Anacreon

Anacreon was a lyric poet of ancient Ionia, born around 582 BCE in Teos and died around 485 BCE. Because of the great distance in time, public information about his life is limited, and his surviving works are mostly fragments. Writing in the Ionic dialect, he composed drinking songs and love poems in an elegant, light style, celebrating the pleasures of the symposium and of desire, and later generations counted him among the nine canonical lyric poets of ancient Greece. Later imitations were collected into the Anacreontea, and his poetic manner had a lasting influence on the European lyric tradition. Three of his works are held in this collection, including the Odes d'Anacréon and a Finnish translation compiled together with poems by Sappho.