| dc.description.abstract | As early as the fifth century, Anacreon was the poet of wine, love, and song; even his
death—choking on a pip—is attributed to the grape. The fact that the symposion
looms large in the extant fragments is, therefore, hardly surprising. In this article,
I examine Anacreon’s sympotic verse and its moral quality. While the ethical character
of Xenophanes’ and Theognis’ sympotic fragments has been acknowledged,
most scholars consider Anacreon as a poet of love, rather than of moral instruction.
Recently, Lear and Hobden have begun to address the moral and instructive
character of Anacreon’s verse. I build on these analyses by examining the Anacreontic
speaker’s presentation of moral value through his own person; there are 46
first-person statements in Anacreon, an important fact considering the narrative and
psychological potency of “I” statements in early Greek lyric. In contrast to gnomic
statements that purport to be generalized prescriptions, Anacreon’s performative “I”
offers an alternative mode of moralizing delivery. These first persons, however, are
not the same person: Anacreon gives a multitude of perspectives on appropriate sympotic behaviour. I read the Anacreontic speaker’s diverse and changing persona as a challenging and embodied moral perspective, which destabilizes the idea of a true
self, and consequently denies the stereotyping of ancient poetic biography. By enunciating Anacreon’s songs, the speaker puts his own body and individuality into play
in the “educative” space of the symposion. In Anacreon’s verse, the self itself becomes
the space on which sympotic instructions—moral imperatives—are inscribed and
displayed to others. | en_US |
