A pointed epitaph in the Greek Anthology shows the estimation in which the poetess was held by her countrymen:—
“These are Erinna’s songs: how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years;
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers?”
Anacreon.—In the sixth century, Te’os, a seaport of Ionia, gave birth to the society poet, Anacreon; who, though an Ionian, wrote rather in the style of the Æolian lyrics. His verses, however, while soft and graceful, were marked by levity, and lacked the dignity and depth of the Æolic school. “The Muse, good humor, love, and wine,” Anacreon tells us, were his themes; accordingly his songs, brimming with sensuality, grew in popular estimation as Greece degenerated in public morality.
When his native city fell a prey to Cyrus the Persian, Anacreon with the other inhabitants set sail for Thrace (540 B.C.). From Thrace, while yet in his youth, he withdrew to the island of Sa’mos whose tyrant, Polyc’rates, was a munificent patron of literature and art. Amid the gayety of the Samian court, the witty and pleasure-loving poet found a congenial home, Polycrates making him an intimate companion and confiding to him important state secrets. But the ruler of Samos was treacherously put to death by a Persian satrap; about which time, Anacreon was invited to Athens by the tyrant Hipparchus, who sent his royal trireme to bring his poet-laureate across the Ægean.
At Athens, Anacreon for a time gave free rein to his passions, joining a set of boon companions who basked in the sunshine of royal favor. His voluptuous career was cut short by the assassination of Hipparchus, and he returned to Teos (repeopled during his absence), to be choked by a grape-seed at the advanced age of eighty-five—or, if we are to take the story figuratively, to fall a victim to his irrepressible love of the bottle.
A statue of a drunken old man on the Athenian acropolis kept alive in the minds of the people as well the graceful odes of Anacreon as his prevailing weakness. His friend Simonides wrote an epitaph to his memory, in which we catch a glimpse of the exciting whirl of pleasures that made up his existence:—
“Bland mother of the grape! all-gladdening vine!