Haya heroic ballads are long story-songs. Their protagonists are larger-than-life heroes whose actions embody ethical knowledge. Many of the stories can be called "epic" -- literature set in an heroic age, a time before the present that has certain universal features, among them, a social organization with a dominant military class, honor and prestige as primary values, the near equal importance of words and deeds in defending those values, and, most importantly, a distributed system of ethics, in which members of different social standings embody different virtues. Protagonists in classic Haya ballads are of four kinds: gods, kings, warrior-heroes, and lovers.