ANACREON was an Ionian Greek, born at Teos, a seaport in Ionic Asia Minor. Living at a time when the Greeks in Asia were under attack from the East, he was twice compelled to change his abode and settled finally in the court of Polycrates, the brilliant "tyrant" of Samos. After his death, he found a new patron in Hipparchus, the tyrant of Athens. He is the typical Ionian poet -- the poet of ease, enjoyment, and grace; of love, too, but of love that is the exact opposite to the love of Sappho. Living in idleness and comfort, he sang of love and wine as a systematic voluptuary, who feared nothing but the approach of old age. His nearest parallel in ancient literature is Horace; but Anacreon has none of the quiet wisdom of Horace, or his genial sympathy with all phases of human life. He wrote, however, the gayest and most winning of Greek verses, and impressed himself so strongly upon later writers, that a number of poems in his own graceful manner were composed in the fourth century B.C., which long passed as Anacreon's work.

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