Anacreon is one of the most important of the Greek archaic lyric poets and has enjoyed a rich reception in both ancient and modern Europe, from Horace in Rome to the so-called Anacreontic poets in modern Europe (among them Abraham Cowley and Robert Herrick in England, and the young Goethe in Germany). However, despite his importance within the classical canon, there has been no full-scale commentary on the fragments of Anacreon in recent decades (with the exception of a single commentary in modern Greek). The two volumes seek to address this gap in scholarship by providing a detailed and up-to-date commentary on all the known fragments of Anacreon alongside a freshly edited text, critical apparatus, and a new translation. The commentary to reconstruct the context of the fragments, shedding light on Anacreon's relation to earlier poets and discussing a variety of aspects of his work, including language, style, narratological analysis, intertextuality, and performance. Close attention has been paid to Anacreon's elaborate poetic language and use of imagery, especially in the representation of paradoxical emotions: the analysis systematically applies the refined tools developed in recent studies on the language of archaic poetry in order to describe and explain these phenomena, while recent findings in the history of religion and classical archaeology have been brought to bear on his representation of the gods. Fresh interpretation of the papyrus fragments has been particularly fruitful as new material has come to light and fundamentally changed our perception of Anacreon: these show that besides familiar topics such as love, the symposium, and observations of everyday life, more unexpected themes such as the Demeter-cult numbered among his concerns and played a significant role in his poetry.

"The Tenth Muse" sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. This concise collection of the ancient Greek poet's surviving works was assembled and translated by a distinguished classicist.

Western literature knows the anacreontic poems best in the translations or adaptations of such poets as Ronsard, Herrick and Goethe. This collection of poems, once assumed to be the work of Anacreon himself, was considered unworthy of serious attention after the poems were proved to be late Hellenistic and early Roman imitations by anonymous writers. This full-length treatment of the anacreontic corpus, first published in 1992, explores the complex poetics of imitation which inspired anacreontic composition for so many centuries in antiquity. The author reassesses Anacreon's own oeuvre, and then discusses the system of selective imitation practised by the anacreontic poets. The book explores what light the corpus can shed on ancient literary genres, intertextual influences, and the literary manifestations of symposiastic and erotic ideals in a post-classical society which looks back to an archaic model as its guiding force.A full translation of the anacreontic collection is included as an appendix and all Greek and Latin is translated.

Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; “a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word.” In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks. Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronicler of human excellence and vice. Callimachus: cosmopolitan head librarian at Alexandria. These are the poets who appear in these pages, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in sustained glimpses. Drawing inspiration from the Greek Anthology, first drafted in the first century BC, Beachy-Quick presents translations filled with lovers and children, gods and insects, earth and water, ideas and ideals. Throughout, the line between the ancient and the contemporary blurs, and “the logic of how life should be lived decays wondrously into the more difficult possibilities of what life is.” Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.

Homer the Preclassic considers the development of the Homeric poems-in particular the Iliad and Odyssey-during the time when they were still part of the oral tradition. Gregory Nagy traces the evolution of rival “Homers” and the different versions of Homeric poetry in this pretextual period, reconstructed over a time frame extending back from the sixth century BCE to the Bronze Age. Accurate in their linguistic detail and surprising in their implications, Nagy's insights conjure the Greeks' nostalgia for the imagined “epic space” of Troy and for the resonances and distortions this mythic past provided to the various Greek constituencies for whom the Homeric poems were so central and definitive.