4. Anacreon of Teos

Colophon, a few miles north of Ephesus, derived its name, presumably, from the hill on whose slope it rose.* Xenophanes the anticlerical, born among them about 576, described the Colophonians as “richly clothed in purple garments, proud of their luxuriously dressed hair wet with costly and sweet-smelling oils”; vanity has a long history.⁶⁰ Here, and perhaps at Smyrna, the poet Mimnermus (610) sang, for a people already infected with the languid pessimism of the East, his melancholy odes of fleeting youth and love. He lost his heart to Nanno, the girl who accompanied his songs with the plaintive obbligato of the flute; and when she rejected his love (perhaps on the ground that a poet married is a poet dead), he immortalized her with a sheaf of delicate elegiac verse.

We blossom like the leaves that come in Spring,

What time the sun begins to flame and glow,

And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening

Nor good nor evil from the gods we know;

But always at the goal dark spirits stand

Holding, one grievous Age, one Death, within her hand.⁶¹

A more famous poet lived a century later in the near-by town of Teos. Anacreon wandered much, but in Teos he was born (563) and died (478). Many a court sought him, for among his contemporaries only Simonides rivaled him in fame. We find him joining a band of emigrants to Thracian Abdera, serving as soldier for a campaign or two, abandoning his shield in the poetic fashion of the time, and thereafter content to brandish a pen; spending some years at the court of Polycrates in Samos; brought thence in official state, on a fifty-oared galley, to grace the palace of Hipparchus in Athens; and at last, after the Persian War, returning to Teos to ease his declining years with song and drink. He paid for his excesses by living to a great age, and died at eighty-five, we are told, of a grape pit sticking in his throat.⁶²

Alexandria knew five books of Anacreon, but only disordered couplets remain. His subjects were wine, women, and boys; his manner was one of polished banter in tripping iambics. No topic seemed impure in his impeccable diction, or gross in his delicate verse. Instead of the vulgar virulence of Hipponax, or the trembling intensity of Sappho, Anacreon offered the urbane chatter of a court poet who would play Horace to any Augustus that pleased his fancy and paid for his wine. Athenaeus thinks that his tipsy songs and changeful loves were a pose;⁶³ perhaps Anacreon hid his fidelities that he might be interesting to women, and concealed his sobriety to augment his fame. A choice legend tells how, in his cups, he stumbled against a child and abused it with harsh words, and how, in his age, he fell in love with this lad and did penance with doting praise.⁶⁴His Eros was ambidextrous, and reached impartially for either sex; but in his later years he gallantly gave the preference to women. “Lo, now,” says a pretty fragment, “golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball, and calls me forth to play with a motley-slippered maid. But she hails from lofty Lesbos, and so finds fault with my white hair, and goes a-searching for other prey.”⁶⁵ A wit of a later age wrote for Anacreon’s grave a revealing epitaph:

All-enchanting nurse of the wine, O Vine, grow lush and long above the tomb of Anacreon. So shall the tippling friend of neat liquor, who thrummed in night-long revel the lute of a lover of lads, yet sport above his buried head the glorious cluster of some teeming bough, and be wet evermore with the dew whose delicious scent was the breath of his mild old mouth.⁶⁶