ABSTRACT
The Italian Hellenist Massimo Peri points out that in the history of Italian poetry, although the terms ballata, canzone, canzonetta and sonetto indicate that these verse forms had a musical origin, the poems themselves eventually became divorced from their relationship with music. Peri goes on to argue that ‘what differentiate the Greek situation from that of the Romance languages are the intensity and the duration of the connections between poetry and music’. In the Greek national narrative the outlaws known as the klefts are presented as those who chiefly resisted Turkish domination and as the precursors of the warriors who led the fighting in the War of Independence. The folk songs that celebrated the exploits of the klefts have sometimes been seen as the chief poetic expression of the Greek nation during the otherwise allegedly ‘unpoetic’ eighteenth century.
