Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and the observations of everyday people and life.

According to Himerius, he was invited there to educate Polycrates, the future tyrant of Samos, who Strabo reports was one of the main subjects of his poetry.

As a consequence, translators have historically tended to substitute rhyme, stress rhythms, stanzaic patterning and other devices for the style of the originals, with the primary, sometimes only, connection to the Greek verses being the subject matter.

Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and observations of everyday people and life.

Two short hymns to Artemis and Dionysus, consisting of eight and eleven lines respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed remains, as printed by recent editors.

But hymns, especially when addressed to such deities as Aphrodite, Eros and Dionysus, are not so very unlike what we call "Anacreontic" poetry as to make the contrast of style as great as the word might seem to imply.

The "triple worship" of the Muses, Wine and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epigram,[13] may have been as purely professional in the two last cases as in the first, and his private character on such points was probably neither much better nor worse than that of his contemporaries.

[15][16] Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which the Suda and Athenaeus mention as extant in their time, only the merest fragments exist today, collected from the citations of later writers.

The subject of the poem still remains: Anacreon complaining that a young woman, whom he compares to a Thracian filly, does not recognize his amatory skills.

[19] His writings influenced fifth-century Athenian drama, as tragedy adopted his metres, while several surviving comic fragments mention him, and Aristophanes included adaptations of Anacreon's poems in his plays.

[20] Ancient philosophical and moralistic writers were divided on Anacreon, with some, such as Plato, portraying him as a wise man, while others condemned him for being too concerned with drunkenness and lust.

[26] The Anacreontea were the most important influence on Anacreon's later reception,[22] with the edition of Henricus Stephanus in 1554 initiating a trend for short and playful "Anacreontic" poetry.

[22] In the visual arts, Anacreon was largely shown in a biographical or literary context: Raphael painted him in the company of Sappho in Parnassus, while a caricature by Honoré Daumier illustrates the ancient story that he choked to death on a grape seed.