Anacreon, one of the most esteemed lyric poets of Greece, was born about 550 B.C. at Teos, an Ionian city in Asia Minor. With his fellow-townsmen he emigrated to Abdera, in Thrace, on the approach of the Persians. Thence he was invited to the court of Polycrates, the ruler of Samos; and here he sang, in light and flowing strains, the praise of wine and beauty. After the death of Polycrates, he went to Athens, and was received with distinguished honour by Hipparchus. We know nothing certain of his life after the fall of Hipparchus, but that he left Athens; and tradition tells that he died at the age of 85, by being choked by a dried grape.
Great honours were paid to him after his death; Teos put his likeness upon its coins, and a statue was raised to him on the Acropolis of Athens, which represented him in a state of vinous hilarity.
Of his poems, only a few genuine fragments have been preserved, for the Odes attributed to him are now admitted to be spurious. Of these there are about sixty, devoted to love and wine, marked by great simplicity and delicacy of expression, fertility of invention, and variety of illustration. Moore found a congenial task in translating them into English verse. The genuine fragments appear in Bergk's Poetæ Lyrici Græci (4th ed. 1878).