trireme to fetch the poet. Like his father Pisistratus, Hipparchus
endeavored to further the cause of letters by calling poets to his
court. Simonides of Ceos was there; and Lasus of Hermione, the teacher
of Pindar; with many rhapsodists or minstrels, who edited the poems of
Homer and chanted his lays at the Panathenæa, or high festival of
Athena, which the people celebrated every year with devout and
magnificent show. Amid this brilliant company Anacreon lived and sang
until Hipparchus fell (514) by the famous conspiracy of Harmodius and
Aristogeiton. He then returned to his native Teos, and according to a
legend, died there at the age of eighty-five, choked by a grape-seed.

Anacreon was a lyrist of the first order. Plato's poet says of him in
the 'Symposium,' "When I hear the verses of Sappho or Anacreon, I set
down my cup for very shame of my own performance." He composed in Greek
somewhat, to use a very free comparison, as Herrick did in English,
expressing the unrefined passion and excesses which he saw, just as the
Devonshire parson preserved the spirit of the country festivals of Old
England in his vivid verse.

To Anacreon music and poetry were inseparable. The poet of his time
recited his lines with lyre in hand, striking upon it in the measure he
thought best suited to his song. Doubtless the poems of Anacreon were
delivered in this way. His themes were simple,--wine, love, and the
glorification of youth and poetry; but his imagination and poetic
invention so animated every theme that it is the perfect rendering which
we see, not the simplicity of the commonplace idea. His delicacy
preserves him from grossness, and his grace from wantonness. In this
respect his poems are a fair illustration of the Greek sense of
self-limitation, which guided the art instincts of that people and made
them the creators of permanent canons of taste.