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Anacreon (c. 572 - 488 BCE)
Anacreon was born in the city of Teos in what is now western Turkey, and fled his hometown in his late twenties when it fell to the Persians. Settling in Thrace, he worked with fellow Greek refugees to found the city of Abdera. His poetry had already begun to gain him some attention, and he accepted an invitation to the court of Polycrates on the island of Samos, where he taught music and lyrical poetry to the tyrant's son until Polycrates was overthrown in 522 BCE. Anacreon then accepted an invitation from Hipparchus to live in Athens, where he continued to live and remained extremely popular even after Hipparchus' assassination eight years later. Except for a brief stay in Thessaly, Anacreon spent the remainder of his life in Athens, finally dying at the age of eighty-five after choking on either a grape or a grape seed in his wine. The ripe old age at which he died and the manner of his death both served as testaments to the virtues of living life to the fullest, a philosophy Anacreon praised in both his life and his work. Anacreon used a metrical style which was employed and imitated by poets for centuries after his passing, and the term "Anacreontic" was coined to describe poems written in this style, although it was not the only one Anacreon used and he probably did not invent it. Anacreon was so admired that the Athenians erected a statue of him at the Acropolis, and his works so numerous that five complete volumes were collected and kept in the Library at Alexandria. Unfortunately, only fragments of these works survived into the post-classical period, and then mostly because of their use in Greek grammars during the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, scholars began to discover the various works written by imitators and admirers of Anacreon from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine eras, and began erroneously identifying and publishing them as Anacreon's own works. The eighteenth-century, already enjoying a certain degree of hedonism and ribaldry in reaction to the puritanism of the previous century, found in these Anacreontic poems a validation of the hedonist lifestyle, with their joyful praise of the pleasures of wine, music, and women. The Anacreon Society, a gentleman's club in London, centered itself around the poet and his alleged works, and members composed a song, "To Anacreon in Heaven," to sing his praises. The problem of course was that the works which had inspired all this drunken womanizing fun were not written by Anacreon, and the fragments of his works which did survive sang the praises of wine, music, - and teen-age boys. Like all classical Athenians, Anacreon practiced paiderastia, and may even have preferred adolescent males over women. As he watched the British siege of Baltimore during the War of 1812, American patriot Francis Scott Key composed "The Star-Spangled Banner," setting the tune of the song to that of "To Anacreon in Heaven." The American national anthem thus is based upon a song whose composers believed they were writing about another good old boy like themselves, when in fact it was written about a man whose indulgences in wine and music were much more refined, and whose indulgences in sex were decidedly gay. Martin Grief once suggested divulging this bit of trivia to the more fanatically homophobic segments of society as a possible strategy for replacing the current anthem with one more aesthetically pleasing and easier to sing, but he was of course writing at a time when gay-baiting straights had not yet adopted the practice of singing the Village People's "YMCA" at sporting events and weddings. The fact that the obviously gay connotations of both that group and the song has failed to sink into the robotic rubes' skulls probably means the historical background of that other song they sing without really understanding or even remembering the words would be equally lost on them. Cluelessness is often incurable.
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