The real Anakreon…

… Celery Stalks – Brief poems by Anakreon | Brief Poems. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As Guy Davenport puts it succinctly, “These fragments are all that survive of a poet whose fame and stature arise from a collection of poems he did not write.”  The poet who inspired Belleau, Ronsard, Herrick, Ben Johnson, Thomas Moore and many others was not the Anakreon whose poems were first printed in Paris in 1554. It took until the nineteenth century to discover that this “poet” was  an imitation, probably prepared in Alexandria by Aristarchus in the second century, by a group of unknown poets in homage to their inspiration. These sixty poems now known as The Anacreonata were written as a tribute and not as a deception, although they are thought to exaggerate the frivolity and exuberant eroticism of his work. “What we have of the real Anakreon,” as Davenport puts it, “is precious little, and that is in fragments: six ruins of lyrics on papyrus that has been visited by the rat and the maggot, 155 brief quotations from other writers, mainly grammarians, and one line, partly conjectural, written on a vase painting.”