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Poets and playwrightsIonian monody

Anacreon

Anacreon of Teos: songs of love and wine, and their lyric metres.

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Who Anacreon was

Teos, Abdera, Samos, Athens. All sources agree that Anacreon was born at Teos, on the coast of Asia Minor.[1] When the Medes under Harpagus attacked Teos, he left with the Teians who settled at Abdera in Thrace (Strabo; the Suda). He then went to Samos, to the court of the tyrant Polycrates. After Polycrates’ death in 522 BC he went to Athens. He was invited there by the Pisistratid Hipparchus (died 514), who also brought Simonides to the city.[2] The same sequence is given elsewhere: Teos, Abdera (founded about 540 BC), Samos under Polycrates, and Athens under Hipparchus.[3]

In the pseudo-Platonic Hipparchus, Hipparchus sends a fifty-oared ship to fetch him. Herodotus shows Anacreon with Polycrates in the dining room near the end of the tyrant’s life.[4]

The other places are less certain. Cingano treats the move to Abdera as secure. Budelmann calls Abdera “more likely”, and lists Thessaly among further residences that “have been suggested”.[5] The Thessalian stay rests on two epigrams of doubtful authenticity, and Cingano judges it to stand “on thin ice”.[6] Campbell leaves open whether he went to Thessaly after Hipparchus was murdered in 514.[3] On Samos he probably overlapped with Ibycus, his slightly older contemporary, and in Athens with Simonides.[7]

Date. A floruit is the peak of a poet’s career, as ancient chronographers dated it. Eusebius put Anacreon’s floruit in Ol. 61.1 (536/535 BC).[8] The Suda’s chronology is “multiple and controversial”, but Anacreon’s dates are better grounded than those of Ibycus. He lived through the second half of the sixth century.[9] His life ran from the mid-sixth century into the early fifth.[10] One source has him live long enough to know Aeschylus’ early tragedies.[11]

Patrons and friends. In Athens and elsewhere he was linked with leading families. He praised Critias, grandfather of the oligarch Critias. He was also linked with Pericles’ father Xanthippus, though the story of a farewell to Xanthippus raises problems of chronology.[12] For Polycrates and Hipparchus, his presence was part of a larger cultural programme.[13]

What he composed. He wrote lyric, iambus (including tetrameters) and elegy. Hephaestion quotes him “in the elegies”.[14] Epigrams were also transmitted under his name. Some are clearly later, and the authenticity of the rest cannot be proved.[6] His lyric included hymns, drinking-songs and a few partheneia.[6]

Almost all the fragments are short pieces for the symposium, the drinking-party, suited to solo performance. The evidence for public poetry is slight. It rests chiefly on a partheneion fragment (501 PMG) that some assign to him, and on Critias’ mention of women’s choruses.[15]

An Ionian singer. He is the one poet to have composed lyric in Ionic.[6] His language is a literary Ionic, with small admixtures from epic and East Aeolic. This places him in the tradition of iambus and elegy rather than of sung lyric. An ancient source derives his form Δεόνυσος (Deonysos), for Διόνυσος (Dionysos), from the speech of Samos.[16] The dialect may have made his songs feel less foreign to Samian and Athenian audiences.[17]

Lyric is traditionally divided into choral lyric, in Doric, and monody, in Aeolic. This division is unproductive, partly because Anacreon’s own language in turn helped to shape that of Simonides.[18] In metre he stands beside Archilochus and Hipponax as a poet of the simple Ionian strophe. Yet his rhythms are far more varied than anything left by the Ionian poets before him.[19]

The stone seats of a small theatre among olive trees.
The ancient theatre of Teos
A single tall column, reassembled from drums, standing among ruins under a blue sky.
The standing column of the Heraion, Samos

Notes

  1. ^ Budelmann 2009, p. 227; Campbell 1988, p. 3.
  2. ^ Cingano 2022, p. 297.
  3. ^ a b Campbell 1988, p. 3.
  4. ^ Budelmann 2009, pp. 227–228.
  5. ^ Cingano 2022, p. 297; Budelmann 2009, p. 228 with n. 4.
  6. ^ a b c d Cingano 2022, p. 298.
  7. ^ Krummen 2009, p. 199; Cingano 2022, p. 291; Budelmann 2009, p. 228.
  8. ^ Campbell 1988, p. 4.
  9. ^ Cingano 2022, p. 297 with n. 20.
  10. ^ Budelmann 2009, p. 386; de Kreij 2022, p. 151.
  11. ^ Cingano 2022, p. 297 n. 21; Campbell 1988, p. 3.
  12. ^ Cingano 2022, p. 297 with n. 22; Budelmann 2009, p. 228 with n. 3.
  13. ^ Budelmann 2009, p. 228.
  14. ^ Hephaestion, Ench. 1.6.
  15. ^ Budelmann 2009, p. 228 with n. 6; Campbell 1988, p. 4.
  16. ^ de Kreij 2022, pp. 151, 153.
  17. ^ Budelmann 2009, pp. 230–231.
  18. ^ de Kreij 2022, pp. 142, 149.
  19. ^ West 1987, pp. 31, 40.
Picture credits on this page
  1. Behind the title: Komast with a barbitos: Attic red-figure kylix by the Chairias Painter, c. 510–500 BC. Athens, Ancient Agora Museum P 24115. Chairias Painter; photo: Zde · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  2. The ancient theatre of Teos. Isabeau · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  3. The Heraion of Samos: the only column still standing, about ten metres high, of the temple of Hera. Kramer96 · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  4. Statue of Anacreon from Monte Calvo, 2nd century AD. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek IN 491. ChrisO · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons · background removed
  5. Eros flying with a phiale, a ball and a plant: interior of an Apulian red-figure kylix of the Group of the Trieste Askoi, c. 340–320 BC. Frankfurt, Archäologisches Museum β 139. Group of the Trieste Askoi; photo: ArchaiOptix · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons · background removed