Anacreon

Anacreon of Teos (c. 582 – c. 485 BC) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet of the Ionian coast who spent his career at the courts of Polycrates of Samos and of the Pisistratid rulers of Athens. He was celebrated in antiquity for short, polished songs of wine, love and good company, and his name became a byword for the light-hearted drinking song.

Only fragments of his own verse survive. The poems traditionally printed as the Odes of Anacreon — the Anacreontea — are in fact, for the most part, later Greek imitations composed centuries after his death and handed down under his name. They were widely read and imitated in Renaissance and eighteenth-century Europe. These odes are given here in Thomas Moore’s free English verse translation of 1800, numbered I to LXXVIII as in his edition; the lengthy scholarly notes he printed with them are omitted.