Anacreon of Teos

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 exceptionof 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 beenpaid 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 recentfindings 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 rolein his poetry.

The exhaustive 600 page commentary of Volume Two reviews supplements to the fragments and tries to tease out contexts as well as commenting on style and meter, earlier sources, and later imitations; it will be the standard edition of this important and beguiling figure for a long time to come, and one hopes for an affordable paperback soon., In the battle against the ravages of time, B.'s Anacreontic commentary represents a worthy weapon. It is apparent from the preface that the focus of the book is on the commentary, which indeed occupies pp. 255-861 of the work., Readers will find in Bernsdorff's work ample spurs for their own explorations., In this edition, consisting of a text and translation of all the major fragments and testimonia (volume I) and a detailed commentary (volume II), Hans Bernsdorff equips readers for their voyage into Anacreon's worlds with everything required for a philologically informed approach to his texts. The volumes are a major scholarly achievement, and will be consulted with profit by anyone interested in Greek lyric poetry., Bernsdorff's longstanding engagement with Anacreon makes this a treasure-trove of insight, and his diligence and judgment in representing textual controversies ensure that it will be the standard edition of the poet for the foreseeable future.

Professor Hans Bernsdorff is Professor of Classics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main.