To the list of Æolian poets, Anacreon, though an Ionian by birth and an Ionian in temperament, is generally added, because he cultivated the lyrical stanza of personal emotion. Into the Æolian style Anacreon introduced a new and uncongenial element. His passion had none of Sappho's fiery splendor, none of the haughtiness and restlessness which distinguished Alcæus. There was a vein of levity, almost of vulgarity, in the Ionians, which removed them from the altitudes of Dorian heroism and Æolian enthusiasm. This tincture of flippancy is discernible in Anacreon. Life and love come easily to him. The roses keep no secrets for his ears, such as they told to Sappho: they serve very well for garlands when he drinks, and have a pleasant smell, especially in myrrh. The wine-cup does not suggest to him variety of seasons--the frozen streams of winter, the parched breath of the dog-star--as with Alcæus: he tipples and gets drunk. His loves, too, are facile--neither permanent nor tempestuous. The girls and boys of whom he sings were flute-players and cupbearers, servants of a tyrant, _instrumenta libidinis_, chosen for their looks, as the poet had been selected for the sweetness of his lyre with twenty chords. He never felt the furnace of Sappho, whose love, however criminal in the estimation of modern moralists, was serious and of the soul. The difference between the lives of these three lyrists is very striking. Alcæus was a politician and party leader. Sappho was the centre of a free society of female poets. Anacreon was the courtier and laureate of tyrants. He won his first fame with Polycrates, at whose death Hipparchus fetched him to Athens in a trireme of fifty oars. Between Bacchus and Venus he spent his days in palaces; and died at the ripe age of eighty-five at Teos, choked, it is reported, by a grape-stone--a hoary-headed _roué_, for whom the rhyme of the mediæval Arcipoeta might have been written: Meum est propositum, In taberna mori, etc. It need not be remarked that of the genuine poems of Anacreon we possess but few (pp. 1011-1045 of Bergk). His great popularity in Greece led to innumerable imitations of his lighter style.[99] These are fully preserved in Bergk's _Collection_ (pp. 1046-1108).