Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/832

Rh 788 A N A A N A dotus, Thucydicles, ^Eschylus, Pindar, and Plato, abundant specimens are to be found ; and the same is true of the writers of the Elizabethan age in our own language. The following is an example : &quot; And he charged him to tell no man; but go show thyself&quot; &c. (Luke v. 14). ANACONDA, a gigantic snake of South America, sometimes over 30 feet in length, called the water-sclent, from frequenting swamps and rivers, and preying on water animals. Its colour is a rich brown, with bright golden rings on each side, and two rows of large black spots along the back. The natives kill it for an oil they obtain from its carcase. It is not venomous, and is said to be harmless. ANACREON, an Ionian Greek, born at Teos, on the coast of Asia Minor, probably about 562 B.C. His repu tation as a lyric poet stood very high both in his own age and in those that followed. &quot; The charming &quot; &quot; the honey-tongued &quot; &quot; the swan of Teos &quot; &quot; the glory of Ionia,&quot; are some of the epithets constantly given him by ancient writers. &quot; Sing us one of the songs of Alcseus or Anacreon,&quot; cries one of the guests in a comedy of Aristo phanes. &quot; When I hear the verses of Sappho or Anacreon,&quot; says the poet to his friends, in the Symposium of Plato, &quot; I set down my cup for very shame of my own perform ances.&quot; But though he has given his name to that class of light and free lyric effusions which celebrate the joys of love and wine, he is to us moderns little more than a name. We can no longer say of him, as Horace could, that &quot; time has not drowned his sportive lays ; &quot; and we have to judge of his merits as a poet chiefly from the warm praises of those who had his poems in their hands. Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which Suidas and Athenseua 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 have been woven up in them. They will always retain a certain popularity from their lightness and elegance, and some of them are fair copies of Ana- creon s style, which would lend itself readily enough to a clever imitator. But an almost conclusive 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 frag ments of his poems quoted by ancient writers are full of lonicisms. Of the poet s life little is known beyond a few scattered notices, not in all cases certainly authentic. He probably shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen, who, when Cyrus the Great was laying siege to the Greek cities of Asia, took ship, and founded a colony at Abdera in Thrace, rather than surrender their city to his general Harpagus. From Thrace he soon removed to the island of Sanios, ruled at that time by Poly- crates, one of the grandest of those old &quot; tyrants &quot; who by no means deserved the name in its worst sense. It is said that he acted as Poly crates s tutor; that he stood very high in his confidence we learn from so good an authority as Herodotus, who represents the poet as sitting in the royal chamber when audience was given to the Persian herald. In return for such favour and protection, he wrote many complimentary odes upon Polycrates and his favourites. But if an anecdote found in Stobseus is true, he was no mercenary flatterer. On one occasion the &quot; tyrant &quot; pre sented him with the sum of five talents. He spent two wakeful nights in thinking of his money, and then re turned it to the giver, saying that it &quot; was not worth the care it cost him.&quot; A cursory remark in the writings of Maximus of Tyre shows at least the high estimation in which the poet was supposed to have been held by his royal patron. That writer says that not even the warning given to Polycrates by Amasis, king of Egypt, that his too- great prosperity would surely arouse the jealousy of the gods, could make a man doubt the stability of his happi ness, who had, like Polycrates, the command of the Ionian sea, a navy so powerful, and such a friend as Anacreon, The same authority tells us that this companionship exer cised a beneficial influence over the stern temper of the tyrant. Like his fellow-lyrist, Horace, who was one of his great admirers, and in many respect of 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 who inherited the literary tastes of his father Pisistratus, sent a special em bassy to fetch the popular poet to Athens in a galley of fifty oars. He must have fully enjoyed and contributed much to the enjoyment of the brilliant circle with which Hipparchus had surrounded himself, and there he made acquaintance, amongst others, with the poet Simonides. When this circle was broken up by the assassination of Hipparchus, Anacreon seems to have returned to his- native town of Teos. There, according to a metrical epitaph ascribed to his friend Simonides, he died and was buried. Lucian mentions him amongst his instances of the longevity of eminent men, as having completed eighty-five 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 adapta tion to the poet s habits, which makes it somewhat apocry phal. 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 Diana and Bacchus, consisting of eight and eleven line?/ respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed re mains, as printed by recent editors. But pagan hymns, especially when addressed to such deities as Venus, Eros, and Bacchus, are not so very unlike what we call &quot; Ana creontic &quot; poetry as to make the contrast of style so great as the word might seem to imply. The tone of Anacreon s lyric effusions has probably led to an unjust estimate, both by ancients and moderns, of the poet s personal character. As Homer was accused of bibulous propensities by some because he makes frequent and kindly mention of &quot; the purple wine,&quot; so Anacreon was held to have been a thorough sensualist because he sang so persistently of wine and love. But a poet must not always be judged by the flights of his fancy. The &quot; triple worship &quot; 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 contem poraries. 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 character istics of intoxication as fit only for &quot; barbaiians &quot; and &quot; Scythians &quot; (Fragm. 64, Bergk). His own excuse, when charged with hymning the reigning beauties of the day rather than the orthodox gods and goddesses, is said to have been made in these words But are not these also lesser divinities 1 &quot; The best editions of Anacreon are those of J. F. Fischer, Leipsic, 1703, and I. Bergk, Leipsic, 1854. (w. L. c.) ANADYOMENE ( AvaSvopbri), an epithet of Aphrodite (Venus), expressive of her having risen (i.e., been born) from the foam of the sea. In works of ancient art e.g., in many existing bronze statuettes Venus was represented