Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

LyRIc POETRY

he lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five, and even in his latter years happiness for him seems to have consisted largely in love and wine. Of his works the Alexandrians still possessed various poems in five books altogether, most of which have been lost by the unkindness of time. All his poetry is dedicated to love, says Cicero (Tusc., iv, 33, 71; cf. Ovid, Tvistia, 11, 363). Although he did not disdain female love—and for the sake of example he once complains half jestingly (frag. 14) that a pretty Lesbian girl refuses to play with him, yet during his life it was the ephebus who had just reached his prime to whom his heart and song were devoted, and an imposing list of names is known to us, the bearers of which had inflamed his heart. After a stay at Abdera in Thrace we find him together with Ibycus at the court of Polycrates, the we ell-known and refined lover of art and magnificence, and ruler of Samos, who had surrounded himself with a court-household of carefully selected pages (Elian, Var. Hiust., 1x, 14). Maximus of Tyre says: “ Anacreon loves all who are beautiful and extols them all; his songs are full of praise of the curly hair of Smerdis, the eyes of Cleobulus, the youthful bloom of Bathyllus”’ (xxiv, 9, 247—1Trag. 44). Again he says that everything that is good is beautiful to love. “I should like to sport with you, O boy, for thou hast the lovecharm of the Graces” (ibid., 120), and “‘ For the sake of my verses boys would love me; for I sing graceful songs, and I know how to say graceful things ” (ibid., 45).

Several epigrams (esp. Anth. Pal., vi, 25, 27, 209, and 31; see also ibid., 23, 23), 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33; and vi, 346) also attest the poet’s love for his Smerdis; in the first mentioned, for instance, Simonides in an epitaph says: ‘‘ Alone in Acheron he grieves not that he has left the sun and dwelleth there in the House of Lethe, but that he has left Megistheus, graceful above all the youth, and his passion for ‘Thracian Smerdis.” Of Anacreon’s

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