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The Great Island
so, one need hardly bother oneself with unanswerable questions, such
as ‘Which is their real system of belief? Which do they believe harder?’
For they believe both, at different times and in different ways. And if
we appreciate the facts of the situation, that is enough.
After all these reservations and qualifications it is time to look at
the folk song itself; it has already cropped up from time to time in this
book.
The Greeks are perhaps the oldest ballad-mongers in Europe.
Arethas of Caesarea, who died in 932, refers to the agyrtes, mountebanks
like the accursed Paphlagonians (i.e. Cappadocians) who make up
songs about the feats of distinguished men and sing them from house
to house at an obol a time. These ballads, now called the Akritic cycle,
arose out of the wars on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, where
the borderers had to defend themselves against the Saracen menace –
often without help from the imperial armies. Thus there existed the
best possible conditions for balladry: an unsettled aristocratic society,
and a series of wars in which great feudal chieftains had opportunities
for magnificent personal exploits. Akra means an edge. The Akritic
cycle is the cycle of ballads from the edges of the Empire – border
ballads – and one of the heroes who features most prominently in it
was named Akritas, the Borderer: Digenes Akritas, the hero also of a
long narrative epic poem.
What have these Cappadocian borderers to do with Crete? Plenty.
For the Akritic ballads are the beginning of Greek folk song as we know
it, song which is almost always in the fifteen-syllable ‘political’ verse,
which sounds like our Barbara Allen:
In Scarlet town where I was born there was a fair maid dwelling
Made every youth cry well-a-day; her name was Barbara Allen.
Only rhyme came into Greek folk poetry from contact with the
‘Franks’, long after the Akritic ballads were born.
Thus all Greek folk poetry stems from the Akritic cycle, songs from
which have been collected from all parts of Greece and the islands.
Certain elements of Greek song are much older even than this. The
swallow song, for instance, where the swallow flies in from the sea and
announces the coming of spring, is found in ancient Greece, and other
themes are survivals from the ancient world. But the form is compara-
tively young.
Now ballads, and especially good ballads, travel quickly. The best
of them cross linguistic frontiers. There are at least two cases where
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