Anacreon’s ‘I’ and the Poet’s Value System

Andrew Lear (Florida State University)

In 1951, H. Fränkel set off a 50 year debate on the nature of the ‘I’ in the lyric poets by asserting that, at least when making statements of value, the ‘I’ is not an expression of personal feeling but a representative of group ideology.  Anacreon’s ‘I’, however, has received little attention.  Slings, for instance, while admitting that Anacreon’s ‘I’ expresses (1990.15-16) “emotion...that many members of his audience can relate to,” regards Anacreon as an ‘entertainer’; he contrasts his clever love-poetry with poetry of opinion, of which he cites the Theognidea as an exemplar.

In this paper, I argue that Anacreon’s ‘I’ and that of the Theognidea function similarly to express ideology.  Some scholars have viewed Anacreon as an ideological poet.  Kurke (1992) and Morris (1996, 2000.155-91) place him in a group of pro-aristocratic poets, the preachers of a (Kurke 1992.96) “cult of habrosyne” (soft living).  An attentive examination of Anacreon’s ‘I’ allows us to see more of Anacreon’s value-system and to contrast it in detail with other, more widely recognized Archaic value-systems.

To this end, I propose an extension of Fränkel’s concept of the ‘I’:  in such poets/traditions as Anacreon and the Theognidea, the ‘I’ not only enunciates a set of values but also resumes its ideals in the practices of its ‘self’.  This is obvious in the case of the Theognidea.  The Theognidean poets praise in their ‘self’ the same values that they recommend to others: loyalty (both factional and erotic) and moderation.  The poet/erastes also shares much with other figures in Greek erotico-ethical discourse, such as the devotee of the Heavenly Eros at Plato’s Symposium 180E-181D:  his desires are almost exclusively pederastic, and he expresses his relationship with his addressee/eromenos mainly in pedagogical or political terms.  While pederastic desire per se is not problematized in the Theognidea (Edmunds 1988.82), the beauty of the eromenos is:  at 1259-1262 and 1377-1380, it is denigrated in favor of good sense (the result of pedagogy) and loyalty.

Anacreon’s ‘self’ is in stark contrast to this.  Pederasty and heterosexual love are of equal value for him:  in such poems as 357 and 358 PMG, the same gods oversee the two forms of love, which are also linked both lexically and semantically (see also 360).  Pace Gentili (1988.90), he lays no claim to a pedagogical role.  He is not loyal:  while the Theognidean poets generally address either Cyrnus or a generic pais, Anacreon has many named lovers, both male and female.  Finally, he assimilates his desire to madness (359, 428) and drunkenness (357, 376, 450), emphasizing his lack of control over it — i.e. his lack of self-control.

It might be possible to view Anacreon’s ‘self’ as an anti-ideal, in the manner of Hipponax (West 1974.28-31, Jarcho 1990.37-9), but I argue that such poems as elegiac fr. 2  and 429 (particularl if we accept the Blanchards’ reconstruction, 1974.274-5) present this apolitical, aesthetic, erotically-focused ‘self’ as an ideal.  I therefore argue that ‘Anacreon’ represents not an anti-ideal, but a counter-ideal.  The question naturally arises what the appeal of this seemingly frivolous value-system was for an Archaic Greek elite male.  I argue that the ‘I’’s continually emphasized awareness of the cyclical nature of desire (see Mace 1993.338-42 on the repeated use of the word deute — again —in Anacreon) gives him a control over the passions more convincing than the Theognidean ‘self’s’ self-control and that thus ‘Anacreon’ is a model, not of frivolousness, but of wise acquiescence in the passions.