ANACREON, an Ionian Greek, born at Teos, on the coast of Asia Minor, probably about 562 b.c. His reputation as a lyric poet stood very high both in his own age and in those that followed. “The charming ”—“the honey-tongued ”—“the swan of Teos ”—“the glory of Ionia,” are some of the epithets constantly given him by ancient writers. “Sing us one of the songs of Alcaeus or Anacreon,” cries one of the guests in a comedy of Aristophanes. “When I hear the verses of Sappho or Anacreon,” says the poet to his friends, in the Symposium of Plato, “I set down my cup for very shame of my own performances.” 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 “time has not drowned his sportive lays;” 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 Athenaeus 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 Anacreon’s style, which would lend itself readily enough to a clever imitator. But an almost ...