There is no lack of terms to describe what I have chosen to call the folk poetry of modern Greece. Folk songs, ballads, epics, epic ballads, traditional songs, oral songs, oral tradition, oral poetry, all are widely used and, at least in a general sense, clearly enough understood. The expression ‘oral literature’ has gained ground in recent years through efforts, particularly of anthropologists, to find a blanket term which would include all the others, although there are signs now that the general distinction between ‘oral’ and other kinds of literature is not as clearcut as was once believed. (As will be seen later, not all the songs discussed in this book are unequivocally ‘oral’.) The more old-fashioned ‘folk poetry’ does not of course cover all types of unwritten ‘literary’ expression – the oral poems attributed to Homer, for instance, were surely sung to entertain the pre-classical Greek aristocracy rather than the ‘folk’ – but it does truly describe the oral songs of modern Greece, in that all of them seem to have been produced away from centres of power and learning. The political and social attitudes they embody are unsympathetic to authority, whether Greek, Turkish or ecclesiastical, and in their language and cultural referents they lie at the opposite extreme from the archaising book-culture of Byzantium which has dominated religious, political and scientific writing up to the present day.