free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Revolt of Daskaloyiannis
mysteriously comes to life. Pantzelios, like other greater poets, was
more concerned with the pity of war than the fighting of it. The two of
Daskaloyiannis’s four daughters who were captured ask after their
father.
‘He is down at a feast, and other chieftains with him.’
(And all the time the fishes were devouring him.)
And from the girls, ‘the envy of the Maytime cherries, dear princesses,
fresh as foam, the envy of the April flowers’, Pantzelios moves into a
long, long dirge, contrasting the old Sphakia, prosperous and happy,
with the new. It is an exact picture, closely and lovingly observed, of a
way of life. If you walk through Sphakia you will no longer see longhaired
girls dressed up in their Sunday best or young men with silvercrusted
armour, tall and wasp-waisted, like violins, or old white-haired
men sitting at the table, eating and drinking, singing their songs till the
table rings. Where are they ? All gone. And Uncle Pantzelios says goodbye
to the great Sphakian families, calling on them by name, and dismissing
them with a question - ‘Where are you?’
He was right to dismiss them, for though the names survived,
Pantzelios’s old society was gone for ever. Greece, which is the cradle
of democracy, as the people are reminded by some newspaper every
day, could justly claim to be at least a playpen for oligarchy as well.
Daskaloyiannis’s society was oligarchic, led by a few pre-eminent
families, prosperous as never since. (Before the revolt Sphakia had a
fleet of over forty ships, whose activities are unfortunately badly documented.
But for this premature uprising, Sphakia might well have
figured more largely in the 1821 war, as Hydra did.) Sphakia was thus
ideally suitable for the heroic oral poet like Pantzelios, who could
count on a sympathetic, aristocratic audience. Provided the rules were
observed, that is the patron’s name mentioned from time to time, the
poet could earn a living. Pantzelios was just one of a long line of Cretan
rhymadori, who, always poor and often blind, wandered from village to
village peddling songs. Outwardly, the ‘Song of Daskabyiannis’ is
quite like a Homeric lay, in its heavy reliance on formulae, its invocation
of an inspiring deity, and its philosophy. Virtue for Pantzelios is
akin to Homer’s arete: in modern Greek, levendia, gallantry –
Joy to the man who meets his death in battle.
He who dies in battle is the winner, not the loser.
He wins a deathless name, a garland of honour.
But there are puzzles; the chief of them concerning Daskaloyiannis
himself.
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