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The pleasures of the chase: a motif in Digenes Akrites

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

David Ricks
David Ricks*
Affiliation:
Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham
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Extract

Thanks to the work of Stylianos Alexiou, the Escorial version of Digenes Akrites (hereafter ‘E’) has taken its rightful place as part of the heroic poetry of medieval Christendom. Even if the claim for E’s priority over the Grottaferrata version (G) does not meet with universal acceptance, E is at least in the field as an alternative. There are, perhaps, three main types of argument against the priority of G. The first is that the linguistic idiom betrays a second-order, solecistic ‘translation’ of a work in a less learned language; the second is that E has preserved proper names, military terms and so on which derive from the Eastern borders and which have been lost in G. Both of these have been expounded by Alexiou in some detail. A third type of argument might concentrate on what we may call the ethos of the E version as distinct from that of G, and one small detail of this is the subject of this note.

Type
Short Notes
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 13 , 1989 , pp. 290 - 295
Copyright
Copyright ©The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1989

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References

1. See especially S. Alexiou (ed.), (Athens 1985), with the same author’s latest article, , 25/6 (1987) 57–62.

2. For a view rather different from the one proposed here see Beaton, R., The Medieval Greek Romance (Cambridge 1989).Google Scholar

3. S. Alexiou, and, especially, (Herakleion 1979).

4. All citations from Alexiou, , including to its division into sections.

5. Despite his earlier complaints, the boy goes off hawking with his father and uncle (754) — and then, in the wild country, he has the chance to prove himself against bigger things.

6. Mavrogordato, J. (ed.) Digenes Akrites (Oxford 1956 Google Scholar) was right to stress G’s status as romance, but not to extrapolate this to the E version.

7. On the issue, see S. McAlister, ‘Digenis Akritas: the first scene with the apelatai’, B 54 (1984) 51–74; also R. Beaton’s review of Alexiou, , JHS 106 (1986) 271–3.