Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/95

 successive generations of raconteurs with ever-varying settings. Fresh combinations of motifs have been and are still being tried; fresh embroidery of detail may be added by each artist; only the theme in its plainest form, the mere groundwork of story, remains immutable. This at the same time explains the wide variations of the same myth even among the ancients themselves, and warns us not to judge of the value of a modern folk-story or folk-song by the closeness of its resemblance to any ancient myth which may have been preserved to us in literature. It was naturally the most finished and artistic presentment of the story which appealed to the taste of educated men and thus became the orthodox classical version; but there is every likelihood that before the story reached the stage of acknowledged perfection much that was primitive had been suppressed as inartistic, and much that was not traditional had been added by the poet's imagination. The unlettered story-teller, endowed with less fancy and ignorant of the conventions of art, is a far trustier vehicle of pure tradition; for though he feels himself at liberty to compose variations of the original theme, he certainly has less power and generally less inclination to do so; for it is on exactness of memory and even verbal fidelity to the traditional form of the story that the modern story-teller chiefly prides himself. Hence the modern folk-story, straight from the peasant's lips in a form almost verbally identical with that in which successive generations of peasants before him narrated it, may contain more genuinely primitive material than a literary version of it which dates from perhaps two thousand years or more ago.

§ 4.

A story, again from the same collection, runs in brief as follows:—Once upon a time a priest had a good son who tended goats. One day 'Panos' gave him a kid with a skin of gold. He at once offered it as a burnt-offering to God, and in answer an angel promised him whatsoever he should ask. He chose a magic pipe which should make all hearers dance. So no enemy could come near to touch him. The king however sent for him,