ANACREON, Greek lyric poet, was born about 56o B.C., at Teos, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor. Little is known of his life, except a few scattered notices, not in all cases certainly authentic. He may have shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen, who, when Cyrus the Great was besieging the Greek cities of Asia (545) , sailed to Abdera in Thrace, where they founded a colony. Anacreon seems to have taken part in the fighting, in which, on his own admission, he did not distinguish himself, but, like Alcaeus and Horace, threw away his shield and fled. He is said to have acted as tutor to Polycrates of Samos; that he enjoyed the tyrant's confidence we Iearn 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. Anacreon wrote many complimentary odes upon his patron. Like his fellow-lyrist, Horace, who was one of his great admirers, and in many respects of a kindred spirit, Anacreon seems to have been made for the society of courts. On the death of Polycrates, Hip parchus, 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 5o 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, accord ing 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 (Macrob. 26) men tions Anacreon as having completed 85 years. If an anecdote given by Pliny (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. 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 Xanthip pus, the father of Pericles. On several coins of Teos he is repre sented, holding a lyre in his hand.
A marble statue found in 1835 in the Sabine district, and now in the Villa Borghese, is said to represent Anacreon.
Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those bacchanalian and ama tory lyrics which are commonly associated with his name. Two short hymns to Artemis and Dionysus, consisting of eight and 11 lines respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed re mains, as printed by recent editors ; but pagan "hymns" and "Anacreontic" poetry are often not unlike. The tone of Anacre on's lyric effusions has probably led to an unjust estimate of the poet's character. The "triple worship" of the Muses, Wine, and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epi gram (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 him self strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for barbarians and Scythians (Fr. 64). Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which Suidas 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 Stephens 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 Cowley and Moore, are really of much later date, though possibly here and there genuine fragments of the poet are included. Modern critics, how ever, regard the entire collection as imitations belonging to differ ent 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. 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 quo tations 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." The best edition of the genuine fragments of Anacreon, as well as of the Anacreontea, is by Bergk (Poetae lyrici graeci, 1882). He in cludes in an appendix a similar collection of imitations from the Anecdote graeca of P. Matranga (185o) , which had their origin in the beginning of the middle ages and resemble the Christian anacreontics of Sophronius.