of the arts and sciences and the other ascertained facts of history, and may vary from glaring inconsistency to scarcely perceptible misrepresentation. Much of the thought entertained about the past is so deficient in historical perspective as to be little better than a continuous anachronism. It is only since the close of the 18th century that this kind of untruthfulness has jarred on the general intelligence. Anachronisms abound in the works of Raphael and Shakespeare, as well as in those of the meanest daubers and playwrights of earlier times. In particular, the artists, on the stage and on the canvas, in story and in song, assimilated their dramatis personae to their own nationality and their own time. The Virgin was represented here as an Italian contadina, and there as a Flemish frow; Alexander the Great appeared on the French stage in the full costume of Louis XIV. down to the time of Voltaire; and in England the contemporaries of Addison could behold, without any suspicion of burlesque,
“Cato’s long wig, flower’d gown, and lacquer’d chair.”
Modern realism, the progress of archaeological research, and the more scientific spirit of history, have made an anachronism an offence, where our ancestors saw none.
ANACOLUTHON (Gr. for “not following on”), a grammatical term, given to a defectively constructed sentence which does not run on as a continuous whole; this may occur either, in a text, by some corruption, or, in the case of a writer or speaker, simply through his forgetting the way in which he started. In the case of a man who is full of his subject, or who is carried along by the passion of the moment, such inconsequents are very apt to occur. Of Niebuhr it is told that his oral lectures consisted almost entirely of anacoluthic constructions. To this kind of licence some languages, as Greek and English, readily lend themselves; while the grammatical rigidity of others, as Latin and French, admits of it but sparingly. In Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Pindar and Plato, abundant specimens are to be found; and the same is true of the writers of the Elizabethan age in English. The following is an example:—“And he charged him to tell no man; but go show thyself,” &c. (Luke v. 14).
ANACONDA, a city and the county-seat of Deer Lodge county, Montana, U.S.A., situated in the mountains on the W. side of Deer Lodge Valley, in the S.W. part of the state, about 26 m. N.W. of Butte, and at an altitude of about 5300 ft. Pop. (1890) 3975; (1900) 9453, of whom 3478 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 10,134. It is connected with Butte by the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific railroad. Among its public buildings are the county court-house and the Hearst free public library (1898). Industrially, Anaconda is essentially a smelting camp for the copper ores from the Butte mines, probably the largest copper-smelter in the world being located here; the principal copper-mine at Butte—one of the most famous copper-mines in the world—is called the Anaconda. In 1905 the capital invested in manufacturing was $13,728,456, and the factory product was valued at $28,581,530. Electric power generated at the Helena Power Transmission Company’s plant on the Missouri river, 18 m. from Helena, comes to Anaconda over 110 m. of wire at 70,000 voltage. Anaconda is to a large degree the market and trading-place of the Big Hole Basin cattle country in the north-western part of Beaverhead county; with Wisdom, in the Big Hole Basin, it was connected in 1905 by a 65 m. telephone line. Anaconda was first settled in 1884 and was chartered as a city in 1888.
ANACONDA, an aquatic boa, inhabiting the swamps and rivers of the dense forests of tropical South America. It is the largest of all modern snakes, said to attain over 30 ft. in length. The Eunectes murinus (formerly called Boa murina) differs from Boa by the snout being covered with shields instead of small scales, the inner of the three nasal shields being in contact with that of the other side. The general colour is dark olive-brown, with large oval black spots arranged in two alternating rows along the back, and with smaller white-eyed spots along the sides. The belly is whitish, spotted with black. The anaconda combines an arboreal with an aquatic life, and feeds chiefly upon birds and mammals, mostly during the night. It lies submerged in the water, with only a small part of its head above the surface, waiting for any suitable prey, or it establishes itself upon the branches of a tree which overhangs the water or the track of game. Being eminently aquatic this snake is viviparous. It is the only large boa which is decidedly ill-tempered.
ANACREON, Greek lyric poet, was born about 560 B.C., at Teos, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor. Little is known of his life, except a few scattered notices, not in all cases certainly authentic. He probably shared the voluntary exile of the mass of his fellow-townsmen, who, when Cyrus the Great was besieging the Greek cities of Asia (545), rather than surrender their city to his general Harpagus, sailed to Abdera in Thrace, where they founded a colony. Anacreon seems to have taken part in the fighting, in which, on his own admission, he did not distinguish himself, but, like Alcaeus and Horace, threw away his shield and fled. From Thrace he removed to the court of Polycrates of Samos, one of the best of those old “tyrants,” who by no means deserved the name in its worst sense. He is said to have acted as tutor to Polycrates; that he enjoyed the tyrant’s confidence we learn on the authority of Herodotus (iii. 121), who represents the poet as sitting in the royal chamber when audience was given to the Persian herald. In return for his favour and protection, Anacreon wrote many complimentary odes upon his patron. Like his fellow-lyrist, Horace, who was one of his great admirers, and in many respects of a kindred spirit, Anacreon seems to have been made for the society of courts. On the death of Polycrates, Hipparchus, who was then in power at Athens and inherited the literary tastes of his father Peisistratus, sent a special embassy to fetch the popular poet to Athens in a galley of fifty oars. Here he became acquainted with the poet Simonides, and other members of the brilliant circle which had gathered round Hipparchus. When this circle was broken up by the assassination of Hipparchus, Anacreon seems to have returned to his native town of Teos, where, according to a metrical epitaph ascribed to his friend Simonides, he died and was buried. According to others, before returning to Teos, he accompanied Simonides to the court of Echecrates, a Thessalian dynast of the house of the Aleuadae. Lucian mentions Anacreon amongst his instances of the longevity of eminent men, as having completed eighty-five years. If an anecdote given by Pliny (Nat. Hist. vii. 7) is to be trusted, he was choked at last by a grape-stone, but the story has an air of mythical adaptation to the poet’s habits, which makes it somewhat apocryphal. Anacreon was for a long time popular at Athens, where his statue was to be seen on the Acropolis, together with that of his friend Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. On several coins of Teos he is represented, holding a lyre in his hand, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing. A marble statue found in 1835 in the Sabine district, and now in the Villa Borghese, is said to represent Anacreon. Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those bacchanalian and amatory lyrics which are commonly associated with his name. 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 pagan 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 tone of Anacreon’s lyric effusions has probably led to an unjust estimate, by both ancients and moderns, of the poet’s personal character. The “triple worship” of the Muses, Wine and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epigram (Anthol. iii. 25, 51), 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. Athenaeus remarks acutely that he seems at least to have been sober when he wrote; and he himself strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for barbarians and Scythians (Fr. 64). Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which Suidas and Athenaeus mention as extant in their time, we have now but the merest fragments, collected from the citations of later writers. Those graceful little poems (most of them first printed
