THE GREEK ANACREONTICS AND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LYRIC POETRY

Patricia Rosenmeyer

I. Introduction

The nineteenth-century French scholar Emile Egger, in his two- volume work entided L'Hellénisme en France: Sur l'influence des études grecques dans le développement de la langue et de la littérature françaises (Paris, 1869), divides the progress of sixteenth-century French lyric poetry into three stages:1

d'abord une phase que je pourrais appeler de développement naturel et qui conforme à la tradition du moyen âge; ensuite, une phase d'imi• tation laborieuse, celle qui characterise le Pindarisme de Ronsard; enfin, une sorte de retour à la nature, après la publication d'Anacréon par Henri Estienne.

Egger's tripartite division leaves out some details, such as the pop• ularity of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in France at this time,2 and implies in an oversimplified way a strict chronological poetic development with little room for variation, but on the whole, his generalization holds true. The goal of this chapter is to explore the last of Egger's categories, the influence of Estienne's Anacreon on the scholars and poets of the 1550s in Paris, and in particular on Pierre de Ronsard. In 1530, thanks in large part to the efforts of the brilliant philo• logist Guillaume Budé, Royal Readerships were established at the Collège de France; these Readers produced in the next few decades a stellar assortment of classical scholars specializing in such areas as

1 Egger 1869: 347. For general background on sixteenth-century lyric poetry and the French Renaissance, see e.g., Chamard 1961; Hutton 1950; Pfeiffer 1958: 3-83; Silver 1981, 1985, 1987. On Ronsard, see e.g., Laumonier 1909; de Nolhac 1921; Hutton 1943; Silver 1969; Christodoulou 1988; Gendre 1997. 2 See Hutton 1943: 103: "The attempt to naturalize the types of classical poetry on the one hand, and on the other the outpouring of Petrarchan sonnets, together very nearly make up the sum of poetical activity in the second half of the sixteenth century in France." 394 PATRICIA ROSENMEYER lexicography, law, and textual criticism: Adrien Turnèbe, Jean Dorât, Denys Lambin, Marc-Antoine Muret, and the somewhat younger Henri Estienne.3 James Hutton, in his excellent summary of "The Classics in Sixteenth-Century France," points out the unusually close relationship between these classical scholars and a new breed of poets who happened to be under their tutelage:4 The outlook of this generation of scholars, their emphasis on the poets of Greece and Rome, made possible a fruitful relationship between them and the rising generation of French poets, whose publications began in 1549-50. Of these poets, Ronsard and Jean-Antoine de Baïf, and, briefly, Joachim du Bellay were pupils of Jean Dorat, while Etienne de Jodelle and Remy Belleau attended the college of Boncourt, where they had as masters George Buchanan and Muret. The interest of the scholars in the ancient poets gave them an interest in forming and encouraging the poets of the present, and these poets in turn, having seized upon the ancient idea of the vates and the doctus poeta, remained close to the world of scholarship throughout their lives.

The felicitous introduction by Henri Estienne of the poems of "Anacreon"—that is, the poems from the collection attributed to, but not necessarily written by, Anacreon—to the newly formed group of poets known as the "Pléiade" resulted in a new poetic direction not just in France, but in Renaissance England and slighdy later in Germany as well, and changed the nature of the "ode légère" in European literature forever. Anacreon became their vates, an inspi• ration for lyric composition more suited to contemporary verse forms and subject matter than Pindar's complexities. Let us begin this study with a closer look at the anacreontic corpus itself, and try to recover what it was about the poetry that excited both scholar and poet and led them to regard these verses as simultaneously a window to antiq• uity and an inspiration for new poetic composition.

II. Henri Estienne and the Rediscovery of "Anacreon" in France

We rely on a single manuscript for the transmission of the anacre• ontic corpus, which exists as an appendix to the tenth-century codex of the Palatine Anthology? The collection consists of sixty poems com-

3 Hutton 1950: 132-33. 4 Hutton 1950: 132. 5 The manuscript tradition is dealt with extensively in my book on the anacre-