Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/118

 verses written for? how far is the poem a literary exercise based on the odes written by Alcaeus to his squire Lykos, or by Theognis to Kyrnus?

No one need defend the character of ANACREON of Teos; though, since he lived in good society to the age of eighty-five, he cannot have been as bad as he wishes us to believe. His poetry is derived from the Lesbians and from the Skolia of his countryman Pythermus. He was driven from Teos by the Persian conquest of 545 B.C.; he settled in Abdera, a Teian colony in Thrace; he saw some fighting, in which, he carefully explains, he disgraced himself quite as much as Alcaeus and Archilochus; finally, he attached himself to various royal persons, Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and Echekrates the Aleuad in Thessaly. The Alexandrians had five books of his elegies, epigrams, iambics, and songs; we possess one satirical fragment, and a good number of wine and love songs, addressed chiefly to his squire Bathyllus. They were very popular and gave rise to many imitations at all periods of literature; we possess a series of such Anacreontea dating from various times between the third century B.C. and the Renaissance. These poems are innocent of fraud: in one, for instance (No.1), Anacreon appears to the write in a dream (Cf. 20 and 59.); in most of them the poet merely assumes the mask of Anacreon and sings his love-songs to 'a younger Bathyllus.' The dialect, the treatment of Eros as a frivolous fat boy, the personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are marks of a later age. Yet there can be no doubt of the extraordinary charm of these poems, true and false alike. Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can