Digenes Akritas, called Akrites in our earliest sources, is the hero of
several texts from the medieval and early modern periods and of several Modern
Greek folk songs. Six Greek and one Slavic version of the epic survive.
The
earliest manuscript, named after the monastery at Grottaferrata, has been dated
to approximately 1300. It has been argued that the long narratives are attempts
to form a single cohesive story out of loosely connected songs about a hero who
may have lived in the ninth century, during the reign of Basil I.1 The songs
and epics of Digenes have been mined for historical information more often than
they have been studied as works of verbal art.
Scholarship on the epic tends to favor a date of origin in the twelfth
century based on societal structures portrayed in the text, but a date closer
to that of the Grottaferrata manuscript’s production circa 1300 is possible.2
The epic is thoroughly nostalgic, celebrating the frontier spirit that
protected the Empire before it lost its vast Asian territories, and an author
attempting to celebrate a lost age might inadvertently reproduce the way of
life of a more recent, more familiar past. Elizabeth Jeffreys argues that
parallel verses found in Grottaferrata and in twelfth-century texts demonstrate
that “a version of the Digenis poem resembling G” was in existence in the
twelfth century (Jeffreys 1998:xlvii). The similarities may, however, result
from a common store of traditional oral formulae.
The texts of Digenes Akrites that we have tell us little or nothing of value about the time of Basil I, but they do attest to the nostalgia with which later Byzantines thought of the time before the loss of the Empire’s eastern territories. Digenes is a warrior of superhuman power who lives in the Empire’s far eastern regions. The name Akrites means “frontiersman.” Though he exists at the borders between Christendom and Islamic lands, there is not the slightest suggestion of religiously motivated war. Digenes’ own father is an Arab emir, and the hero’s epithet literally means “born of two races.” His Christian name, Basil, evokes both Basil I and Basil II,…
The texts of Digenes Akrites that we have tell us little or nothing of value about the time of Basil I, but they do attest to the nostalgia with which later Byzantines thought of the time before the loss of the Empire’s eastern territories. Digenes is a warrior of superhuman power who lives in the Empire’s far eastern regions. The name Akrites means “frontiersman.” Though he exists at the borders between Christendom and Islamic lands, there is not the slightest suggestion of religiously motivated war. Digenes’ own father is an Arab emir, and the hero’s epithet literally means “born of two races.” His Christian name, Basil, evokes both Basil I and Basil II,…
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