Quote by Anacreon: “Youth, lovely youth, is fleeting, soon as morning dream.”

Youth vanishes before you realize it is going — not slowly, like aging, but all at once in retrospect. Anacreon wrote this with characteristic lightness, but the image of a morning dream is precise: you are certain it was real, vivid, and full, and then it is simply gone.

Anacreon wrote during the flourishing of Archaic Greek lyric poetry, a period when celebrated poets were supported by aristocratic and tyrannical courts across the Greek world. His work was performed at symposia — the formal drinking gatherings of the Greek elite — where pleasure and mortality were constant companion themes.

Greek lyric poet who lived approximately 582–485 BCE on the island of Teos. He was celebrated across the ancient world for his poems on wine, love, and the pleasures of life. He spent time at the courts of various rulers and was one of the canonical nine lyric poets recognized in ancient literary tradition.