The Heirs of Anacreon

Henri Estienne, Parisian printer and classical scholar, published the Anacreontea in 1554, believing himself to be recovering a lost poet, Anacreon, long considered doomed to hearsay and a few fragments. In fact, Anacreon remains doomed to hearsay and a few fragments, and some of the poems in the Anacreontea were likely written as late as the eight or ninth century CE. The earliest poems in the collection, however, could possibly be assigned to as early as the third century BCE (still three hundred years after Anacreon wrote). These were no mere forgeries: Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, and the Anacreontea proved that he had many imitators. Not quite the simple “drinking songs” they are often claimed to be, they are, nevertheless, songs, and the recurrent themes include the joys of love and wine:

Fruitful earth drinks up the rain;
Trees from earth drink that again;
The sea drinks the air, the sun
Drinks the sea, and him the moon
Is it reason then, d’ye think
I should thirst when all else drink?

Anacreon lives on in the style of verse – Anacreontics (the seven-syllable line)– that bears his name. He lived on for a while, too, in The Anacreontic Society, a social club of "Peers, Commoners, Aldermen, Gentlemen, Proctors, Actors, and Polite Tradesmen" dedicated to “mirth and music, wit and wine.” The members of the club would call up the poet as their presiding figure pledging themselves as ‘Sons of Anacreon’ with a group recitation of The Anacreontic Song. The music for the song was written by John Stafford Smith, a society member, who also wrote the music to which The Star-Spangled Banner was set. In fact, it was the same music. Thus the tune that accompanies “O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” originally accompanied:

And long may the sons of Anacreon intwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine

This doesn’t prove anything, of course – but it’s something to take to the ball game.