Introduction to Digenes Akrites
[In the following excerpt, Mavrogordato examines the discovery of Digenes Akrites, compares the poem's many versions, and surveys assorted critical analyses.]
1. DISCOVERY
In the middle of last century nothing was known of the Byzantine epic of Digenes Akrites; but the atmosphere had been prepared by the publication of several ballads of what is now called the Akritic Cycle (a name first used by Legrand in 1874). The discussion of these—(in particular a paper by Büdinger who had used the headline ‘A Greek Mediaeval Popular Epic’, although the Song in question, The Sons of Andronikos, was only seventy lines in length)—had opened the way for further revelations of an heroic age of mediaeval Greece.
(i) The discovery was made at Trebizond. Manuscripts could not be photographed at Trebizond, and after considerable correspondence the precious work was sent to Paris by post; and in 1875 Sathas and Legrand published Les Exploits de Digénis Akritas—épopée byzantine du dixième siècle … d'après le manuscrit unique de Trébizonde. The manuscript is said to be not earlier than the sixteenth century. There are several gaps in it. The poem is divided into ten books of which the first and the last are missing altogether; there remain 3,182 lines of it.
This manuscript was afterwards returned to the hands of Savvas Ioannides, the Trebizond schoolmaster, author of a statistical history of Trebizond, who in May 1868 had received it from a monk at the monastery of Soumelá. (For the present state of the monastery of Soumelá see D. Talbot Rice in Byzantion, v. 72 ff.) He published another edition of it at Constantinople in 1887,1 and then deposited it in the library of the Filologikos Syllogos. All the archives of this institution are said to have been removed to Angora by the Turkish Government and the fate of the Digenes manuscript is unknown; but in the opinion of Kyriakides (conveyed in a private letter 7 April 1936) it must, for the present at least, be regarded as lost.
(ii) Before the learned world had had time to digest this, several other manuscripts were discovered; beginning with the version found in Andros in 1878 and published by Mêliarakes in 1881, a manuscript of the sixteenth century practically complete in 4,778 lines, conveniently filling the gaps in the Trebizond manuscript which it closely follows. The Mêliarakes edition was reprinted in 1920. This Andros manuscript is now in the National Library at Athens, and is referred to by Kalonaros as the Athens version (which he prints first in his collection).
The Mêliarakes introduction refers to a Greek newspaper of 23 November 1880, reporting that Legrand had discovered in Constantinople, and proposed to publish, another version, the oldest known, written in iambics and containing the name of the poet. At that time (towards the end of 1880), Legrand must have known of the existence of the Grottaferrata and Oxford manuscripts besides the Andros manuscript, which was still in the press; he may also have heard about the description of other versions in an unpublished Athos manuscript of the monk Dapontes just then discovered (see below). Legrand, discussing his hopes of one or all of these in a conversation with reference to his own edition of the Trebizond manuscript, may have originated this newspaper paragraph of which nothing more seems to be known.
Another short version, in prose, said to have been discovered in Constantinople by Dr. Mordtmann, is mentioned in Legrand's preface to Grottaferrata (pp. xi, xxii—‘signalée par le Dr. Mordtmann à Sabbas Ioannidis’); and is also referred to hopefully by Polites (Peri tou Ethnikou Epous, p. 5); by Hesseling in his introduction to ESC (Laografia, iii. 551); and by Ioannides himself in the introduction to his Constantinople edition of 1887.
(iii) Next came a manuscript of the fourteenth century discovered at the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata near Frascati in 1879, which was published by Legrand in 1892 (reprinted 1902).
(iv) The incomplete ‘Madrid’ version of only 1,867 lines was discovered by Krumbacher in the Escorial library in 1904 and was published by Hesseling in 1912.
(v) A rhymed version was published by Lampros in 1880 from a manuscript at Lincoln College, Oxford, which had the advantage of being signed by the writer, a monk of Chios, by name Ignatios Petritzes, who finished his task on 25 November 1670.
(vi) A prose version, written by Meletios Vlastos of Chios in 1632, discovered by Mr. D. Paschales in Andros in 1898, was not published till 1928; it is now in the library of the department of Folk-lore at the University of Salonica.
(vii) Finally there is a very incomplete Russian version—fragments of a (linguistically) thirteenth-century version assembled from two different eighteenth-century manuscripts and from the quotations of the historian Karamzin (the third manuscript, from which he took his quotations, was burned in Moscow in 1812). This version was published by Speransky in 1922 and reproduced in a French translation by M. Pascal in 1935; and in a Greek translation in the edition of Kalonaros in 1941. A third and fuller eighteenth-century manuscript of this version was recently discovered in Russia and was published in 1953.
We thus have now manuscripts of five metrical versions of the Digenes Epic:
| Trebizond | MS. sec. xvi, 3,182 lines, | 10 books |
| Andros | MS. sec. xvi, 4,778 lines, | 10 books |
| Grottaferrata | MS. sec. xiv, 3,749 lines, | 8 books |
| Escorial | MS. sec. xvi, 1,867 lines | |
| Oxford | MS. 1670, 3,094 lines, | 8 books |
One prose version:
| Paschales | MS. 1632, | 10 books |
And one Russian version:
| Speransky | MSS. sec. xviii |
| Kuzmina | MS. 1761. |
I usually cite these versions by the first three letters of these titles (TRE, AND, GRO, ESC, OXF, PAS, SPE), giving the number of the line and of the book where necessary for the metrical versions, and for the prose versions the number of the page of the volumes of Laografia and Byzantion in which the Greek prose version and the French translation of the Russian version were first published.
The Ballads of the Akritic Cycle are more difficult to deal with because no approximately complete collection has yet been published and they must be hunted out in various journals and anthologies. Polites once said that his own private collection contained more than 1,300 ballads; but after eliminating versions which differ in only a few words or only by combination or contamination with fragments of other versions, it might be permissible to guess that the number of ballads deserving consideration as ‘Akritic’ must be less than a hundred; of which not more than fifty have any great significance.
Each version includes some details or names which must have been added by the author or transcriber of the version in which they occur, and could not have formed part of the supposed archetype, the original Digeneid, which is generally believed to have been put together from a great variety of sources in the tenth century.
The Digenes Akrites is a romantic epic of between 3,000 and 4,000 lines, narrating and celebrating the parentage, education, exploits, and death of its eponymous hero—whose name implies the burden of the story, for it may be translated as Twyborn the Borderer. His father was a notable Arabian emir who in a raid over the Byzantine frontier carried off the daughter of a Greek general; after embracing Christianity he was permitted by the family to marry her; and settled down as a law-abiding subject of the ‘Roman’ Empire. The son of this union of two races and two religious soon showed in the chase signs of exceptional heroic ability—hunting and athletics having been in the Greek Empire the pride and privilege of a ruling class. He imitated his father by carrying off—but single-handed—the daughter of a Greek general. After his marriage he left the parental castle, and with his bride and a few personal attendants lived a nomadic life among the lonely places of the border; making it his special business to exterminate the bands of robbers and cattle-drivers who haunted it (all of whom seem to have been Greeks, and one of whom was a woman). He built himself a palace on the Euphrates (although the earlier books seem to imply an imperial frontier in Kappadokia, where his parents had their castle till they came, before their death, to live with him). There he soon fell ill and died surrounded by the honours of the whole empire in Asia.
The epic can hardly have been officially inspired for it seems to embody no definite propaganda. If the imperial authorities had wanted to promote a new ideal of peace they would have displayed it in a less indefinite and more popular form, and would have employed a more accomplished and a more metropolitan poet. The bare outline just given suggests an attempt to arrange a bunch of local adventure stories into the likeness of an epic embodying ideals of tolerance and peace. It is not a romance in spite of many borrowings from Hellenistic romances; and it is untouched by Western influences in spite of many reflections, through such Hellenistic writers, from the Mediterranean world which was later to inspire any number of Italian and French storytellers. J. B. Bury (Romances of Chivalry, pp. 18, 19) praises the epic comprehensiveness of Digenes, ‘which justifies us in naming it along with Homer and the Nibelungenlied’.
It is a heroic poem of provincial origin intended for private reading or for recitation not in the market-place but in banqueting hall or refectory.
2. VERSIONS
I
The Grottaferrata version is probably the earliest we possess. The narrative is clear, simple, and concise. Irrelevancies are omitted and effective detail often added. It omits altogether the rather silly story about Ankylas. It begins with the Emir instead of with the once-upon-a-time King and Queen who had a beautiful daughter. It omits the earlier visit of Digenes to Philopappos. In the episode of the Emperor's visit it names the Emperor Basil (instead of Romanos as in TRE and AND) and it adds the detail that Digenes catches a wild horse and kills a lion by way of display for the Emperor's entertainment; it also names the Emperor Basil (instead of Romanos) in the passage in Book IV which refers to the banishment of Eirene's father, and in the same passage, by a sort of attraction or association set up by the name Basil, gives the Emperor himself the surname of Akrites, calling him ‘Basil the blessed, the great Borderer’ (cf. GRO iv. 55 with TRE 835 ff.). It omits the later references to honours conferred on Digenes by the Emperor Nikeforos which appear in the penultimate books of AND and TRE. From the same part of the narrative it also omits many redundant details of his wealth and daily life, and it omits the excessive lamentations on the death of his mother. It mentions that his final illness was the result of a chill after bathing; and it specifies that his tomb was built on a hill near Trôsis. It develops at greater length than the other versions the incidents of his courtship and marriage.
There is more Moslem colour in GRO than in other versions (e.g. a knowledge of Moslem miracles (GRO iii. 139) and of the Moslem shrine at Palermo (GRO i. 101)); but there is also a greater sincerity, one might almost say a greater savagery, of Christian morality.
The language is fairly correct literary Greek of, probably, the eleventh century, with a noticeably large number of words from the Septuagint. Such, however, is the unity of the Greek language, and so insufficient is our present knowledge, that, if allowance be made for ecclesiastical and literary influences (for familiarity with the Septuagint and with historical sources) on the one hand, and for the revisionary habits of later copyists on the other, it would be difficult, judging by language alone, to say much more than that the Grottaferrata version was written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.
II
TRE and AND are a pair and follow the same story in all its details so that AND is useful for filling up the numerous gaps in TRE (especially the whole of the beginning down to the pursuing brothers' search for their sister's body in the Emir's camp, and the whole of the end from the speech of Digenes to Eudokia on his deathbed).
The language of TRE is also inclined to be literary but is distinctly less correct than that of GRO; the syntax is often in a state of dissolution so that the semi-classical manner seems less natural.
III
AND tells exactly the same story as TRE and has many identical passages. But it has been written up in a later and more romantic manner; many passages suggest that it was copied and rewritten as late as the fifteenth or sixteenth century. (The writing of the manuscript is said to be of the sixteenth.) The end of Book I from line 247 onwards actually breaks into rhyme and produces a lyrical peroration in roughly rhymed octosyllables. Although the extant parts of TRE are, as has been said, identical in incident with AND, it is permissible to suspect that the beginning of TRE, if we had it, might differ considerably; for the first book of AND (‘once upon a time a King and Queen’), while consistent with the romantic manner of the AND narrative and language, would have seemed incongruous in the distinctly more epic manner of TRE. A romantic monk of the fifteenth century seems to have been rewriting a more learned text which was almost that of TRE, and often took over its lines as they stood. (For the introduction of rhyme see Krumbacher, p. 700.)
Perhaps this romantic monk was Eustathios, who is said in the opening lines to be writing the story for a dear young friend called Manuel. It has been surprisingly believed that these lines do in fact give us the name of the original author of Digenes. A Greek scholar, A. Hatzês, has tried without much success to prove by linguistic arguments that the Digenes was written by Eustathios (or Eumathios) Makrembolites, author of the Byzantine prose romance Hysmine and Hysminias. (See Byz. Neugr. Jahrb. ix (1931), pp. 256 ff.; and for Grégoire's criticism and list of Hatzês's works, Byzantion, vi. 482.) It ought to have been impossible for anybody to suppose that the heading of AND implies that Eustathios was the original author. Petritzes, the writer of OXF, uses even more definite language—esyntaxa kai 'synthesa to, he says—yet we know that he was only the versifier. Eustathios may have been the redactor who added the rhymes and other romantic embroideries. As for the author of Hysmine and Hysminias, he lives in quite a different world of literary preciosity.
IV
The ESC version is extremely incomplete, beginning at about the same point as TRE and omitting altogether many incidents and innumerable details, while many of the episodes and lines are in the wrong order. It is written in an extremely but not uniformly popular style, with a Cretan flavour, which combines with many repetitions and confusions to give it a striking if superficial resemblance to some of the Akritic ballads. It has become a commonplace, started by N. G. Polites, to say that the Ballads are more ‘poetical’ than the Epic, because they are full of magic and confusion. Consequently Kyriakides and others declare that the ‘breath of life’ blows through the muddle of the ESC because it resembles the Ballads. It has even been argued that, assuming the Epic to have been assembled from scattered Ballads or Lays, the fact that ESC most resembles the extant Ballads shows that it is nearer to the source and consequently earlier than all the other versions. A similar argument was at one time (October 1941) produced by Grégoire in support of the Russian version. This argument ignores the considerations that the qualities of an Epic are not the same as those of a Ballad; and that we cannot conclude that an epic text is closer in time to its component lays because it resembles what other lays or ballads have become after a thousand years of oral transmission. So much a priori. But Grégoire has now shown (Byzantion, v. 339) that the details of Arab raids borrowed by GRO from the chronicles of Genesios are not absent from ESC; and ESC even exceeds other versions in bookishness by borrowing the tomb of Digenes from Arrian's description of the tomb of Cyrus (Anabasis, vi. 29. 4-8) and the parrots in the garden from Achilles Tatius.
Actually the disorder of the ESC version, the innumerable omissions, the innumerable additions of irrelevant tags out of ballads, the repetitions of the same line, the duplications, the phonetic confusions (e.g. 719, amêras, ‘the emir’, for Omêros, Homer), the way the words continually overflow the metre, and the metre breaks off into half-lines or into the rhythms of a chanted speech—all these lead to the conviction that this was taken down, not before the end of the fifteenth century, the date of the manuscript, from the dictation of a wandering Cretan ballad-monger who was trying to recite from memory in the musical recitative which still survives in Crete a version which contained a few original details (e.g. that Digenes made a bridge over the Euphrates). (The same overflowing of the metre is noted by Kyriakides (p. 119) as a sign of dictation in the Ballad of Armoures.) Whenever his memory fails he repeats as a catchword one of the characteristic or operative lines of the episode he is trying to recall, or he improvises, or marks time with a tag or two out of his repertory; and his version certainly contains vestiges of a literary original. Anyone who doubts the possibility of memorizing even imperfectly the whole of the Digenes may be reminded that only a few years ago villagers could be found in Crete who professed to know by heart the whole of the Erotokritos which is nearly three times as long as this (9,956 lines).
Kyriakides (op. cit., p. 75) compares three extracts—ESC 806-23, TRE 1207-37, GRO iv. 380-95—with a view to showing that ESC, allowing for a lacuna, follows the fullest tradition. He argues that there must be a lacuna because the mother of Digenes prays to the Virgin twice; and that therefore something to account for her second prayer—actually, as we see from TRE, the fact that Digenes couldn't eat his supper—must have been lost. But the whole passage shows that ESC doubles nearly everything; he repeats things because he is trying to remember what comes next; e.g. 831, Digenes plays his tampouri as well as his labouto; 918, 919, he calls out to Doukas to arouse him, but Doukas is aroused by hearing the gallop of the horse; there is another repetition in 836, 845, and another muddle in 844, again defended by Kyriakides in a long note (p. 79) on the kailyard principle that whatever is laïkôteron must be poiêtikôteron. It is true that this version has beauties and originalities of sound and surface that have been produced by oral transmission; but they are the qualities of a seventeenth-century ballad, not of an eleventh-century heroic poem.
The ESC manuscript which contains this version also contains a version of the Lybistros and Rodamne romance written in the same hand and disfigured to a smaller extent by faults of the same kind. The latest editor of Lybistros and Rodamne (Mme J. A. Lambert, Amsterdam, 1935) dismisses the hypothesis of dictation in the case of the Lybistros, in spite of the phonetic evidence, on grounds which seem insufficient.
V
There is no such problem when we come to the OXF version. We know that it was composed in 1670 by the monk Ignatios Petritzes of Chios, who puts into rhyme a version which substantially resembles that of AND; but as it is in eight books instead of ten he may have been working from one of the versions seen on Mount Athos by Dapontes (see below, p. xxi). In so doing he humanizes and to some extent rationalizes the story. His tale is well-proportioned and not savage or sanctimonious; it is set in a world which is more ‘civilized’, or at least less mediaeval. He brings in priests and bishops to celebrate weddings and funerals. The Arabs become Turks; the emir Haplorrabdes becomes Abdullah; and Petritzes is the only redactor who bothers to give Abdullah's wife and daughter Moslem names, Aissé and Fatouma—names easily found, for these were the favourite wife and youngest daughter of Mohammed. In the same episode he explicitly denies that Digenes, after rescuing the deserted bride, helped himself to his own reward, as the earlier versions allege, or did anything to be ashamed of. When he comes to Maximo the Amazon, whom he calls Maximilla, he remarks that a woman's place is in the home; and now he allows Digenes to yield to temptation, thus distinguishing Fatouma from Maximilla, who had, literally, asked for it. The name Maximilla may have been familiar to him as that of a prophetess who was head of the Montanist heresy at the end of the second century.
The fact that the earlier versions seem to see no difference between the treatment of the unwilling Fatouma and that of the willing Maximo, may be connected with the oriental seclusion of Evdokia (who was never seen by any of the servants; only a little boy waited on them at table) to show that the author of Digenes was exceedingly provincial in his outlook; there was nothing like this at Constantinople (or in Hysmine and Hysminias); but the author of Digenes was Asiatic; he seems never to have heard of Europe; and only mentions one place in Europe—the Moslem shrine of Palermo (except for AND 2419, sta merê Ahaias).
Ignatios Petritzes was not only six hundred years later; he was writing in Chios. The whole is written in good popular Greek of the seventeenth century without pretentiousness or affectation.2 We are surprised only by quotations from Aristophanes (Plutus), Theocritus, The Song of Songs, Bion, and Euripides (Hecuba). (OXF 237-42 = Aristoph. Plut. 3-7; OXF 1563-6 = Theoc. iii. 15, 16; OXF 1576-80 = Bion, 1. 7-20; OXF 1052 ff. = Song of Solomon vi. 8; OXF 1593-6 = Eur. Hec. 600, 601.) The chief interest of this version is in the personality of the author Ignatios Petritzes. (There are four other manuscripts copied by him in the library of the Greek patriarchate at Jerusalem. See GRO, introd. p. xii.) His humble lines of dedication at the end of his work, and his hopes that it may some day be printed, are modest and attractive.
VI
D. Paschales who discovered the prose version in Andros in 1898 waited thirty years before he published the manuscript. When at last it appeared in 1928 it was a sad disappointment. It had been hoped that a prose version might throw some light on problems of date and origin; or at least that it might correspond to one of the versions which the eighteenth-century monk and polygrapher Caesar Dapontes (1714-84) describes as then existing in the library of the monastery of Xêropotamou on Mount Athos. (This reference was first discovered by M. Gedeon in the manuscript of a Byzantine chronicle in verse called Biblos Basileiôn. See Lampros, Romans grecs en vers, introd. p. xcix. For a notice of Dapontes see R. M. Dawkins, The Monks of Athos (1936).)
Dapontes gives in twenty lines a summary of the story which he unfortunately breaks off at the point where the hero's parents have been introduced; up to this point, that is to say up to about the end of the first book, he appears to follow closely the story as given in AND—except that the father of Digenes is said to have been an ‘emir of Egypt’ or ‘Sultan of Misir’ (Cairo): this difference is probably without significance: the Emir is actually called Soultanos in AND 307—and a Syrias may have been confused with Misiriou. Then interrupting his summary he adds:
‘The story is very long but interesting and sweet as sugar. It is a book of eight or ten quires and contains all his exploits. I have seen it in two forms with illustrations and without pictures. It is divided into eight books and it is very rare and difficult to find. At the beginning of each book it has five lines of verse containing the argument of each book: and it is always in manuscript. I have not seen a printed copy and it seems never to have been printed. They have printed Erotokritos, Sôsanna, Erofile and others: what a pity they have never printed Basil. If it is given me to live I mean to put this story into verse and send it straight to Venice. Happy the printer who prints it for it will bring him both profit and honour.’
Two points should be noticed in this quotation. First of all his intention of putting it into verse before having it printed, which implies that both the manuscripts he saw were prose versions. (It cannot be assumed that he saw two different versions. He may have seen two copies of the same version, one of them illustrated.) It has been suggested, quite untenably I believe, that he only meant to put it into rhyme, to add rhyme to blank verses. But his mention of the five lines of verse (and if they were five lines they were almost certainly unrhymed lines) prefixed to each book implies that the rest of the work was in prose. It is curious, however, that the library should have had two copies in prose and none apparently in verse. If Dapontes had succeeded in producing his own versified edition, we may be sure it would have resembled closely the Oxford version written a hundred years earlier by that other monk from Chios, Ignatios Petritzes, whose character, gentle, literary, and unheroic, must have been very much like that of Dapontes.
It was the curious habit of those who enjoyed and transmitted to us the works of middle Greek literature to rewrite, apparently each to his own taste, any work which they thought worthy of preservation. The Cretan play Erôfile even after it was printed is said to have been rewritten for the second edition by a patriotic Cretan. Of the Cypriot Chronicle of Mahairas the two sixteenth-century manuscripts (Venice and Oxford) differ so much, and yet are so much alike, that Professor Dawkins felt himself obliged to conclude—rather unsatisfactorily—that they were written by two independent authors working from identical materials.
This rewriting habit must have begun early. The text of Chaireas and Calliroe, a romance of the second-century novelist Chariton of Aphrodisias, depended on a single Florentine manuscript until the recent recovery from Egypt of three small fragments. Of these fragments two papyri of the second or third century generally confirm the Florentine text. But a seventh-century parchment palimpsest discovered near Thebes in 1898 differs so widely that in the words of the latest editor (W. E. Blake, Oxford, 1938) ‘rationem inter Thebanum et Florentinum haud aliter definire se posse crediderit vir doctus quam si duas memorias omnino inter se diversas poneret, quarum utraque suo modo ex ampliore exemplari contracta esset’. Before the discovery of these fragments the romance was usually attributed to the fourth century.3
Be that as it may, when D. Paschales at last published the prose version associated with his name, it turned out to be another seventeenth-century version which had little interest either as a prose romance of Digenes or as a specimen of the seventeenth-century language, because it was obvious that the writer had taken the trouble to turn into flat and literary prose a version very closely resembling that of AND, leaving embedded in his periods many undigested fragments of the original verses.4 The editor claims (Laografia, ix. 312) that it represents an independent tradition, and it is true that in numerous unimportant details he seems to follow TRE rather than AND and in a few details to have been following a version which differed from both. (See, for example, Laografia, ix. 350, compared with TRE 1128, 1133, lines which are different in AND; p. 358, where the name of the Saracen Soudales is omitted but details are inserted which are not in AND or TRE (lacuna), or GRO (where the Saracen is omitted altogether), but which are in ESC 930, 931; p. 359, where the detail of the girl's father and her two brothers pursuing does not agree with TRE 1267 or AND 2075 or OXF 1957 (where the three pursuers are her three brothers), or with ESC 969 (five brothers) but with GRO iv. 610, iv. 657; PAS p. 361, the twelve eunuchs, who are to be found in GRO iv. 925 but in no other version; p. 366, a detail which is in no other version about the confusion in the house of Haplorrabdes when his wife fell ill; p. 406, the doctors feel his pulse; and a few other details and misunderstandings.)
The writer gives his name as Meletios Vlastos and the date 1632. The editor on insufficient linguistic grounds says that he was a native of Chios. A Cretan monk of this name is said to have been one of the teachers of Cyril Loukares. Why did Meletios want to turn the story of Digenes, of which he had in his hands a perfectly good redaction in verse, into indifferent prose? His motive was not the same as that of the gentlemen who translate the New Testament into ‘modern English’. Verse is the natural speech of the peasant culture (cf. the story of Mrs. Flecker's cook in J.H.S. liii (1933), 1); verse aids the memory in recitation, and is no longer necessary when recitation gives place to reading.5 There are many French prose romances (e.g. Balin and Balan) made from earlier verse romances; and various prose versions of the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Ste-Maure from the twelfth century onwards. To Meletios there was something vulgar and uneducated about a story in verse; he wanted to have a good story in a form fit for a gentleman to read.
VII
The Russian version (SPE) is composed of three fragments of a (linguistically) thirteenth-century prose romance, two from manuscripts of the eighteenth century, and a third quoted by the historian Karamzin from a manuscript probably of the thirteenth century which was burned in Moscow in 1812. These fragments were assembled and published by Speransky in 1922, and were edited in a French translation by Pascal in 1935 (in Byzantion), and in a Greek translation by Kalonaros in 1941.
Here, combined with many folk-tale elements—a book of fate, a magic horse, a spring of water with a light burning in it,6 and other fairytale wonders which suggest oral transmission—we can recognize the chief incidents of the Greek story.
Maximo the Amazon becomes Maximiana the daughter of Philipap, and Devgeny after pole-jumping over the river7 easily defeats them both and sends them home to his parents. He refuses to marry Maximiana because the Dream Book says that if he marries her he will live sixteen years but if he marries Strategovna (the daughter of the General) he will live thirty-six years. So he carried off and, after several bachelor parties, married the General's daughter, and settled down to a life of fame and hunting, until he was attacked by a certain Caesar called Basil; and then he jumps over the river again, defeats him, enters into the town (not named), and ascends the throne.
Grégoire accepts this rebellion as the first nucleus of the poem, and argues that we must see in it a revolutionary manifesto issued by the Paulician heretics of the Armenian border and their Arab allies against their arch enemy the Emperor Basil I the Macedonian (867-86)—from whom the hero was given his first name—and that all the Greek versions are descended from a loyalist revision of this seditious original officially prepared and circulated at the beginning of the tenth century. Grégoire's arguments, too numerous to be examined in detail, would be convincing only in an unreal society. (He has not noticed by the way that Philipap's army—SPE 318—are said to be ‘brave as Macedonians’.)
These arguments were strongly contested by Wartenberg (in Byzantion, xi (1936), pp. 320 ff.); it must be added, however, that they seem to have been largely accepted with other Gregorian hypotheses by Professor Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History, v. 252 ff.). The evidence leads us rather to believe that the Russian is descended by oral transmission from a sophisticated Greek version already combining the later Euphrates frontier—quite inconsistent with the reign of Basil I—with the earlier Kappadokian frontier; the Russian includes even the eulogy of the month of May which seems to derive from the eulogy of the Rose in the second book of Achilles Tatius. It is reasonable to suppose that the Hero of the Borders becoming Emperor in the City is a fairy-tale ending tacked on in the course of transmission—a common form of contamination in popular literature of any period. This conclusion seems to have been finally confirmed by the discovery of a third Russian manuscript dated 1761. It closely follows the earlier of Speransky's two eighteenth-century fragments, but is much fuller and preserves traces of an earlier text and vocabulary.8 It begins with the Emir and completes the story of the abduction of the daughter of Strategos, but omits altogether the final episode of the overthrow of the Emperor Basil. If, as seems probable from the superior text and archaic vocabulary, this new version in fact preserves the oldest Russian tradition, it follows that the Emperor's defeat must be the addition of a later copyist, and does not preserve any early Greek original put about by rebellious Paulicians. It was already impossible to understand, on Grégoire's hypothesis, why no version, Russian or Greek, shows any trace of feeling either for or against the Paulicians.
VIII
Before leaving this review of the various versions of the Digeneid and passing on to consider the story they present, something must be said about the Ballads, the Akritic Cycle of Folk-songs or tragoudia.
These ballads have been found to some extent in all parts of the Greek world (as have also ‘Castles’ or ‘Tombs of Digenes’), and it was clear that they belonged to the Byzantine period and to Asia Minor, on the fringes of which, and especially in Pontus and in Cyprus, the best of them have been collected. Their nature is well indicated in the well-known scholion, on a passage in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written by Arethas (850-932), Bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea,9 which speaks of ‘wandering beggars, like the cursed Paphlagonians who now make up songs about the adventures of famous men and sing them for pennies from door to door’ (see Kougéas, in Laografia, iv. 236). This brings us at once to the place and also to the time of the Akritic ballads: the period which, as Grégoire has shown, is peculiarly the Heroic Age of Mediaeval Greece: the ninth and tenth centuries which produced the adventurers of the Amorian and Macedonian dynasties, the Andrónikoi and Constantines of the Doukas family, the Nikefóroi of the Fokâs family, and many others whom he has convincingly identified in the fragments of the existing ballads.
Many of the early investigators thought that the poem of Digenes had been made by a ‘rhapsode’ who stitched together short lays or ballads of this sort which celebrated the glories of individual heroes, a method of composition once supposed to have produced the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the French Roland (as Lönnrott in fact produced the Finnish Kalevala in modern times (1835-49) from traditional lays collected by Topelius in 1822).
Here, then, we say as we approach the Greek songs of the Akritic Cycle, here is a wonderful chance to study in their raw state the materials of an epic poem. In these ballads we might expect to find, distorted perhaps by oral tradition but still easily recognizable, many of the episodes of Digenes. We are surprised to discover an entirely different world: a world of supernatural feats, magic weapons, and talking birds; in which Digenes is only one of a number of heroes we have never heard of before—Andronikos, Porfyrios, Armouropoulos, Konstantas, Theophylaktos, Xantinos—and is not by any means the most popular. Digenes indeed hardly appears at all except in the series of ballads describing his death,10 foretold by talking birds, his iron death-bed, and his wrestling with Death who comes to fetch him. This connected series and one or two which seem to refer to his carrying off, in entirely different circumstances, of Evdokia, are the only ones that can be fitted into the story of our Digenes at all; and a great number are commonly called ‘Akritic’ only because of their obvious antiquity. Some of the other heroes have been plausibly identified by Grégoire as historical figures, emperors or generals or pretenders; or as the eponymous heroes of imperial themes or regiments. But he has had less success in rationalizing the incidents.
A son of Andronikos born in captivity, his mother having been carried off before his birth, escapes from the Saracens and goes in search of his father and brothers. (In this episode it is worth noting that the hero is digenes, twy-born, in another sense, as being the son of a Christian father Andronikos as well as the putative son of the Emir at whose court he is born and brought up (see Passow 482, Kyriakides, Dig. Akr., pp. 35 ff., and Legrand, Chansons pop. grecques (1874), no. 87, esp. lines 7, 8).) A gargantuan Porfyres falls in love with the king's daughter and no chains are strong enough to hold him. The equally monstrous Xantinos liberates his son who has been yoked to the plough with a buffalo. Most of the songs which are not in the Pontic or Cypriot dialect have almost lost their narrative character and have been so contaminated with later ballads that they are only recognized as Akritic by the names of the heroes and by their obvious antiquity. It is sometimes suggested that Digenes was only one among a number of ballad-heroes and that the author of the epic took up the Digenes cycle and left the other heroes to the wandering ballad singers. But why should adventures which were good enough to attract the epic-maker in search of material have completely disappeared from ballad circulation? It must be understood that the relation between ballads and epic is not one between successive stages of composition, or between different treatments of the same materials, adapted in one form for street singing and in another for ceremonial recitation or private reading. It is rather a relation between different levels of interest in the same community. The study of one does not necessarily throw any light on the other; although a knowledge of both is necessary for an understanding of the society in which both were produced and developed.
What nearly all editors call the poetical vigour of the ballads as distinguished from the epic is really a radical difference of theme and treatment. A fourth-rate ballad, especially if it is recorded in the surprising dialect of Pontus, may be superficially more attractive than a second-rate epic. The songs as we have them today, after 900 years of oral transmission, cannot be regarded as the sources of the epic, and cannot be used as standards by which to judge the relative ages of the various versions or the various episodes of the epic. We do not know what these ballads were like when they were first sung. If they were recognizably the same as they are now, then they obviously have nothing to do with our Digenes; even the death-bed series are disqualified for comparison by their association with miraculous incident; and if they were entirely different—still less can we be allowed to draw any critical information from their present derivatives.
Only one of the ballads, the Son of Armoures (first published by Destouny in Russia in 1877 with a facsimile and reprinted by Kyriakides, p. 119), exists or used to exist in a manuscript said to have been of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. All others have been collected in modern times, although the sources are not always known. (See, for example, the obscure history of the Sons of Andronikos ballad, first published by Zampelios (1859) who says the manuscript was given him by Brunet de Presle,11 who had it from the unpublished part of the collection of Fauriel, who had copied it from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale; this is flatly denied by Legrand who says that Brunet de Presle when a student took it down from the dictation of Professor Hase (Zampelios, Pothen hê Koinê Lexis Tragoudô? (1859), p. 37; Legrand, Chansons pop. grecques, p. 183). Büdinger, who reprinted the text given by Zampelios, refers to his vain efforts to trace the supposed manuscript in Paris (Ein mittelgriechisches Volksepos (Leipzig, 1866), p. 3); see also Wagner who again reprinted it (Medieval Greek Texts (1870), pp. x, xiii n. 34, xxii). Legrand implies that his own text was taken from the same manuscript of Brunet de Presle as that which Zampelios had copied and ‘improved’.)
Not one of the Akritic ballads or fragments can be regarded as belonging to the category of Folk-chronicles or Historical Ballads, a class represented by the Cretan historical ballads of the eighteenth century like the well-known Daskalogiannes; and it is from the historical rather than from the romantic ballad that we should expect the maker of the Digenes epic to have drawn some of his materials.12 The strange absence from the extant Akritic ballads of any recognizable incident of the epic is paralleled to some extent in English ballad literature. The Gest of Robyn Hode is a small epic of 1,824 lines divided into eight ‘fyttes’, first published in the middle of the sixteenth century, and said to have been composed ‘by a poet of a thoroughly congenial spirit’ from ballads which had begun to circulate about a hundred years earlier. Not one of the ballads from which it was made up is extant in a separate shape, and ‘some portions of the story may have been of the compiler's own invention’ (Child's Popular Ballads, ed. Sargent and Kittredge, p. 225). …
4. DISCUSSIONS
I
An attempt must be made to summarize the interpretations and estimates of the Poem of Digenes put forward by a succession of scholars from the first editors Sathas and Legrand down to M. Henri Grégoire, who, in a series of articles beginning in 1930 (assisted on questions of the relations of Byzantium and the Arabs by the researches of E. Honigmann, A. A. Vasiliev, and Marius Canard), has put these studies on a new foundation. He first entered this field by demonstrating that incidents of Anatolian history not mentioned by any Byzantine historian but known only from Arab sources could be traced in Digenes; he was soon showing that the author of Digenes was equally conversant with Byzantine sources; and in particular that some of the original details for which the Escorial version had acquired a reputation as a folk-epic of infallible originality were actually borrowed directly from Genesius, and in one detail went back to Herodotus. (See Byzantion, v (1930), pp. 327 ff.; and p. 128; ESC 254 ff.; GRO ii. 75 ff.; Genesius, pp. 121-6 (describing the capture of Ankyra by the Paulicians); and id., p. 94; Theoph. Cont., p. 179.)
II
It must be remembered to the credit of Sathas and Legrand that they, the first editors, were the first to see that the historical incidents and background against which the hero was set in motion were the rebellions, in the ninth and tenth centuries, of the Paulician heretics, to whom Gibbon devoted a chapter and Bury an appendix (Decline and Fall, ch. liv; ed. Bury, vol. vi, pp. 110, 543). In spite of these attentions their doctrines remain wrapped in considerable obscurity. The publication of an Armenian text The Key of Truth (ed. Conybeare, 1898) is said to show that they held the belief, commonly known as Adoptionism, that Jesus was only a man until the entrance of a spirit on his baptism in his thirtieth year. They are said to have rejected the Old Testament, and to have represented generally speaking an advanced form of protestantism: they ‘hated monkery, and protested against the superstitious practices and rites of the Church’ (Baynes, Byz. Empire, p. 88). They are also said to have believed in a dualistic government of the world. A colony of Paulicians had been transported to Thrace in the seventh century and later are said to have spread westward through Bulgaria as far as Provence. They had no priests, and disliked all churches, icons, and relics.13 On these grounds they have been approximated to, or identified with, the Iconoclasts, the Manichaeans, the Bogomils, and the Albigenses. Anna Comnena, who ought to know, speaks of the Paulicians as a branch of the Manichaeans (Alexiad xiv; ed. Reifferscheid, vol. ii, p. 257); and it will probably be safe to suppose that they were to some extent a link between the Manichaeans and the Iconoclasts. ‘The Paulicians took refuge in Mesopotamia, and later in the Mohammedan dominions generally’, says Conybeare (quoted by Bury (loc. cit.)), ‘where they were tolerated, and where their own type of belief, as we see from the (Manichaean) Acts of Arkelaus, had never ceased to be accounted orthodox. They were thus lost sight of almost for centuries … at last they again made themselves felt as the extreme left wing of the Iconoclasts …’ (cf. Baynes, Byz. Emp., p. 88; Byron, Byz. Ach., p. 174, is inclined to exaggerate the connexion with Iconoclasm). Of the connexion between Paulicians and Bogomils no doubt is possible, for colonies of Bogomils in Turkey were sometimes called Paulicians; but ‘the Paulicians always appear in history as restless and troublesome, … the Bogomils, on the contrary, as meek, humble and ascetic’.14 There seems to be no doubt that the Bogomils were both Adoptionists and Manichaeans, rejecting both the divinity of Christ and the ceremonial of the Church with a severe puritanism which they somehow reconciled with the extravagances of dualistic eschatology.
These zealots ascribed
this visible world to the work of a devil,
says Robert Bridges of ‘those ancient Manichees’ (Testament of Beauty, iii. 703 ff.):
from all time Goddes foe and enemy to all good:
In hate of which hellpower so worthy of man's defiance
they had lost the old fear, and finding internecine war
declared twixt flesh and spirit in the authentic script
of Paul of Tarsus, him they took for master, and styled
themselves Paulicians the depositories of Christ.
Their creed—better than other exonerating God
from blame of evil—and their austere asceticism
shamed the half-hearted clerics, whose licence in sin
confirm'd the uncompromising logic, which inferr'd
a visible earthly Church to be Satan's device …
all of which may be accepted as a fair account of the Paulicians except that they took their name not from Paul of Tarsus but from Paul of Samosata, as is sufficiently proved by the passage of Anna Comnena's Alexiad already referred to, which also suggests that the Paulicians were more deeply infected than the Bogomils with Manichaeanism. Obolensky, however, insists that their name must be derived from an Armenian Polik (a contemptuous diminutive) and that the connexion with Paul of Samosata ‘cannot be justified either doctrinally or historically’ and ‘must be finally abandoned’ (The Bogomils, pp. 55, 56).
After the most savage persecution by the imperial armies, especially under the Regency of Theodora (842-856), the Paulicians revolted under the Armenian General Carbeas, formed an alliance with Omar the Emir of Melitene, and fortified Tefrik (which appears as Afrikê, GRO ii. 78) and other strongholds in the Armenian marches, whence, says Gibbon, ‘in their hostile inroads the disciples of St. Paul [sic] were joined with those of Mahomet’. In 859 Carbeas defeated Michael III, son of Theodora, under the walls of Samosata. E. W. Brooks (Camb. Med. History, iv. 133) says that this reading in Genesius should be amended to Arsamosata as ‘Omar had nothing to do with Samosata’; but Samosata was the headquarters of the Paulicians. Under the Regency of Bardas (862-6) and the generalship of his brother Petronas, Omar was defeated and killed at Poson in 863. But the Paulician rebels under Chrysocheir continued to pillage Asia Minor till Basil I the Macedonian (867-86) sued for peace, or at least sent an embassy of conciliation which led to a renewal of the war. In a later campaign Chrysocheir was defeated and beheaded (873) and Tefrik and Melitene and Samosata came definitely under the Byzantine dominion. Yet, says Gibbon, ‘the spirit of independence survived in the mountains; the Paulicians defended above a century their religion and liberty, infested the Roman limits, and maintained their perpetual alliance with the enemies of the empire and the gospel’.
It is impossible to read TRE 187 ff. without accepting the identification of Chrysocheir the Paulician with Chrysocherpes, father of the Emir Mousour and grandfather of Digenes. Chrysocherpes (Chrysoberges in GRO i. 284), marrying Spathia of Rahab-Edessa (called Panthia in GRO i. 284), became son-in-law of Ambrôn who is Omar of Melitene. After the death in battle of Chrysocherpes, his son the Emir Mousour tells us that he was brought up by his ‘Arabian uncles’ (theioi Arabitai, TRE 80, 808; GRO i. 287); and these Arabian uncles must be Mousour of Tarsus, and Karôes, for the Emir's mother, in GRO ii. 75, explicitly calls Karôes her brother. Karôes is to be identified with equal certainty with Carbeas. All these principal identifications, Ambron-Omar, Chrysocherpes-Chrysocheir, Karôes-Carbeas, were originally pointed out by Sathas and Legrand in their edition of Trebizond (introd. pp. lxiv ff.) and have been abundantly confirmed by Grégoire. But I do not think it has been noticed that if the Emir Mousour is son of Spathia and of the Paulician Christian Chrysocheir, he is just as much a Digenes, a child of two races, as his own son who is the Digenes par excellence of the poem; and this is what he implies when he emphasizes the fact that he was brought up by his Arabian uncles or kinsmen; he means that if his father had not been killed he would have been a Christian (GRO i. 288 is corrupt, but the emendation is obvious); and if Spathia calls Carbeas her own brother (a point which Grégoire seems to have missed), she is definitely naming as an Arab of the true faith the other Paulician leader of Armenian extraction. What is the explanation? It can only be that the author had very little knowledge of the Paulician heresy. This is exactly what we should suppose from the fact that it is impossible to squeeze out of the poem the faintest trace of Paulician doctrine15 (unless anyone is optimistic enough to suggest that the name of Digenes symbolizes a Manichaean dualism!). It follows that the poem is not and never can have been a Paulician pamphlet, as Grégoire suggests, of which fragments have survived in the Slavonic version (Byzantion, x (1935), pp. 335 ff.). For even if the pamphlet had been submitted as he assumes to loyalist revision before being reissued as imperial propaganda, the orthodox censors would certainly have left some signs of anti-Paulician odium; they would have emphasized the virtues of monasticism or the divinity of Christ or the unity of the creation, or some other points of doctrine on which the Paulicians erred; and they certainly would not have allowed Carbeas and Chrysocheir to be honourably mentioned in the family of the orthodox hero; and Chrysocheir to be openly glorified by his widow for refusing to apostatize before his death (TRE 190-5). The fact remains that the author of the poem as we have it is as surprisingly impartial as between Paulicianism and orthodoxy as he is between Christianity and Islam; if indeed his attitude is not so much impartiality as ignorance; for he does not seem to have ever heard of the Paulician heresy; and names the Paulician leaders only as brave enemies of the Empire, not distinguishable in any way from the Arabs who have now been conciliated. Sathas and Legrand were right in detecting that all the identifiable figures in the poem are connected by family and by locality to a Paulician milieu. They were wrong when they tried to stretch the evidence to prove that one of the objects of the Paulicians was the re-hellenization of the ‘Roman’ empire of Byzantium (TRE, introd. p. lxxiii), arguing only from a certain ‘westernizing’ tendency of Constantine Porphyrogennetos. They were unfortunately obsessed at the time with the great idea of producing a hero to lead Greece in a secular crusade against the Turks.
III
In this political obsession they were followed thirty years later by N. G. Polites who presented the poem as the ‘National Epic of Modern Greece’. It is difficult to see how anybody capable of reading the poem from beginning to end could be expected to swallow this, seeing that the hero is ex hypothesi a happy fusion of Christian and Mohammedan blood. There is little religious fanaticism in the poem, and only the most perfunctory expressions of orthodox Christianity. There is in fact little sign of any real religious feeling at all. It would never have occurred to this ‘Gentle Knight y cladd in mightie armes’ to spend the hours before battle on his knees. It has already been remarked that all the opponents of Digenes appear to have been at least nominally Christians, with the exception of the highwayman Mousour (TRE 1617), and of ‘Soudales the Saracen’ (AND 2024; ESC 928); and the latter curiously enough, though called a Saracen, was fighting in the service of our hero's prospective father-in-law Doukas, and bore the name of a Byzantine general; of a Byzantine general who distinguished himself by his persecution of the Paulicians (see above, p. xxxix). Is this a faint trace of Digenes being on the Paulician side? (See refs. to Cedrenus and Cont. Theoph. in TRE, introd. p. lxxx.) Or is it only another detail which tends to show that the author was not composing propaganda for either Greeks or Paulicians but was writing romantically about battles long ago? These considerations suggest that theological passion was not as universal in the Empire as has sometimes been supposed. Distant provinces, unless agitated by particular local heresies, were inclined to be less fanatical than the capital not only because the shifting frontiers were natural areas of percolation and tolerance, but also because all bigoted theologians, from a natural love of temporal power, must usually have a centripetal tendency. If the author had any political theories at all, other than a general preference for peace, he may have been hinting that the Paulicians (represented by Chrysocherpes and by Digenes the grandson of Chrysocherpes, who would represent a non-existent but wished-for product of the Paulician-Arab alliance) ought to be used by the Empire to subdue or convert the Arabs. If he held such views, he might have expressed them more clearly. Or was it too dangerous for an Orthodox author to suggest that Paulicians might have their uses?
IV
The nationalism of Polites was a cause of distortion more serious than the linguistic prejudices of his successor S. P. Kyriakides, whose preference for the rustic language makes him overestimate the Escorial version and the Pontic Songs. But his admirable book on Digenes Akritas collects from the Byzantine chroniclers many invaluable illustrations of the Akritic life, showing its extraordinary passion for horses, hunting, and feats of strength; and his review (in Laografia, x (1928), pp. 623-62) of the first five Gregorian articles is of the greatest importance.
Kyriakides accepts in general Grégoire's dates (928-44) for the production of the original Digeneid, and even narrows it down, by the final destruction of Melitene in 934, to the decade immediately preceding 944 under Romanos Lekapenos (918-44). Then, by an extremely detailed examination of modifications which have been introduced into the genealogy of the hero in the various versions of the poem, he goes on to argue that it received two ‘Doukas revisions’ in the eleventh century under Constantine Doukas (1059-67) and Nikeforos III Botaneiates (1078-81). From the first of these revisions descends our Escorial version, from the second our Grottaferrata; and all our other versions descend from a third or Comnenian revision in the first half of the twelth century. The endless argument about details seldom carries conviction, and his maintenance of the Escorial version in a position at the top of the tree nearest to the archetype is based on linguistic prejudice; product though it is, says he, of a Doukas revision, it shows signs of independence and of ‘earliness’, among which he is driven to enumerate, as pointing to the ninth century, the mention of the Emir's victories over ‘Romans and Persians’ (ESC 150) and of ‘Soudales the Saracen’ (see above), although Persians are also mentioned in TRE (2868) and Soudales in AND 2026; TRE has a lacuna here.16
Finally he notes that it is unnecessary to go back for an origin of the name of Digenes to a turmarch Diogenes killed in 788 (see below, p. lxxi). The epithet digenes is applied to Leo V the Armenian (813-20) by Symeon Magister; mixed parentage is a not uncommon attribute of royal or heroic figures as it is of Alexander in the Persian epic of Firdausi (see the Shah Nameh of Firdausi, translated by J. Atkinson, 1833, pp. 493 ff.). Sikander is born of the union of Nahid, daughter of Failakus (Philip), with Darab the Arabian general (see also pp. 375 ff. for the marriage of Gushtasp to Kitabun, daughter of the King of Rum, a curious episode with numerous Greek affinities, including the detail that the friend and brother-in-law of Gushtasp is called Mabrun who must be the Mavrianos of the Greek ballad).
V
In the train of Grégoire has appeared most notably N. Adontz (‘Les Fonds historiques de l'épopée byzantine Digénès Akritas’, in Byz. Zeitschrift, xxix (1930), pp. 198-227) who, naturally provoked by the Sathas-Legrand-Polites idealization of everything Greek, has proceeded to show that as a matter of fact everybody mentioned in the poem was more or less an Armenian. Indeed ‘les hommes d'action à Byzance, soit au palais impérial, soit sur le champ de bataille, étaient principalement Arméniens ou d'origine arménienne’. This may be true of the period, and corresponds of course to the importance of Melitene. But the observation is historically misleading because the Empire habitually disregarded such distinctions: all its subjects were ‘Romans’ or ‘Christians’. He is more convincing when he reminds us, and I believe he was the first to observe the fact, that the emperor Basil I the Macedonian (867-86), whose campaigns against the Paulicians led to the death of Chrysocheir, was himself so famous for his athletic and hunting exploits that Basil Digenes the Borderer might have taken from him both his name and his attributes. He also noted that the three heroines of the poem, Anna, Eirene, and Evdokia, seem to have been named after the ladies of the court two hundred years later, when the emperor, who married Evdokia, widow of Constantine Doukas, was called Romanos Diogenes (1068-71)—suggesting a later or Comnenian recension in the eleventh century. His examination of Armenian epic romances for alleged parallels and originals of incidents in the Greek is interesting but produces results fewer and less convincing than those extracted from the Arabic by Grégoire and his collaborators. That Armenians were unusually active and prominent in the ninth and tenth centuries is undeniable. But it is equally true that at this period men of every descent began to forget their races in the service of the Empire. From the middle of the ninth century, says Diehl, ‘there really existed a Byzantine nationality’. By speaking Greek they became consciously ‘Romans’.
VI
It was Grégoire who first turned his attention to Trôsis, a place on the Euphrates where Digenes is said to have made his camp in the meadow. He looked for it on the map—and there it was: a place called Trusch, a day's march from Samosata; and Samosata (actually mentioned in ESC 1320 in an incidental boast of the three Apelate leaders among themselves, but in no other version) was the capital of the ancient Commagene Kingdom on the upper Euphrates, the Kingdom of the Philopappi, and later became the metropolis of the Paulicians. Many of the rulers of the Syrian Kingdom of Commagene (suppressed by Rome in a.d. 72) bore the name of Philopappos, and the last of them, dying in exile in a.d. 114, gave his name to a familiar monument in Athens.17 The name of Philopappos may well have survived in heroic legend round the ancient capital on the Euphrates, and it is at least a curious coincidence that Philopappos should be the name of the chief of the Reivers in the Digenes epic, reappearing in all sorts of mutilated and distorted forms in many of the Songs. But near Trôsis-Trusch on the Euphrates there stands on a hill another ruined monument of the Commagene period, and this seems to answer exactly to the poem's description of the tomb of Digenes (GRO viii. 239; in ESC 1670 ff. the more elaborate description seems to be reminiscent of Arrian's description of the tomb of Cyrus). But that is not all; near by there still stands a Roman bridge crossing a branch of the Euphrates—and this must be the bridge which Digenes (again only in ESC 1660) is said to have built over the Euphrates in a single span (monokerato). Grégoire, as mentioned above, cannot leave the single span alone, and produces a preposterous emendation; but it is hard to resist him when he argues that the frontier guards of Romanos Lekapenos, who advanced to the Euphrates after 928, saw these monuments of antiquity, the Bridge and the Tomb, and connected them in their ballads with their eponymous and partly symbolic hero Digenes Akrites. (He does not tell us when these singing soldiers imagined their hero to have lived—the Bridge and the Tomb cannot have looked very new—or what interval of time separated the soldiers' songs from the literary epic made out of them.)
Thus one layer of the poem—although layer is hardly the right metaphor for a tissue of fibres which penetrate the epic in all directions—derives from Melitene, and another from the Euphrates, which the Byzantine power bordered from 928 to 1071. The line of demarcation in the poem is exactly the front reached by the armies of Romanos Lekapenos, who died in 944. Other elements, as already shown, have led us to the decade 934-44. The Sacred mandelin is still in Arabian custody in Edessa whence it was removed in 944; and it must be after 934, Kyriakides has supplemented, for there is no mention of Melitene; Edessa is the headquarters of the Syrian Arabs; it was in 934 that Melitene, after the reconciliation of 928, was again attacked by Kourkouas and wiped out with the help of Melias and his Armenians (Kyriak., Laografia, x. 628; referring to Theoph. Cont. 416). But there are the unmistakable borrowings from Genesius; and his work is generally believed to have been written between 945 and 959, and can hardly have been in circulation before 944 owing to the dedication to Constantine Porphyrogennetos (Krumb., Byz. Litt. 264; Gibbon, ed. Bury, v. 503; Bury, East. Rom. Emp. 460; Byzantion, v. 346, vi. 495). To this difficulty Grégoire replies that there may have been an earlier edition of the History or an earlier dedication; that Miss A. Werner, a pupil of Heisenberg, has contended that Bury may have been mistaken in thinking that Genesius preceded the Continuation of Theophanes; or that both authors may have drawn independently from a common source now lost.
To these chronographical data must be added the fact that the poem also contains recognizable memories of the raiding of Anatolia by Paulician rebels in alliance with Omar of Melitene a hundred years earlier. Grégoire had first been led to examine the historical substructure of the Digeneid by noting that the destruction of Ankyra, which necessitated its rebuilding by Michael III in 859 (known from an inscription), is not mentioned by any Greek historian, and only from Arab sources is known to have occurred in 838; yet it is clearly referred to in the Greek epic (GRO ii. 77; AND 4291). Besides these memories of ninth-century campaigns, which require some expert knowledge to decipher, it is obvious that there is an older layer of the epic localized in Asia Minor before the imperial frontiers were advanced to the Euphrates. The move of Digenes from Kappadokia to the Euphrates is never explicitly referred to; but his parents remained in Kappadokia till his father's death when his mother rejoined him on the river banks; the career of Digenes may itself symbolize the imperial advance, though Grégoire never suggests this. In Kappadokia, Grégoire concludes, historic lays may have preserved and magnified the memory of an officer of the Anatolic theme named Diogenes, described as tourmarches anêr hikanos, ‘a good regimental officer’, who is known from Theophanes (Bonn, p. 718) to have fallen in battle in 788 at Kopidnado (emended by Grégoire to Podando) in the Taurus. (Kyriakides, as we have seen, thinks this supposition unnecessary.) In a later contribution (Byzantion, xi (1936), p. 608) Grégoire reaffirms this identification, and also that of Aaron Doukas (TRE 54), with a Bulgarian Aaron, Duke of Mesopotamia, who died about 1070, and is one indication of a Comnenian recension at the beginning of the twelth century; and in his latest work (Digenes, New York, 1942, p. 34) the identification of Digenes with the ‘good regimental officer’ Diogenes, who was killed in 788, appears to be supported by the fact that Roland, eponymous hero of the French Chanson, was killed in the Pyrenees in 788.
A further note must be added about Grégoire's Diogénes; it is not easy to see how such a name could have developed into the adjective Digenés—an adjective of learned formation, and always used as such in the epic; the author of which might seem to have taken it not from any real person but from the Byzantine prose of his day. The adjective digenés is not used at all—except by one or two grammarians with the meaning ‘of two genders’ (as Aristotle G.A. iii. 9. 11 uses trigenés of a moth which is ‘thrice-born’)—until it appears in the history of Symeon Magister (Theophanes, Bonn, iii. 603), used of Leo V the Armenian (813-20)—digenes ex Assyriôn kai Armeniôn (Symeon was writing about 970). The idea of the double descent of great men, if not the adjective, is familiar in learned literature and in romance. Kyriakides, who gives us this quotation from Symeon, also points out (Laografia, x (1928), p. 661) that the Perso-Macedonian descent of Basil I is emphasized in Theophanes Cont. and that the idea of the double descent of Alexander and of other great men is common in the Alexander Romance and in Firdausi. But in the ballads Digenés is used only as a proper name; and the idea that a descent from two races is an advantage seems to be unfamiliar to the ballads. They often seem to adopt the name without knowing what it means; and show signs of trying to regularize it as a proper name by shifting the accent back to the penultimate and calling him Digénes. The result of this shift is that the name is very soon corrupted to Giánnes (e.g. the ballads on the death of Digenes in Laografia, i (1910), nos. 27, 31, 38, 39).
Finally it must be said that even if Diogénes were a more convincing figure, it is apparent that the epic is not about a good officer or even about a successful general of the imperial government, but about a lonely hero of romance; a hero who somehow crystallized social and political emotions and perhaps—like King Arthur or like Robin Hood or like Piers Plowman—was not a reflection of any clear original.
Grégoire's most original and substantial contribution to Digenic research is his dissection and exhibition of the Arabic element in the poem. Digenes has an Arabic counterpart, an historical character named Abd Allah Abu-'l Husain el Antaki el Battal, commonly known as Sidi Battal who was killed in an Arab raid at Akroenos in 740 (see Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, p. 709). His apocryphal adventures are enshrined in the Turkish romance of Sidi Battal (itself not earlier than the fourteenth century, and most familiar in Ethé's German translation), and his tomb near Eskishehr was still a place of pilgrimage in Asia Minor in the twentieth. He also married a Christian princess and in fact had several Christian wives, one of whom was the daughter of his vizir Akrates—so named, presumably, after Akrites himself. (Hasluck (pp. 706 ff.), from whom most of these details are taken, makes a strange slip when he remarks that ‘Digenes Akritas elopes with an emir's daughter’.) This Turkish romance acquires some historical importance when Marius Canard discovers that it incorporates the substance of a tenth-century lay of the Emir of Melitene, an Arabic Gest of Omar of Melitene the existence of which Grégoire had suspected must underlie the earlier part of the Digenes epic, occupied largely as it is with Arabian andragathy and celebrating the gallantry of the Emir (father of Digenes) and his grandfather Ambron (who is Omar of Melitene although Melitene is never mentioned). This Arabic epic material appears most clearly in GRO; more clearly than in ESC which Grégoire usually quotes; it refers openly to the Emir's harem, as in fact do all versions except the seventeenth-century OXF; see TRE 215, GRO iii. 127, AND 669—all references quite as explicit as ESC 236 to the terpna korasia he has left behind him. GRO is the only version which refers to the Moslem sanctuary at Palermo, GRO i. 101; although ESC refers to Mecca and the tomb of Mohammed (ESC 537, 564). Sidi Battal himself is fanatically Moslem in spite of his Christian wives, but the romance is a late Turkish recension. It is possible that a Gest of the exploits of Omar of Melitene, the existence of which can be traced not only in the Adventures of Sidi Battal but also in an earlier Arabian epic, the Dat el Himmat, was used by the author of Digenes to furnish the exploits of the hero's father and grandfather; but it is more probable that the exploits of Omar were familiar in local tradition.
The conversion of the Emir Musur evidently corresponds, says Grégoire, to the historical submission of an Emir of Melitene to the Byzantine general John Kourkouas in 928. But the dating of all these campaigns is extremely precarious (see Runciman, Romanus Lecapenus, pp. 137 ff.); it seems much more likely to correspond with the final capture of the city in 934, when ‘only Christians were allowed to remain inside the walls, whereupon the majority of the population hastened to be converted’ (ibid., p. 142); and the fact that in this culminating attack Kourkouas was supported by Melias (who has been identified as Melimendzes) shows how difficult and unnecessary it is to follow into extreme detail the historical incidents reflected in the epic. The place which historical detail occupies in the Digeneid must be conditioned by the character of the poem. If it is, as Grégoire appears to believe, a semi-political manifesto, it should have as a background a prejudiced perhaps but at least a recognizable picture of the contemporary scene. If it is a romance enlivened by the occasional appearance of historical characters, it is legitimate to identify these but unnecessary to expect them to coincide in detail with their prototypes.18
The fall of Melitene was followed shortly, as the Arab but not the Byzantine chroniclers report, by the conversion of a whole tribe, the Beni Habib, of Syrian Arabs; an incident which strikingly recalls the conversion, in Digenes, of the Emir's mother and all his household and their migration to Kappadokia. It is known, however, that similar conversions were not rare. Kyriakides (Digenes, p. 69) quotes an edict of Constantine Porphyrogennetos by which Saracen prisoners are encouraged to marry and settle down by three years' exemption from taxation. After the victory of John Kourkouas the imperial attitude towards the Syrian Arabs became one of conciliation and peaceful penetration, says Grégoire rather questionably. It was hoped that the friendly Syrian Arabs might form a buffer against the darker tribes from the south, the ‘Egyptians’, and the Arabs from Baghdad who had failed to come to the help of Melitene. It is specially noted in Digenes (GRO i. 32) that the Emir, whose marriage and conversion produced the hero, was fair and handsome, ‘Not black like the Ethiopians’.
With the help of Marius Canard, Grégoire follows the Emirs of Melitene from the Arabian chroniclers into the Arabian Nights. But no useful end seems to be served, as far as Digenes is concerned, by recognizing their appearance there, or the appearance of other characters some of whom seem to have come from the Akritic cycle (as we have already noticed, above, the appearance of Maurianos in the Shah Nameh). We are not impressed by the resemblance, detected by Grégoire, between the Magic Horse of the Arabian Nights and the Rape of Evdokia. Even if we were, it would be unnecessary to deduce any Arabic or any Greek priority, or any specifically literary influence. In Mesopotamia a common reservoir of folk anecdote, which is always more local than national, must have been decanted indifferently into Greek tragoudia and into Arabic bazaar stories; and much later recorded in the literary redactions of Digenes Akrites and of the Thousand and One Nights. Difference of language is no bar to the diffusion of folk-tale. Mesopotamia had been a mixing bowl and centre of diffusion for a thousand years or more—and nearly all the inhabitants of Syria must have spoken more than one language. It is only with the growth of nationalism and the spread of public education that the ability to speak more than one language has come to be regarded as the privilege of a minority.
After following Arabic themes eastward to Persia and westward to France, and after applying the methods which were so successful on the Euphrates to the upper reaches of the Meuse, Henri Grégoire was conducted by the Nibelungs19 to the tenth-century Latin poem Waltharius. There he finds on a hill-top in the Vosges the hero Walther spending the night, while his enemies approach, with his head in the lap of the damsel Hildegunde (Waltharius, ii. 490 ff.; Grimm and Schmeller, Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. JH. (Göttingen, 1838), p. 19; see also Raby, Secular Latin Poetry, i. 262 ff.). This, cries Grégoire, is exactly what Digenes does in the Russian version after he has carried off Evdokia (SPE, p. 327). In this passage Devgeny, having carried off the daughter of Strategos, says to her, ‘Sit down and look in my hair until your father and brothers arrive. If I fall asleep do not wake me in a fright but gently’ (see also Kalonaros, ii. 285). It is a passage which shows the contaminating folk element in the Russian version, but otherwise has little significance. The Waltharius is a literary exercise written by a schoolboy who knew Virgil and a little Greek and took a German story for his plot. No source, says Grégoire, has ever been discovered for this episode, and this German boy must have seen the primitive Greek original of the Russian version: it is a final proof for him of the existence of a primitive Greek version which followed the fantastic lines of the Russian. But Devgeny was not the first young man, nor was Waltharius the last, to sleep with his head on the lap of a damsel who wakes him attactu blando at the proper moment; and whether she cleanses his head while he is asleep, as in the Russian version, or only strokes it to wake him up is an accident of place. We know that head-in-lap is a characteristic position of the dreaming King in Celtic legend, especially before battle;20 and Waltharius is not more relevant to Digenes than is the ballad of Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (Child, no. 4, a.; p. 5):
‘O sit down a while, lay your head on my knee
That we may hae some rest before that I die.’
She stroak'd him sae fast, the nearer he did creep,
Wi a sma charm she lulld him fast asleep.
After all this it will perhaps seem surprising that although Sathas and Legrand chose to identify Digenes, by appealing to the Porfyrios of the Songs, with an obscure Byzantine general called Pantherios, a relative of Constantine, who is supposed to have deserved some of the glory of Kourkouas whom he replaced in 944 (TRE, introd. p. cxxvi), no one has yet found any connexion between Digenes and the Georgian epic The Man in the Panther's Skin. Nor has it yet been suggested that Digenes, the Lonely Knight, symbolizes the Monothelite heresy, with Maximo to represent the seventh-century champion of orthodoxy, Maximus the Confessor. But Grégoire has succeeded in tracing Maximo to a Greek inscription of the second century a.d., which was found at Sebastopolis (Sulu-Serai) on the Black Sea, was recorded by Röhl in 1875, and has now disappeared. It was erected to the memory of a woman described as matrônan stolatan, and archiereian, and wife of a pontarches, and she is named as
kese(nn)ian maximan tên kai amazonin.
Districts associated with the cult of Hercules, as was the town of Sebastopolis, were traditionally sites of colonies of Amazons; the same tradition no doubt led one of the great ladies of Sebastopolis to take the surname of Amazonis. This inscription, says Grégoire, must certainly have been seen and misunderstood by some Byzantine soldier of the Charsianian Theme, and gave rise to a local story which suggested the name of Maximo for the Amazon adversary of Digenes.21
5. CONCLUSIONS
I
It has been made sufficiently clear that Digenes is not a conflict between Greek and Barbarian, Christianity and Islam, or East and West. Partly of course this is because, as Baynes says in a passage already quoted, in the eighth and ninth centuries the heart of the Empire was in Asia Minor and Armenia. There is something more that can be said about the relation of the Christian and Moslem aspects of the poem. Why should a Christian author trouble to include in his work, with very little alteration, the substance of a Moslem epic? An answer to this may be borrowed from another quarter. Recent finds of Byzantine art in Russia have occasioned argument about the priority of Greek and Iranian motives. In reference to these discussions Talbot Rice has remarked that ‘it is not possible to speak of the influence of the East upon the West because from the seventh to the twelfth centuries there was neither east nor west’.
This highly relevant remark may be supplemented by a quotation from H. St. L. B. Moss (Birth of the Middle Ages (1935), p. 144): ‘The culture of Islam was not, as is often supposed, an Asiatic civilization, irreconcilably opposed to that of Europe. It was, on the contrary, a product of the same elements as those which formed the background of early Christian thought, the union, namely, of Hellenistic culture which pervaded the near east.’ He goes on to remind us with a reference to Vasiliev (vol. i, p. 274) that in the eyes of many medieval writers from John Damascene to Dante (Inferno, xxviii. 31) Islam was not a pagan religion but a Christian heresy. This attitude helps to explain the carelessness with which Moslems and Paulicians are confused in the genealogy of Digenes.
If the author had been writing ‘historically’ about the Arabs and the Empire before 944, would it have been possible for him to avoid mentioning the victorious general John Kourkouas? ‘The Greek chroniclers lauded John Kourkouas as the man that brought the frontier to the Euphrates’, says Runciman (Romanus Lecapenus, p. 148); ‘for once they were guilty of underpraising’. Sathas and Legrand (TRE, introd. pp. cxv ff.) suggest that there was a conspiracy between Constantine Porphyrogennetos and the chroniclers to exalt the Armenian Kourkouas and suppress with silence the achievements of the Greek Pantherios; and that the magnificence of Pantherios is presented in the figure of Digenes, who is in fact the historical Pantherios of whom very little is known except that he was of the imperial family. But now an even greater difficulty arises which does not seem to have been noticed. Our hero Digenes is not a general at all. He never led an army in his life. He chooses his own lonely and errant life on the borders. It is ridiculous, therefore, to look for him in the regular army or in the regular bureaucracy of the Empire. If it is strange to find no mention of Kourkouas, it is equally strange that another Armenian, Melias or Mleh the Great, whose rise to power is recorded in Constantine Porphyrogennetos (de Admin. Imp., Bonn, pp. 227, 228), the constant ally of Kourkouas in his campaigns against the Arabs, should appear in an unflattering light as Melimentzes whom Digenes unhorses with a single blow: Melias who was given the frontier theme of Lykandos in 914 and shared with Kourkouas the triumph of Melitene in 934. (Adontz thinks that Kourkouas himself does appear—as Ioannikios; and Grégoire at one time suggested that Digenes himself represented Melias, and by defeating him assumed his exploits.)
II
Grégoire believes that the poem—that is the archetypal version—must have been written after 930, when Melitene was destroyed, and before 944. His reason for this is that in GRO iii. 135 the Emir's mother, resisting his attempts to convert her, refers to a famous local relic—‘The Towel of Naaman’. He assumes that this must be the famous ‘Sacred Image of Edessa’, a towel on which Christ had wiped his face, leaving on it an impression or mould (ekmageion) which he sent to King Abgar of Edessa.
Unfortunately, as noted above (p. xxxv), Grégoire forgets that there was a second Relic, no less sacred than the Sacred Image, which was not removed from Edessa in 944. This was the Letter from Jesus Christ to the leprous King Abgar; it was more closely associated with Abgar than the kerchief, and more likely to be confused with Naaman than the portrait of Christ; it might even have been described as tou Naiman to mantato—the letter of Naaman—and a Greek scribe thinking of the more famous relic may have changed mantato into mantili. There may even have been a third relic, rightly called tou Naiman to mantili, which was the towel on which Naaman wiped himself after bathing in Jordan. Edessa, as Hasluck notes (Letters on Religion and Folklore, pp. 129, 172), was a great clearing-house of religious legend. The letters of Christ and Abgar are preserved in Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. i, 13), copied from a Syriac manuscript at Edessa. A modern version of the story and the text of the Letter for use as a charm are to be found in a pamphlet of magical formulas from Cyprus now in the Cambridge University Library (pam. 5.91.1434. Kyprianarion periehon proseuhas kai exorkismous. …, K. Belefantou (Leukosia, 1913), pp. 29, 30). Christ, on the appeal of Abgar, sent not only the Letter promising the evangelizing visit of Judas son of Thaddaeus, but also, by the same messenger, Ananias, the self-portrait on a towel, after Ananias, himself an artist, had failed to draw it. This version combines both Portrait and Letter and the Letter is said to have remained at Edessa till it was captured by the Byzantine General Maniakes in 1031, six years after the death of Basil II. Maniakes, by the way, was famous for his herculean strength and stature (Psellos, ed. Sathas, p. 137; cf. TRE 974; AND 1511; GRO 1179). By that time Romanos III Argyros was on the throne, and he started negotiations with the Arabs. Vasiliev says that they resulted in a treaty for the rebuilding of the churches of Jerusalem. In any case the Arabian Wars, which had lasted without any considerable intermission for three hundred years, now came to an end. We have found another Basil, another Romanos, and another Relic of Abgar-Naaman, nearly a hundred years later than the first; and in some respects they are more congruous with the data than the other trio.
III
The poem of Digenes is in fact a romance, and a romance destitute of theological or political propaganda; fortunate is the reader who can not only find in it with Grégoire (Ant. Class. i. 424) ‘des indications géographiques nombreuses et précises’ but draw any substantial information from them. It is marked by a complete absence of fanaticism or political urgency because it is based on floating folk-tale; and it is of learned execution because it is written by a monk or scribe with enough education to want to make out of floating folk-story something permanent like ‘l'art des musées’, that is to say like Homer, or perhaps like Pseudo-Kallisthenes. We know that it was written when there had been for some time a ‘Roman peace’ on the frontiers of the Empire and when there was a possibility and a prospect of that peace being maintained. The author is telling a story of the past and not recording contemporary events. He has heard of the Paulician rebellions but knows very little about them, in spite of the fact that he appears to be writing in their own country on the Euphrates. He can suppose without improbability that the funeral of Digenes was attended by delegations from Baghdad and Babylon; and he took apparently from an Arab source a chronicle of the Arab raids of the ninth century as part of his background. He had no difficulty in reading it because as a dweller on the frontier he was certainly bilingual, like the Emir (GRO i. 115). As his poem was intended for Greek readers he was careful to connect his hero with no generals, no armies, and no big cities. Historical characters in romance, like the author's friends in a modern novel, are often difficult to disguise; when he was obliged to name a Greek family he avoided the difficulty by calling them all Doukas.
IV
The author of the original Digeneid (and there is no reason to suppose that it was very different from the Grottaferrata version) was a Greek or rather a ‘Roman’, from the district of Syria Commagene. He was probably a monk. His language is largely drawn from the Septuagint, and he has some pretensions to a literary education, although his knowledge of past history seems to be a pantheon of biblical heroes and Alexander the Great; he is more familiar with Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius than with Homer. (The actual quotations from the Iliad only occur in TRE and AND; Iliad i. 365—TRE 1218, AND 1808; Iliad ii. 489—TRE 504, AND 1018; they seem to have been added as part of a definite writing-up of GRO (see especially GRO iv. 391, a gnomic line identical with TRE 1221, where TRE (followed of course in more popular language by AND) has added the quotation from the Iliad). But GRO shares with TRE a reference to Odysseus and the Seirens: GRO iv. 261; TRE 1117.) His literary culture is small. But he has intimations of a highly civilized idea, the idea of imperial peace, the opposite of nationalism; an idea which might come naturally to one who lived on the tidemark of the Byzantine armies, and was not, for all that, any commoner in the tenth century than it is today. It would be pleasant to believe that in the figure of Digenes the author was personifying a new political ideal for the future of the Empire:
ostendent terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
esse sinent. …
And where in the history of the Arab wars are we to find a period of established peace for the author to look back on?
Grégoire finds such a pacific interval in 928 and even discovers that Kourkouas was then following a new policy of ‘pacific penetration’. Less optimistic surveyors of the eastern frontier will find it difficult to discover any settled frontiers before the victories of Nikeforos Fôkas (963-9); or any tranquillity before the victories of Basil Bulgaroktonos (976-1025). When Romanos Lekapenos advanced to the Euphrates he had come to the brink of another hundred years of unceasing warfare. It was only the victories of Basil Bulgaroktonos, culminating in the last taking of Edessa, and the capture of the second relic of Edessa, the Letter of Abgar, by George Maniakes, that inaugurated a period of established peace on the Mesopotamian frontiers during the reign of Constantine Monomachos (1042-55).
Reference has been made to the description in the history of Psellos (ed. Sathas, 1899, p. 123) of George Maniakes. Psellos (1018-79) wrote the earlier part of his history about 1060 and gives a personal description of Maniakes the victor of Edessa. He towered over everybody; his voice was like thunder, his hands looked capable of shaking walls and shattering gates of bronze; his spring was like that of a lion; and his fame even surpassed his actual appearance; every enemy of the Empire (barbaros) was afraid of him, either from having seen him or from having heard the stories about him. The same historian has also left us a striking description of the beauty of Constantine IX Monomachos (ibid. p. 147) which exceeded in naturally exquisite form, colour, and proportion the poetical descriptions of Achilles and ‘Nereus’.22 His head was ruddy and gleamed like the sun while the skin of his breast and belly was of a dazzling whiteness, so that, in his youth of course, and before he fell ill, one might have looked and said that his head was like the sun surrounded with shining rays of hair and the rest of his body like pure and transparent crystal. Both these descriptions recall the descriptions of Digenes, though none of the details are identical, except that the breast of the youthful Digenes was also like crystal (GRO iv. 199, TRE 974). There is nothing in the least decisive in such descriptions, though the resemblances are certainly greater than those which Kyriakides detects (Laografia, x. 656) between the description of the twelve-year-old Eirene (AND 124 ff.) and Anna Comnena's description of her own mother Eirene (Alex. iii. 3; ed. Reifferscheid, vol. i, p. 101).23 But they certainly add to the probability that the middle of the eleventh century was the time when a provincial author, a Syrian or Mesopotamian monk, could have looked back into the past over a considerable period of peace, and attributed its establishment to a fictitious hero who had been honoured by an emperor named Basil, or (in a second edition) by two emperors named Romanos and Nikeforos.
The crystalline torso of Constantine Monomachos had already been noticed by Sathas and Legrand (in their note on TRE 974) who refer to uses of the same simile in later romances (Florios and Platziaflora and Imberios and Margarona). It is in fact a commonplace in Byzantine authors24—but not before the eleventh century.
V
The emperor Basil who delights to honour his namesake Digenes in the oldest version (GRO iv. 972) is clearly Basil II, the Bulgaroctone (976-1025), ‘who at that time was managing the empire of the Romans, Basil the blessed, the great conqueror, who indeed buried with himself the imperial glory; for he happened to be making his expedition against the Persians in those parts where the Boy was to be found’. His Persian campaign may quite permissibly refer to Basil's Georgian campaign of 1021, although Kyriakides, while accepting the manifest reference to Basil II, decides that Persôn cannot here mean Persians—etyhe gar kata Persôn poiôn tên ekstrateian—but is an anachronism put in in the eleventh century as a compliment to Nikeforos Botaneiates who was proud of his descent from Basil II. (Laografia, x. 654.) It is noteworthy that in GRO iv. 56 ‘Basil the Blessed the Great Borderer’ is also given as the name of the emperor who had banished the grandfather of Digenes; and that owing to the length of his reign Basil II is one of the few emperors who might really have lived to honour the grandson after banishing the grandfather. (The corresponding passages in TRE 836 and AND 1369 mention Romanos as the emperor who banished the grandfather, evidently because in those versions it is Romanos who honours the grandson Digenes.) Sathas and Legrand connect the disgracing of the grandfather with the conspiracy against Leo VI in 908 led by the real Andronikos Doukas who strangely enough went over to the Arabs (TRE, introd. p. xcv). All of which goes to show again that the history of Digenes while often recognizable is not real history. It is ‘typical’ history presenting a generalized or abstract picture of the Eastern frontier.
The elaborate theories of Grégoire and Kyriakides, who suppose that successive revisers made genealogical interpolations in order to do honour to various living individuals, require us to think that the author or reviser possessed a mentality which is not to be found in other parts of the poem; and ask us to believe, if we can, that a Doukas at any period within the author's range would have been highly honoured on being related, by an anonymous monk, to the grandmother of a legendary hero. The author undoubtedly took what names he could from the histories available, and he would not have had to look very far to find the names of Doukas or Mouselês: and as for damsels, there are fourteen Evdokias and twenty-one Eirenes in the index of Ducange's Familiae Byzantinae. It must have been from a history book that he took the name of Soudales the ‘Saracen’ who fought for Evdokia's father on the night of the elopement. Soudales, as has been said, was one of three generals sent against the Paulicians by the Empress Theodora in 855; in the Continuation of Theophanes their names are given as ‘the son of Argyros, and the son of Doukas, and Soudales’; but in the Skylitzes transcription of this chronicle the names are given as ‘Leon Argyros, and Andronikos Doukas, and Soudales’. The conjunction of Soudales with Andronikos Doukas suggests that it was from this passage that the author of Digenes took both these names. But this conjunction is found not in the original book but only in the transcription of Skylitzes; and Skylitzes was a contemporary of Psellos writing in the middle of the eleventh century. So the conjunction in the poem of Soudales and Andronikos Doukas is another detail which gives a hint of this date.25
VI
Digenes is a symbolic hero; he must accordingly be placed in a symbolical setting. So the poem gives us no history but a composite arrangement of history, in which fragments or aspects of many actual facts are rearranged to give a universalized image of conflict on the eastern frontier; combined with elements of pure romance. This legendary or at least typical period of conflict so far from being contemporary or even conterminous with the time of composition is separated from it by a gap the existence of which is indicated by the word tênikauta (GRO iv. 972) which has been often overlooked.
For such a legendary period it was necessary to provide typical emperors; and we may suppose that the author chose as his ideal emperor the not so long departed Basil II; and that the first rewriter of the poem preferred the conquering names of Romanos Lekapenos and Nikeforos Fôkas, without considering or caring whether both these emperors could have honoured a hero who died at the age of thirty-three. Of one thing we may be quite certain, that the emperors named were not the author's contemporaries. Basil II died in 1025. What are we to regard as a sufficient interval in order that his achievements may be represented as legendary? Shall we guess that the Digenes was written during the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042-54) during which ‘almost complete peace reigned on the frontier of Syria and Mesopotamia’? It was not only the first period of complete peace but also the latest. In 1048 the Seljuq Turks were already gathering on the Armenian border.
Notes
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Epos Mesaiônikon / ek tou kheirografou Trapezountos / O Basileios Digenes Akritês / O Kappadokês / ypomnêmatisthen ekdidotai / ypo / Sabba Iôannidou / … en Kônstantinoupolei / … 1887.
The text is fairly correct and is supplemented by about 700 lines from the OXF and AND versions. Ioannides regards Digenes as a fully historical figure of the Kappadokian aristocracy who lived from 936 to 969 against a background slightly adjusted from the chronicle of Kedrenos.
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Ioannides (p. 22) says it is written in the dialect of Chios, presumably because it is too demotic for his taste.
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Achilles Tatius has also been shown by a papyrus fragment to have written at the end of the third century, though he had formerly been placed in the fourth or fifth (see Ach. Tat., ed. S. Gaselee, pp. xiii-xv).
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It should be noted here that all the metrical versions of Digenes are written in the well-known ‘political’ metre, the politikos stichos, the fifteen-syllable ballad metre, which has become almost universal in Greek popular poetry. (See my note in F. H. Marshall's Three Cretan Plays (Oxford, 1929), p. 2, and add refs. to Wagner, Mediaeval Greek Texts (1870), pp. ii-viii; Schmitt, The Chronicle of Morea (1904), pp. xxxiii-xxxvi; W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (1904, n.e. 1955), pp. 343, 344; Heisenberg, Dialekte und Umgangsprache im Neugriechischen (Munich, 1918), pp. 44-55; and Ducange, s.v. politikoi stichoi.) This metre, although it is now of course accentual, seems to be the same as the ancient (quantitative) iambic tetrameter catalectic which is to be found fairly often in the tragedians as well as in Aristophanes. See, for example, Aristophanes, Plutus 288, Nubes 1433, which are both quantitative and accentual; Nubes 1399, which is quantitative but cannot be read accentually. Aeschylus, Persae 155, and Soph. O.T. 1524, are examples of quantitative trochaic tetrameters catalectic which can be read accentually as iambic tetrameters catalectic, and many more could no doubt be found; even Homeric hexameters can sometimes be read as accentual fifteeners, though usually without caesura: e.g. Od. ix. 106, Iliad vii. 59. The beginnings of the accentual fifteener are obscure, but Professor D. S. Robertson has shown that it can be discovered in Procopius' Anecdota xv. 34 by substituting for the discreet ho deina (‘so-and-so’) the vocative of a proper name such as Theódôre. This would take it back to, say, a.d. 550. In English it is less common than in Greek, and is seldom heard except in ballads like ‘In Scarlet town where I was born there was a fair maid dwellin'’, or better still in the song of the London Apprentices in The Knight of the Burning Pestle:
The rumbling rivers now do warm for little boys to paddle:
The sturdy steed now goes to grass and up they hang his saddle. -
This is explicitly stated in a Greek song published by Firmenich (Tragoudia Rômaïka, 1840, p. 122).
Ta grammata den êxevra, kai na mên tên xehasô
Tragoudi tou tên ekama, kala na tên fylaxô,
‘To keep the story safe, because I could not read,
I made a song of it, that he who hears may heed.’ -
There is a magic spring with fire in it in Belthandros and Hrysantza (240 ff.); and in view of the geography of Digenes it is curious that the magic water in Belthandros should be situated plêsion Armenias … eis tês Tarsou to kastron. (Belthandros, 104, has the word apelates.) ‘A spring in Sicily which has fire mixed with its waters’ is described in Achilles Tatius ii. 14. 7.
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For the pole-jumping over the river cf. Kallimachos and Khrysorroe, 2532.
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See V. D. Kuzmina, Novy Spisok ‘Devgeneva deyaniya’, in Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, ix, Moscow and Leningrad, 1953. For all information about this third Russian version I am indebted to the great kindness of Mr. John W. H. Smith of Merton College, Oxford.
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Whose copy of Plato, found in Patmos, is now in the Bodleian Library (Harvey).
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Laografia, i (1910), pp. 169-274. Polites has here edited 72 songs including 14 which are only slightly, and in some versions, contaminated with Akritic matter; but not including, he says (p. 171), innumerable wrestling matches of an unnamed man with Charon.
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With special permission from Fauriel's widow to take a copy of it; see Zampelios, Pothen hê Koinê Lexis Tragoudô? (p. 37, footnote).
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Note that neither ballads nor epic present Digenes as typically a Dragon-slayer; yet Grégoire sees Digenes on some fragments of pottery, said to be of the thirteenth century, discovered at Athens by the Agora Excavation (see Byzantion, xv (1940-1); and Hesperia, x (Jan.-March 1941) and Dig. Akr. (New York, 1942), pp. 3-5). For knowledge of these fragments and photographs of two of them I am greatly indebted to Prof. J. M. Hussey and Dr. Alison Frantz. They seem to be typical figures of St. George and may be compared with the fresco of St. George and the Dragon from Stratford-on-Avon, used as frontispiece in E. K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play (1933).
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See S. Runciman, The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge, 1947).
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See D. Obolensky, The Bogomils (Cambridge, 1948).
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But see above p. xxxix for the possible significance of the name Soudales in AND 2024.
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An examination of all the passages in which Persians are mentioned suggests that the name is used vaguely to indicate any enemies from the East. Add to the passages quoted above GRO iv. 975; GRO v. 260 (= TRE 1830); AND 2439, 1278, 4073.
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See E. R. Bevan, The House of Seleucus, ii. 268. ‘The dynasty of Commagene vaunted it [the blood of the imperial house of Seleucus] and after the dynasty was brought down, [so did] the last members of the family. One of them, Gaius Julius Antiochus Philopappus, put up the well-known monument at Athens about a.d. 115 with a statue of Seleucus Nicator, his great ancestor.’ See Corp. Inscr. Att. iii. 557; and Pausanias xxv. 8.
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It is pertinent to recall the appearance of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland, and that of Attila (Etzel) in the Nibelungenlied.
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The last of whom, by the way, was Napoleon; see Byzantion, xi (1936), p. 614.
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See E. Ettlinger, ‘Pre-cognitive Dreams in Celtic Legend’, Folk-Lore, lix (Sept. 1948), pp. 114-17.
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See Grégoire, Dig. Akr. (New York, 1942), pp. 136 ff. I have to thank M. Grégoire for communicating this discovery to me in a private letter (March 1936) a year before its publication in Byzantion, xi (1936), pp. 607 ff. and Mélanges Cumont, fasc. 2, pp. 723 ff. There are some good notes on the Female Warrior in history and literature in Hasluck's Letters on Religion and Folklore, pp. 204-9.
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Psellos says Nereus. But the reference is to the Homeric Nireus of Iliad ii. 671. Cf. Propertius iii. 18. 27, ‘Nirea non facies non uis exemit Achillem’—where also all the manuscripts read Nerea.
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I have mentioned above, p. 1, a more striking verbal resemblance from Anna Comnena, and from the same page; and this resemblance occurs not only in AND and TRE, but also in GRO, which, according to Kyriakides, escaped any Comnenian recensions.
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And reappears in folk-song: see Polites, Eklogai, no. 195; agoure drosere kroustallobrahionate.
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See Bury, East Rom. Emp., p. 278; Gibbon, v. 507. Andronikos (or Aaron) Doukas is named as the father of Eirene, TRE 844, AND 20; see Appendix A.
Appendix C
Reference List of Leading Texts, Commentaries, Books, and Articles
I. Texts
1. C. Sathas and E. Legrand. Les Exploits de Digénis Akritas: épopée byzantine du dixième siècle publiée pour la première fois d'après le manuscrit unique de Trébizonde. [With French translation.] Paris, 1875. (Trebizond.)
1a. S. Ioannides. Epos Mesaiônikon ek tou Heirografou Trapezountos O Basileios Digenês Akritês O Kappadokês Ypomnematisthen Ekdidotai ypo SABBA IÔANNIDOU. Constantinople, 1887.
2. E. Legrand. Les Exploits de Basile Digénis Acritas: épopée byzantine publiée d'après le manuscrit de Grotta-Ferrata. Paris, 1892. [Reprinted 1902.] (Grottaferrata.)
3. A. Mêliarakês. Basileios Digenes Akritas: epopoiia byzantinê tês 10ês ekatontaetêridos kata to en Andrôi aneurethen heirografon. Athens, 1881. [Reprinted 1920.] (Andros.)
4. S. P. Lampros. Romans grecs en vers. Paris, 1880. (pp. 111-238, and introd., pp. lxxxviii-cvii.) (Oxford.)
5. D. C. Hesseling. Le Roman de Digénis Akritas d'après le manuscrit de Madrid. In Laografia, vol. iii, pp. 536-604. Athens, 1912. (Escorial.)
6. D. Paschales. Oi deka logoi tou Digenous Akritou: pezê diaskeuê (Meletiou Blastou). In Laografia, vol. ix, 1928, pp. 305-440. (Paschales Prose.)
7. P. Pascal. Le ‘Digenis’ slave, ou la ‘Geste de Devgenij’. [French translation.] In Byzantion, vol. x, fasc. 1, pp. 301-39. Brussels, 1935. (Speransky slavonic.) Greek translation of Russian text in Kalonaros, vol. ii, pp. 257-92. For a third MS. (c. 1760) of the Russian version newly discovered see V. D. Kuzmina. Novy Spisok ‘Devgeneva deyaniya’ in Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, ix. Moscow and Leningrad, 1953.
II. Secondary Texts
A. Akritic Songs
8. M. Büdinger. Ein Mittelgriechisches Volksepos. Leipzig, 1866.
9. W. Wagner. Mediaeval Greek Texts. London (Philological Society), 1870. (pp. x, xiii n. 34, xxii-xxiv.)
10. S. Zampelios. Pothen ê koinê lexis Tragoudô? Athens, 1859. (pp. 38-43.)
11. E. Legrand. Chansons populaires grecques. Paris, 1874. (pp. 182-97.)
12. E. Legrand. Chansons populaires grecques (spécimen d'un recueil en préparation). Paris, 1876. (pp. 2, 10-19.)
13. P. Triantafyllides. Oi Fygades: meta makrôn prolegomenôn peri Pontou. Athens, 1870. (pp. 21-51; 169-75.)
14. Archeion Pontou, vol. i. Athens, 1928. (pp. 47-96.)
15. A. Passow. Popularia Carmina Graeciae Recentioris. Leipzig, 1860. [Akritic are: Nos. 439, 440, 448, 449, 474, 482, 486, 491, 508, 509, 510, (514, 515), 516, (517-19), 526, 527.]
16. S. P. Kyriakides. O Digenês Akritas. Athens, n.d. [Six typical Akritic songs printed in an appendix (pp. 119-50). Same as No. 27.]
17. N. G. Polites. O Thanatos tou Digenê. Laografia, vol. i. Athens, 1910. (pp. 169-275.) [A collection of 72 songs dealing with the death of Digenes.]
18. N. G. Polites. Eklogai apo ta tragoudia tou Ellenikou laou. Athens, 1925. [pp. 85-115; Nos. 69-78.]
19. R. M. Dawkins. ‘Some Modern Greek Songs from Cappadocia.’ American Journal of Archaeology, vol. xxxviii (1934). [No. 1.]
Other Akritic songs and versions are to be found in nearly all collections of folk-songs and in various volumes of Laografia, Archeion Pontou, & c.
B. Related Texts
20. M. Miller. Poème Allégorique de Méliténiote. (Notices et extraits de manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, tome xix, seconde partie.) Paris, 1858.
21. H. Ethé. Die Fahrten des Sajjid Batthâl. [2 vols.] Leipzig, 1871.
22. J. Atkinson. The Shah Nameh of Firdausi, translated and abridged. London, 1832.
23. J. Grimm und A. Schmeller. Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. JH. Göttingen, 1838.
24. P. Le Bas. Eumathii Philosophi de Hysmines et Hysminiae Amoribus. (Erotici Scriptores.) Paris, 1856.
25. J. A. Lambert. Lybistros kai Rodamne. Amsterdam, 1935.
III. Commentaries
26. N. G. Polites. Peri tou Ethnikou Epous tôn Neôterôn Ellênôn. Athens, 1906. Reprinted in Laografika Symmeikta, i. Athens, 1920.
27. S. P. Kyriakides. O Digenês Akritas. Athens, n.d. (1926).
28. A. Rambaud. Une épopée byzantine au Xe siècle. Revue des Deux Mondes. 15 Août 1875.
29. C. Gidel. Nouvelles Études sur la littérature grecque moderne. Paris, 1878.
30. J. B. Bury. Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil. Oxford, 1911.
31. H. Pernot. Études de littérature grecque moderne. Paris, 1916.
32. J. Psichari. ‘A propos de Digénis Akritas’, and ‘La Ballade de Lénore en Grèce’, in Quelques Travaux de Linguistique, de Philologie et de Littérature helléniques, tome i. Paris, 1930.
33. H. Grégoire. O Digenês Akritas. New York, 1942.
To these must be added very numerous articles by H. Grégoire, R. Goossens, N. Adontz, A. Hatzês, M. Canard, E. Honigmann, S. P. Kyriakides, and others in the volumes of Byzantion, the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the Byzantinisch-neugriechische Jahrbücher, Laografia, and the Epetêris Byzantinôn Spoudôn. The beginning of this modern series of Akritic studies was Grégoire's article on ‘Ancyre et les Arabes sous Michel l'Ivrogne’, in Byzantion, vol. iv, pp. 437 ff. (1929). The offprint of his contribution to Byzantion, vol. ix (1934), gives on pp. 2 and 3 of the wrapper a list of twenty-four articles constituting the Gregorian campaign up to that date, of which two were the sole work of Goossens. A good summary of the earlier results claimed is given by Grégoire and Goossens in ‘Les Recherches récentes sur l'épopée byzantine’ in L'Antiquité Classique, Louvain, vols. i (1932) and ii (1933).
34. S. Impellizzeri. Il Digenis Akritas: L'Epopea di Bisanzio. Florence, 1940.
35. P. P. Kalonaros. Basileios Digenês Akritas. 2 vols. Athens, 1941, 1942.
IV. Works of Reference
36. K. Krumbacher. Geschichte der Byzantinischen Litteratur. Munich, 1897.
37. J. B. Bury. Cambridge Mediaeval History, vol. iv. The Eastern Roman Empire. Cambridge, 1923.
38. ——— A History of the Eastern Roman Empire (802-867). London, 1912.
39. C. Diehl. History of the Byzantine Empire. Princeton, 1925.
40. N. H. Baynes. The Byzantine Empire. London, 1925.
41. R. Byron. The Byzantine Achievement. London, 1929.
42. S. Runciman. Byzantine Civilisation. London, 1933.
43. ——— Romanus Lecapenus. Cambridge, 1929.
44. A. A. Vasiliev. Histoire de l'Empire Byzantin. Paris, 1932.
45. ——— Byzance et les Arabes. Brussels, 1935.
46. E. Honigmann. Die Ostgrenze des Byzantinischen Reiches (363-1071). Brussels, 1935.
47. S. Runciman. The Medieval Manichee. Cambridge, 1947.
48. G. N. Hatzidakis. Mesaiônika kai Nea Hellênika. Athens, 1905, 1907.
49. S. Xanthoudides. Erôtokritos. Candia, 1915.
50. F. J. Child. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. London, 1904.
51. J. Meursius. Glossarium Graeco-Barbarum. Leyden, 1614.
52. Ducange. Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Graecitatis. Leyden, 1688.
53. E. A. Sophocles. Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods. Harvard, 1914.
54. W. H. Maigne d'Arnis. Lexicon Manuale Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis. Paris, 1866.
55. N. H. Baynes and H. St. L. B. Moss, edd. Byzantium: an Introduction to East Roman Civilization. 2nd imp. Oxford, 1949.
56. D. Obolensky. The Bogomils. Cambridge. 1948.
57. C. M. Bowra. Heroic Poetry. London. 1952.
58. Byzantské epos Basilios Digenis Akritas. Přeložil, úvodem a poznámkami opatřil K. Müller. V. Praze, nákladem České akademie věd a umění, 1938. [Czech translation of Book I from Oxford MS.: Books II-X from Trebizond MS.: and Book X from Oxford MS.; with introduction and notes.] [For notice of this work and other bibliographical information I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. John Simmons of the Taylor Institution at Oxford.]
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