Author: ANACREON
Biography:
ANACREON (b c. 575-570 BCE: OCD)
Anacreon was probably born in Teos, Ionia (now Turkey). He was a lyric poet who was attached to the court of Polycrates of Samos and, later, to the court at Athens. Only fragments of his verse survive, with most of it celebrating love, revelry, and wine. The translations listed here are not of the surviving fragments known to be by Anacreon. Rather, they are translations of a collection of odes inspired by Anacreon but composed by unknown later poets probably in about the first to fifth centuries CE. They survive in manuscript as a collection known as the Anacreontea and were first published in France in 1554. Despite their anonymous origins, the odes were widely influential on the development of European lyric poetry. Translators of the odes who have their own headnotes in this database are Thomas Moore, Francis Howes, Edward Thurlow, William Biglow, and James Usher. Of the other translators, William Green is included in the headnote to Horace whose work he also translated. The Rev. David Henry Urquhart was born in Dorset in late 1754. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford (MA 1803), and was ordained in 1784. He married Elizabeth Day in Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1783; they had one daughter and four sons. Urquhart was installed as a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral in 1792. He died at Broadmayne, Dorset, on 22 May 1829. The Rev. Hercules Drelincourt Younge of Huguenot descent was born in Dublin in about 1720 and died on 14 Jan. 1798. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1743). Thomas Girdlestone (baptised 22 Aug. 1758, died 25 May 1822) served as a physician in Yarmouth, Norfolk, for over thirty years. His other publications include medical treatises and an essay on the authorship of the Junius letters. Although John Broderick Roche identified himself as “M.D. and A.M.” on the title page of his 1827 translation, he has not been identified. His book garnered praise for including prose and verse translations with the Greek originals, an analysis of Greek grammar, and a lexicon. Nothing is known about Thomas Bourne whose 1830 translation was issued by Colburn and Bentley in their Family Classical Library series. (OCD 3 Mar. 2025; ODNB 3 Mar. 2025 [Girdlestone]; ancestry.co.uk 3 Mar. 2025; CCEd 3 Mar. 2025) SR