3io BALKAN BALLADS

listener sympathizes anxiously with the girl's restless inquiries,
which her dead brother does so little to calm and satisfy:

Along the roads as they passed by the little birds were twittering,
but twittered not with voice of birds, nor yet like unto swallows,
but twittered they and spoke in words as men do speak together:
'Now does she know, the pretty maid, that a dead man conducteth?'
'But do you hear, my Constantine, what things the birds are saying?'
4Just birds, so let them twitter on; mere birds, so let them chatter.'
And further, as they went their way, yet other birds addressed them:
'Surely it is a crime, a wrong, a strange and mighty wonder,
that living men should go their ways in company with dead ones!'
'But do you hear, my Constantine, what things the birds are saying?
how living men do go their ways in company with dead ones?'
'Tis April now and so they talk; 'tis May, and nests a-buiiding.'
*I fear me greatly, brother mine, with unguents you're anointed.'
"Nay yester even as I went into St. George's temple,
the reverend father sprinkled me with overflowing unguent.'
And on they passed and on they went and other birds addressed them:
'Now all the world is gone awry, and 'tis a mighty wonder,
that such a pretty maid should be she whom the dead conducteth.'1

Such ballads are Akritic because they go back to the Akritic age,
which is the oldest stratum of European balladry: an age when the
Greek frontier was on the Euphrates and the Saracens were their
enemies, before the Seljuqid Turks have appeared. They are Cappa-
docian, because found in that province, or Paphlagonian, as Arethas
preferred to say, or Pontic. Removed so far from European Greece
they escaped the eyes of the first collectors, who found only the
later klephtic ballads of the seventeenth century and onwards;
and they have only in our own day been brought within the easy
reach of scholars, thanks to the Greek migrations which accom-
panied the triumphal advance of Kemal Atatiirk. Old modes of
music and unexplored variations of the words enchant the col-
lectors, who are actively gathering the remains of this ancient
poetry in the Greece of to-day.

The Akritic ballads are separated from the klephtic by the depth
of the Turkish invasions and the breadth of Byzantine literature.
The Greek capital was hardly favourable soil for the growth of
balladry. Peculiarly literate, the flood of classical manuscripts
which fecundated the Renaissance in Italy represented but a back-

1 J. E. Flecker's Bryan of Brittany is a beautiful adaptation of this ballad in
the English style.