Anacreonte. Testimonianze antiche. Traduzione e commento

Since his lifetime, Anacreon has asserted himself as icon both in lifestyle and poetry, by inspiring not only a poetic style, adapted to different contexts or literary genres, but also a life-conception. This is the result of two factors: first, he became the ionic pattern of arbiter elegantiarum in the Athenian society at the end of VI BC; second, his poetic style, favoring simple but elegant forms, was bound to attract readers and imitators throughout the ages. Aim of this study is to provide a collection and classification, with translation and commentary, of all the sources concerning Anacreon’s life, work (and its ancient editions), meter and reception in antiquity, including anecdotes and Hellenistic epigrammatic praises to his graves and statues. For this wide range of fields, such a collection serves different purposes: to return Anacreon to his historical and biographical context; to discuss how antiquity collected his poetry and classified and judged the poetic genres he practiced; and also, to separate Anacreon from the later abstractions, by asking whether the ancients read the true poet or late imitations. In other words, by looking through the ancients’ lenses, it may be possible to examine more distinctly the different images of Anacreon shaped by tradition and how different they are from the historical profile.