birds . . . impart to us by signs all that God has revealed to them, it follows of necessity that they have a closer intimacy than we with the divine, that they surpass us in knowledge of it, and are dearer to God than we[1].' Indeed it might seem that there was hope of birds knowing that which a god sought in vain to learn. To Demeter enquiring for her ravished child 'no god nor mortal man would tell the true tale, nor came there to her any bird of omen as messenger of truth[2].' In effect, the special aptitude of birds to carry divine messages to men was never questioned in ancient Greece; it was a very axiom of religion, without which the whole science of auspices would have been a baseless fabrication.
Now it would have been no matter of surprise for us, if practical augury had still been in vogue at the present day and the theory had been forgotten; if the customs born of a belief in the prophetic power of birds had, with the inveteracy of all custom, outlived the parent principle. Rather it is surprising that among all the perplexity and bewilderment of thought caused by the long series of changes, religious, political, and social, through which Greece has passed, this recognition of birds as intermediaries between heaven and earth has abated none of its force or its purity, neither vanquished by the direct antagonism of Christianity, nor contaminated by the influx of Slavonic or other foreign thought. Yet so it is; and the perusal of any collection of modern folk-songs will show that the idea is fully as familiar now as in the literature of old time.
A few examples may be cited; and in selecting them I shall exclude from consideration those many Klephtic ballads which open with a conversation between three 'birds[3]'; for the word 'bird' ([Greek: pouli]) seems to have become among the Klephts a colloquial equivalent for 'spy' or 'scout,' suggested perhaps by the qualities of intelligence, alertness, and speed required, and it is admittedly[4] impossible in many cases to determine whether the term has its literal or its conventional meaning. Moreover these openings of ballads have passed into a somewhat set form; and formulae are
- ↑ Origen, contra Cels. IV. 88.
- ↑ Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 46.
- ↑ e.g. Passow, Popul. Carm. nos. 122, 123, 213, 232, 234, 235, 251 et passim.
- ↑ A. Luber in a monograph Die Vögel in den historischen Liedern der Neugriechen, pp. 6 ff., notes the impossibility of determining in many cases whether a real bird or a scout is meant.
