eS ee ae ee 
ee ey eee ee ee ee ee ee ee Te 
ASTER AS KNOWN TO SHEPHERDS 37 
The ancient pastoral life immortalized to us by Theocritus and 
Vergil still survives among the Greek shepherds of to-day; a 
modern Greek poem pictures the Vlach* who “went and sat 
beneath the fir; who folded his flock by the bramble,” “where by 
the weird-haunted rocks he played upon his pipe.” + In Aetolia 
Rodd heard shepherd boys singing while “ playing on their six- 
stopped pipes cut from a hollow cane in the old traditional way.”’ 
The survival of the ancient shepherd life in and near Attica is 
thus described by Rennell Rodd: “ Whatever their race, their 
manner of life is the same. Their days are spent entirely in the 
open air, and in wet weather or dry they sleep with their flocks, 
covered with their rough frieze cloaks on the mountainside ; in the 
summer they explore the higher altitudes, and make their halting 
places in the lambing season under some dark vallonea’s shade . . . 
Illness is unknown among them and they generally live to a very 
great age... . One may see the shepherds moving camp often on 
a November morning marching around the outskirts of Athens, 
when they move down from the high pastures of Cithaeron to win- 
ter in the lower slopes around the foot of Pentelikon. . . . It is in 
this folk of the mountains and the open air, living their changeless 
life apart, with their tanned and faunlike faces, and the laughing 
look in their clear brown eyes under the matted curly hair, that 
the link to the older world is the closest. Their habits, their 
methods, their very dress, have hardly changed ; and living face to 
face as they do with the miracle of nature, the weirdness of mighty 
forces unaccounted for, and the evidences of strange phenomena 
which they cannot explain, still keep alive in them the mystery of 
the ancient Pantheism. (Rodd, 80 ; and again, p. 203),—The shep- 
herds of Parnassus who live all their lives in the open air on the 
mountainside, keenly sensitive to those impressions which affect 
all simple people who live face to face with nature at her wildest 
and ruggedest, still speak of supernatural appearances, as of the 
apparition of a monstrous he-goat among their flocks.” 
That the story of the aster shining in the night should arise 
among them is quite in keeping, even though it may have grown 
* Vlach. The modern Greek knows the shepherds as Vlachs because many of 
them are of Wallachian origin. —Rodd, Customs and Folklore of Modern Greece, 80. 
} Rodd, Customs and Folklore of Modern Greece, 279. 
