Again:—
"O boy, with the maiden's eyes, I seek and follow thee, but thou heedest not, nor knowest that thou art my soul's charioteer."
In another place he speaks of[71]—
"Love, the virginal, gleaming and radiant with desire."
Syneban (to pass the time of youth with friends) is a word which Anacreon may be said to have made current in Greek. It occurs twice in his fragments,[72] and exactly expresses the luxurious enjoyment of youthful grace and beauty which appear to have been his ideal of love. We are very far here from the Achilleian friendship of the Iliad. Yet, occasionally, Anacreon uses images of great force to describe the attack of passion, as when he says that love has smitten him with a huge axe, and plunged him in a wintry torrent.[73]
It must be remembered that both Anacreon and Ibycus were court poets, singing in the palaces of Polycrates and Hippias. The youths they celebrated were probably little better than the exoleti of a Roman Emperor.[74] This cannot be said exactly of Alcæus, whose love for black-eyed Lycus was remembered by Cicero and Horace. So little, however, is left of his erotic poems that no definite opinion can be formed about them. The authority of later Greek authors justifies our placing him upon the list of those who helped to soften and emasculate the character of Greek love by their poems.[75]
Two Athenian drinking-songs preserved by Athenæus,[76] which seem to bear the stamp of the lyric age, may here be quoted. They serve to illustrate the kind of feeling to which expression was given in public by friends and boy-lovers:—
"Would I were a lovely heap of ivory, and that lovely boys carried me into the Dionysian chorus."[77]
This is marked by a very delicate, though naïf, fancy. The next is no less eminent for its sustained, impassioned, simple, rhythmic feeling:—
"Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear crowns with me, with me when I am mad be mad, with me when I am temperate be sober."