Anacreon

Use in the book

Anacreon enters in a compliment. When Critias says that Charmides is thought "far and away the most temperate of anyone nowadays", Socrates answers that it is only right he should excel, for his father's house, "the house of Critias son of Dropides, has come down to us celebrated by Anacreon and by Solon and by many other poets for its outstanding beauty and virtue and everything else that goes by the name of happiness", and his mother's side, the house of his uncle Pyrilampes, is "no different" (157d–158a2). Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and poet of the early sixth century BC, was kin to the house (155a). The house is named after an ancestor, Critias son of Dropides, who on the usual modern reconstruction was the great-great-grandfather of both Charmides and Critias son of Callaeschrus (153c). The two are first cousins: Charmides' father Glaucon was Critias' uncle (154b, 158b), and Critias is the boy's guardian (155a). The "your" of "your family" (ὑμῖν, hymin) is plural in the Greek, and can be read as taking in Critias, whose father's house this is as well.

The praise of the two houses ends in a likelihood, not a verdict: "Born of such people, you are likely to be first in everything" (158a). Socrates then puts the question to the boy himself, "So tell me yourself" (158c), and the question whether he has temperance turns into the question what it is (158e–159a). This can be read as the dialogue's answer to the poets' testimony: famous witnesses make it likely that the boy excels, but only an examination of what he says can show whether he is temperate. A few pages later, when Charmides asks what it matters whom he heard a definition from, Socrates gives the rule: "what we have to look into is not who said it, but whether what is said is true or not" (161c).

Places to read

1. 157e–158a2Socrates praises Charmides' two houses: his father's, the house of Critias son of Dropides, celebrated by Anacreon, Solon and many other poets; and his mother's, the house of his uncle Pyrilampes, in no way inferior.

Translation in this edition

"Celebrated by Anacreon and by Solon and by many other poets" keeps the threefold "by" of the Greek (καὶ ὑπὸ Ἀνακρέοντος καὶ ὑπὸ Σόλωνος καὶ ὑπ’ ἄλλων πολλῶν ποιητῶν). "Celebrated" renders ἐγκεκωμιασμένη, from ἐγκώμιον (enkōmion), a song or speech of praise, and "has come down to us" renders παραδέδοται, "has been handed down": Socrates reports a tradition of praise, and quotes none of it.

Ἀνακρέων

Attested: Ἀνακρέοντος (Anakreontos; 157e). Anacreon of Teos, the lyric poet, named first of the poets who celebrated the paternal house of Charmides and Critias. Lemma: Ἀνακρέων.

Elsewhere in Plato

Socrates names Anacreon in three other dialogues of the Platonic corpus. In the Hipparchus he says that Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, sent a fifty-oared ship to fetch Anacreon of Teos to Athens, because he wished to educate the citizens (228c). In the Phaedrus, unwilling to grant that the speech on love Phaedrus has just read him leaves nothing more to say, he guesses that he has heard better from the poets, "Sappho the beautiful, perhaps, or Anacreon the wise", or else from some prose writers (235b–c). In the Theages he recalls a song in which Anacreon said that Callicrite, daughter of Cyane, knew the arts of tyranny (125d–e).

Other ancient sources

Herodotus, the historian of the fifth century BC, places Anacreon at the court of Polycrates: in the less common of two accounts of why Oroetes, the Persian governor of Sardis, set out to destroy Polycrates, Anacreon is with Polycrates in the men's hall when Oroetes' herald comes.¹ Pausanias, who described Greece in the second century AD, records Anacreon's statue on the Athenian Acropolis, posed like a man singing in his cups, and calls him the first poet after Sappho of Lesbos to make love the subject of most of what he wrote.²

Of the praise of Critias' house two traces are given in the edition's note at 157e: Solon's verses bid someone "tell fair-haired Critias to listen to his father",³ and Anacreon was said to have celebrated a Critias of the same house. An ancient commentator on Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound says that Anacreon stayed in Attica in love with Critias, without saying which Critias he means.⁴ The praise also ran the other way. Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists of about AD 200 is a vast miscellany of quotations, quotes hexameters by Critias in praise of "sweet Anacreon", whom Teos brought to Greece, "the spur of drinking parties, the beguiler of women"; the lines tell him that love for him will never grow old or die. Elsewhere, quoting a couplet from Critias' Elegies, Athenaeus names the poet as the son of Callaeschrus, the Critias of the Charmides.⁵ The first poet Socrates names as a praiser of the house is thus one whom, on Athenaeus' evidence, Critias himself praised in verse, and the compliment can be read as paid to the guardian as much as to the boy.

Use in the book

Anacreon’s arrival follows Homeric recitation and precedes the account of Simonides’ retention by fees and gifts. These are distinct forms of cultural acquisition. Homer’s epics are brought into the country, a ship is sent to bring Anacreon into the city, and Simonides is kept in the ruler’s company. The series presents Hipparchus as someone able to gather both poetic material and living poets around Athens.

The unusual precision about the vessel makes the effort tangible. Sending a substantial oared ship for one poet dramatizes the resources devoted to culture. It need not mean that the poet was forcibly abducted: the clause says that the ship was sent and he was brought, but supplies no resistance, negotiation or agreement. Nor does the text explain who owned the ship, how the voyage was financed or where Anacreon embarked.

Socrates gathers this action under the wish to educate the citizens. He does not quote Anacreon or describe the content of his poetry. The educational value is asserted through the gathering of an eminent poet rather than demonstrated in a surviving lesson. Consequently the reader should not infer that the dialogue endorses a specific Anacreontic doctrine or that every song performed at court was a civic curriculum.

The Aristotelian Constitution also associates Hipparchus with inviting Anacreon and Simonides to Athens. That parallel supports the broad reputation for poetic patronage, while the fifty-oared ship remains the vivid detail furnished by this narrative and its dependent retelling. An overlap in patronage does not confirm the account of Hipparchus’ seniority or the intellectual motive for his murder.

Places to read

1. 228cἈνακρέοντα τὸν Τήιον — Anacreon is identified by his Teian origin.
2. 228cπεντηκόντορον — The ship is specified as fifty-oared.
3. 228cστείλας ἐκόμισεν εἰς τὴν πόλιν — Sending the vessel is followed by bringing the poet to the city.

Translation in this edition

“Fifty-oared ship” makes the object immediately intelligible without requiring the technical transliteration “penteconter.” The edition records a damaged second omicron in the printed πεντηκόντορον and reads the intended type. That printing issue does not indicate uncertainty over what kind of vessel the Greek word denotes.