Digenes Akritas

Digenes Akritas (Latinised as Acritas; Greek: Διγενῆς Ἀκρίτας) is a medieval Greek romantic epic that emerged in the 12th-century Byzantine Empire. It is the lengthiest and most famous of the acritic songs, Byzantine folk poems celebrating the lives and exploits of the Akritai, the inhabitants and frontier guards of the empire's eastern Anatolian provinces. The acritic songs represented the remnants of an ancient epic cycle in Byzantium and, due to their long oral transmission throughout the empire, the identification of precise references to historical events may be only conjectural. Set during the Arab-Byzantine wars, the poem reflects the interactions, along with the military and cultural conflicts of the two polities. The epic consists of between 3,000 and 4,000 lines and it has been pieced together following the discovery of several manuscripts. An extensive narrative text, it is often thought of as the only surviving Byzantine work truly qualifying as epic poetry. Written in a form of vernacular Greek, it is regarded as one of its earliest examples, as well as the starting point of Modern Greek literature.

The epic details the life of the eponymous hero, Basil, whose epithet Digenes Akritas ("two-blood border lord") alludes to his mixed Greek and Arab descent. The text is divided into two halves: the first half, epic in tone, details the lives and encounter of Basil's parents; his mother, a Byzantine noblewoman from the Doukas family named Eirene, and his father, an Arab emir named Mousour who, after abducting Eirene in a raid, converted to Christianity and married her. The second half, in a more romantic atmosphere, discusses Basil's early childhood and later, often from a first-person point of view, his struggles and acts of heroism on the Byzantine borders. Allusions to Greek mythological elements, including the Hercules-like childhood of Basil, and his affair with the Amazon warrior Maximo, also appear throughout the text. Though a legendary figure, it has been suggested that inspiration for the hero may have derived from the 11th-century Cappadocian general and emperor Romanos Diogenes.

The epic of Digenes Akritas continued to be read and passed down in the post Byzantine period, with the most recent surviving manuscripts dating to the 17th century. The character became the archetype of the ideal medieval hero featuring in a number of folk songs popular throughout the Greek-speaking world, most prominently in Crete, Cyprus, and Asia Minor. The epic would go on to have significant impact on the culture of modern Greece, particularly on folk music, the arts, and literature.

The epic of Digenes Akritas is most commonly thought to have been first compiled around the 12th century AD building on earlier material which was primarily derived from oral sources. The existence of the epic during this time is referenced at a Ptochoprodromic poem to emperor Manuel I Komnenos under the name "New Akrites". During the 19th and 20th centuries, a total of six manuscripts of the epic became available, with the oldest surviving piece dating back to the late 1200s–early 1300s. Each of the surviving manuscripts constituted a different version of the same medieval story. Comparative evidence suggests that word-for-word precision was a rare instance in the Byzantine period and it was typical for copies of literary works to involve some degree of variation.

The existence of more manuscripts has been attested in the 18th and 19th centuries, but their location remains unknown. Those include a now lost manuscript once seen at the Xeropotamou monastery of Athos in the 18th century. The oldest two are the 'El Escorial' and 'Grottaferrata' versions, from the names of the libraries in which the respective manuscripts are held. While the form (or forms) in which the text has survived is not the product of oral composition, it has nevertheless retained a considerable number of features of its oral origins. The common core of the two versions preserved in the Esc and Gro manuscripts goes back to the twelfth century. The two manuscripts differ greatly, with the Gro version being more well-organized, while the Esc version is closer to the language of everyday speech with several gaps and metric irregularities. The text of Esc appears to be closer to the original composition, while Gro represents a version that is heavily marked by learned reworking. Both texts give enchanting descriptions of the life of the martial societies of the border regions of the empire, while in the figure of Digenes are concentrated the legends that had accumulated around local heroes. The Esc version is the superior of the two in respect of the power and immediacy of the battle scenes and austerity of style. The epic descriptions of the mounted knights and battles are marked by drama, a swift pace and lively visual detail.

There exists an Old Slavonic version of Digenis Akritas under the title Deeds of the Brave Men of Old (Дѣяніе прежнихъ временъ храбрыхъ человѣкъ), which is adapted from a line in the Grottaferrata manuscript. The Slavonic version is often called the Devgenievo deianie, but this title is not found in manuscripts. It contains both straightforward translation and free retelling of the Greek version in the Grottaferrata manuscript. It was produced in a bilingual Greek–South Slavic milieu, probably in Macedonia under the Serbian Empire (14th century) or its successors. It has features suggestive of oral-formulaic composition.

The existence of the epic of Digenes Akritas remained unknown prior to the second half of the 19th century when most of the manuscripts were discovered and published. Until then, the hero – variously referred to as Digenes, Constantine, or Giannis (John) – was only known through the songs and ballads of the Acritic Cycle that had been preserved in the oral tradition of the Greek-speaking world and had been collected and published around the same time. The first manuscript of the epic was discovered in 1868 at the Sumela Monastery of Trebizond and it was first published in 1875. It was soon followed by the Andros manuscript which was discovered in 1878 and published in 1881. A rhymed version from the Lincoln College of Oxford was published in 1880; the version had the advantage of being signed by its writer, a monk from Chios by the name Ignatios Petritzes, in 1670. The oldest surviving manuscript was found in the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata, near Frascati, in 1879 and it was published in 1892. A prose version written by Meletios Vlastos of Chios in 1632 was discovered in Andros in 1898 and it wasn't published until 1928. The incomplete Madrid version, published in 1912, was discovered in the Escorial library of Spain in 1904.

The names 'Digenis' or 'Akritas' (rarely found together) have long been widespread throughout the Greek-speaking world representing heroes of folk-songs that are particularly popular in Crete, Cyprus, and Asia Minor. Before the discovery of the manuscripts, the protagonist of the epic was only known through the Acritic songs; narrative vernacular songs or ballads typically in political verse that originated from the Byzantine period and reflected episodes and characters associated with the epic-romance of Digenes Akritas. Collected primarily from 19th century oral sources, the best of those songs were found on the fringes of Asia Minor, like Pontus, and Cyprus. In the acritic tradition, the warriors are presented as paragons of elegance and nobility (Greek: λεβεντιά); they reside in luxurious houses typically on the edges of the Christian world, and sometimes bear names of the Byzantine aristocracy.