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Anacreon c.570-c.475BC
Greek lyric poet

From Teos, Asia Minor, he helped to found the Greek colony of Abdera in Thrace (c.540BC) despite threatened attack by the Persians. He was invited to Samos by Polycrates to tutor his son. After the tyrant's downfall, he was brought to Athens by Hipparchus, son of the tyrant Pisistratus, and later went to Thessaly. His work, which survives only in fragments, includes poems of love and wine, satires, dedications and epitaphs. A model for the Latin lyric poets, it was also widely imitated by French and English poets of the Renaissance.

Bibliography: V Martin, Quatre Figures de la Poésie Grecque (1931)