There is but little known, with certainty of the life of Anacreon.
Chamaeleon Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in the
general wreck of ancient literature. The editors of the poet have
collected the few trifling anecdotes which are scattered through the
extant authors of antiquity, and, supplying the deficiency of materials by
fictions of their own imagination, have arranged what they call a life of
Anacreon. These specious fabrications are intended to indulge that
interest which we naturally feel in the biography of illustrious men; but
it is rather a dangerous kind of illusion, as it confounds the limits of
history and romance, and is too often supported by unfaithful citation.
Our poet was born in the city of Teos, in the delicious region of Ionia,
and the time of his birth appears to have been in the sixth century before
Christ. He flourished at that remarkable period when, under the polished
tyrants Hipparchus and Polycrates, Athens and Samos were become the rival
asylums of genius. There is nothing certain known about his family; and
those who pretend to discover in Plato that he was a descendant of the
monarch Codrus, show much more of zeal than of either accuracy or
judgment.
The disposition and talents of Anacreon recommended him to the monarch of
Samos, and he was formed to be the friend of such a prince as Polycrates.
Susceptible only to the pleasures, he felt not the corruptions, of the
court; and while Pythagoras fled from the tyrant, Anacreon was celebrating
his praises oh the lyre. We are told, too, by Maximus Tyrius, that, by the
influence of his amatory songs, he softened the mind of Polycrates into a
spirit of benevolence towards his subjects.
The amours of the poet, and the rivalship of the tyrant, I shall pass
over in silence; and there are few, I presume, who will regret the
omission of most of those anecdotes, which the industry of some editors
has not only promulged, but discussed. Whatever is repugnant to modesty
and virtue is considered, in ethical science, by a supposition very
favorable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should
be much more strongly entertained where the transgression wars with nature
as well as virtue. But why are we not allowed to indulge in the
presumption? Why are we officiously reminded that there have been really
such instances of depravity?
Hipparchus, who now maintained at Athens the power which his father
Pisistratus had usurped, was one of those princes who may be said to have
polished the fetters of their subjects. He was the first, according to
Plato, who edited the poems of Homer, and commanded them to be sung by the
rhapsodists at the celebration of the Panathenaea. From his court, which
was a sort of galaxy of genius, Anacreon could not long be absent.
Hipparchus sent a barge for him; the poet readily embraced the invitation,
and the Muses and the Loves were wafted with him to Athens.
The manner of Anacreon's death was singular. We are told that in the
eighty-fifth year of his age he was choked by a grape-stone; and however
we may smile at their enthusiastic partiality who see in this easy and
characteristic death a peculiar indulgence of Heaven, we cannot help
admiring that his fate should have been so emblematic of his disposition.
Caelius Calcagninus alludes to this catastrophe in the following epitaph
on our poet:--
Those lips, then, hallowed sage, which poured along
A music sweet as any cygnet's song,
The grape hath closed for ever!
Here let the ivy kiss the poet's tomb,
Here let the rose he loved with laurels bloom,
In bands that ne'er shall sever.
But far be thou, oh! far, unholy vine,
By whom the favorite minstrel of the Nine
Lost his sweet vital breath;
Thy God himself now blushes to confess,
Once hallowed vine! he feels he loves thee less,
Since poor Anacreon's death.
It has been supposed by some writers that Anacreon and Sappho were
contemporaries; and the very thought of an intercourse between persons so
congenial, both in warmth of passion and delicacy of genius, gives such
play to the imagination that the mind loves to indulge in it. But the
vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamaeleon, and Hermesianax,
who are the source of the supposition, are considered as having merely
indulged in a poetical anachronism.
To infer the moral dispositions of a poet from the tone of sentiment
which pervades his works, is sometimes a very fallacious analogy; but the
soul of Anacreon speaks so unequivocally through his odes, that we may
safely consult them as the faithful mirrors of his heart. We find him
there the elegant voluptuary, diffusing the seductive charm of sentiment
over passions and propensities at which rigid morality must frown. His
heart, devoted to indolence, seems to have thought that there is wealth
enough in happiness, but seldom happiness in mere wealth. The
cheerfulness, indeed, with which he brightens his old age is interesting
and endearing; like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the
most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which be
attributes to himself so feelingly, and which breathes characteristically
throughout all that he has sung. In truth, if we omit those few vices in
our estimate which religion, at that time, not only connived at, but
consecrated, we shall be inclined to say that the disposition of our poet
was amiable; that his morality was relaxed, but not abandoned; and that
Virtue, with her zone loosened, may be an apt emblem of the character of
Anacreon.
Of his person and physiognomy, time has preserved such uncertain
memorials, that it were better, perhaps, to leave the pencil to fancy; and
few can read the Odes of Anacreon without imaging to themselves the form
of the animated old bard, crowned with roses, and singing cheerfully to
his lyre.
After the very enthusiastic eulogiums bestowed both by ancients and
moderns upon the poems of Anacreon, we need not be diffident in expressing
our raptures at their beauty, nor hesitate to pronounce them the most
polished remains of antiquity. They are indeed, all beauty, all
enchantment. He steals us so insensibly along with him, that we sympathize
even in his excesses. In his amatory odes there is a delicacy of
compliment not to be found in any other ancient poet. Love at that period
was rather an unrefined emotion; and the intercourse of the sexes was
animated more by passion than by sentiment. They knew not those little
tendernesses which form the spiritual part of affection; their expression
of feeling was therefore rude and unvaried, and the poetry of love
deprived it of its most captivating graces. Anacreon, however, attained
some ideas of this purer gallantry; and the same delicacy of mind which
led him to this refinement, prevented him also from yielding to the
freedom of language which has sullied the pages of all the other poets.
His descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas, not the words.
He is sportive without being wanton, and ardent without being licentious.
His poetic invention is always most brilliantly displayed in those
allegorical fictions which so many have endeavored to imitate, though all
have confessed them to be inimitable. Simplicity is the distinguishing
feature of these odes, and they interest by their innocence, as much as
they fascinate by their beauty. They may be said, indeed, to be the very
infants of the Muses, and to lisp in numbers.
I shall not be accused of enthusiastic partiality by those who have read
and felt the original; but to others, I am conscious, this should not be
the language of a translator, whose faint reflection of such beauties can
but ill justify his admiration of them.
In the age of Anacreon music and poetry were inseparable. These kindred
talents were for a long time associated, and the poet always sung his own
compositions to the lyre. It is probable that they were not set to any
regular air, but rather a kind of musical recitation, which was varied
according to the fancy and feelings of the moment. The poems of Anacreon
were sung at banquets as late as the time of Aulus Gellius, who tells us
that he heard one of the odes performed at a birthday entertainment.
The singular beauty of our poet's style and the apparent facility,
perhaps, of his metre have attracted, as I have already remarked, a crowd
of imitators. Some of these have succeeded with wonderful felicity, as may
be discerned in the few odes which are attributed to writers of a later
period. But none of his emulators have been half so dangerous to his fame
as those Greek ecclesiastics of the early ages, who, being conscious of
their own inferiority to their great prototypes, determined on removing
all possibility of comparison, and, under a semblance of moral zeal,
deprived the world of some of the most exquisite treasures of ancient
times. The works of Sappho and Alcaeus were among those flowers of Grecian
literature which thus fell beneath the rude hand of ecclesiastical
presumption. It is true they pretended that this sacrifice of genius was
hallowed by the interests of religion, but I have already assigned the
most probable motive; and if Gregorius Nazianzenus had not written
Anacreontics, we might now perhaps have the works of the Teian
unmutilated, and be empowered to say exultingly with Horace,
_Nec si quid olim lusit Anacreon
delevit aetas_.
The zeal by which these bishops professed to be actuated gave birth more
innocently, indeed, to an absurd species of parody, as repugnant to piety
as it is to taste, where the poet of voluptuousness was made a preacher of
the gospel, and his muse, like the Venus in armor at Lacedaemon, was
arrayed in all the severities of priestly instruction. Such was the
"Anacreon Recantatus," by Carolus de Aquino, a Jesuit, published 1701,
which consisted of a series of palinodes to the several songs of our poet.
Such, too, was the Christian Anacreon of Patrignanus, another Jesuit, who
preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that the Graecian
poet had dedicated to festivity and love.
His metre has frequently been adopted by the modern Latin poets; and
Scaliger, Taubman, Barthius, and others, have shown that it is by no means
uncongenial with that language. The Anacreontics of Scaliger, however,
scarcely deserve the name; as they glitter all over with conceits, and,
though often elegant, are always labored. The beautiful fictions of
Angerianus preserve more happily than any others the delicate turn of
those allegorical fables, which, passing so frequently through the mediums
of version and imitation, have generally lost their finest rays in the
transmission. Many of the Italian poets have indulged their fancies upon
the subjects; and in the manner of Anacreon, Bernardo Tasso first
introduced the metre, which was afterwards polished and enriched by
Chabriera and others.