whitening hair And looks another way. Why the timid sidelong glances Dost thou flee from my advances Thracian colt, and in thy fancies Hold my cunning in disdain? Know that could I but come near thee I could bridle, bit, and gear the And around the stadium steer thee Past the goal with skilful rein. |
Anacreon thus became the type of the Dionysian old man, the white-haired bard of wine, love and song. It was later a fashionable literary exercise to compose in his name little verses on these themes. Thus without any conscious intention of forgery arose the collection of so-called Anacreontea which, preserved in the Palatine Anthology, has usurped the name and fame of the true Anacreon. They are not in the Ionic dialect; they do not refer to the details of Anacreon's life; they are rarely if at all quoted by the ancients as of Anacreon; they are composed not in the variety of Greek lyric measures, but in a monotony of tripping iambics; for the mighty god Eros of Anacreon they substitute a bevy of Alexandrian or Pompeian Eroses; they are obviously spurious.
The publication of Stephanos' edition of the Anacreontea in 1554 was a literary event of the revival of letters which Ronsard saluted in this strain:
| To Stephanus I quaff this cup Through whom black Hell hath rendered up And given back to our desire Anacreon's lost sweet Teian lyre. |
From France the fashion of Anacreontea passed to Germany where successive generations of 17th and 18th century rhymers and readers delighted in such verse as Gleim's
| Rosen pflücken, Rosen blühen Morgen ist nicht heut! Keine Stunde lass entfliehen, Flüchtig in die Zeit. |
In England Anacreontics were written under that name perhaps first by Cowley, and in form of paraphrase, free translation or imitation by William Oldys, John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, John Phillips, Charles Cotton, John Hughes, William Hamilton, John Cunningham, William Shenstone, William Thompson, William Somerville and other bards buried in Chalmers' Johnson's poets, as well as by Herrick, Gray, Prior, Garth, Parnell, Allan Ramsay and Tom Moore.
Among the favorite motives of Anacreontea and Anacreontics are the order for a picture (paint the portrait of my love); Eros swallowed in a draft of wine; lines to a drinking cup; the women tell me I am old — but; his countless loves — mille é tre; to a swallow; to the dove; to the happy grasshopper; all things drink; why not I; fain would I sing of epics and war, but the strings of my lyre echo only love; I would I were thy mirror, etc., the motive of the song in Tennyson's ‘Miller's Daughter’; bulls have horns and lions teeth and women beauty: the origin of roses; love and the bee; love the lost child admitted from the midnight storm and rewarding his benefactor by a shaft from his bow — a theme varied in countless imitations.