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The Song
Eat and drink, captains, and I shall tell you,
I shall tell you the story of a brave man,
A young man whom I saw on the plains hunting,
Hunting the hares and chasing the ibex.
– Put off your clothes, young man, lay down your weapons
And bind your hands high in the air and I’ll take your soul.
– I’ll not put off my clothes or my weapons.
You are a man, I am a man, both of us brave –
Come let us wrestle on the marble threshing floor,
For the mountains would crack and the countryside be spoilt.
They went and wrestled on the iron threshing floor.
And nine times the young man threw Charos,
And Charos rose up again nine times, and took the young man,
Grasped his hair and forced him to his knees.
– Let go my hair, Charos, and take me by the arm,
And then I will show you what heroes are made of.
– I take all heroes just like this,
I take beautiful girls and fighting men
And I take little babies with their mothers.
A slender girl met me on the three steps of Hades
And I thought she would ask me of her mother
Her brother or sister or her first cousins;
But she did not ask me of her mother
Her brother or her sister or her first cousins,
But she sat down and asked me of the upper world.
–Does the sky still hold up, does the upper world stand?
Do brave young men and women stili get married?
Do they build churches, do they build monasteries,
Do they baptize children?
In other songs Hades is a place of denial and negation, where there
are no children playing, no targets to shoot at, no weapons, no musical
instruments. Sometimes the dead make vain plans to escape. In Greek
folk song as a whole the iconography of death is extraordinarily rich –
for it is pictures which these songs put into the mind, miniature,
poignant pictures. The view they embody is primitive and anti-
Christian. There are glimpses of Christian elements; Charos sometimes
appears dazzling with golden hair like the rays of the sun, his eyes
flashing lightning– in other words with the attributes of the Archangel
Michael, who is Charos’s shadow-minister in the Christian tradition,
and carries off the soul at the moment of death. But this is little comfort
when his kingdom is as it is. It is a place of nothingness. It is the abroad
from which you do not return. And there is a perpetual, frustrated.
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