ABSTRACT
In the Byzantine poem Digenis Akritis, at the end of the hero's life, Digenis makes a speech of farewell from his deathbed to his beloved wife. He is concerned for her in her coming widowhood. In the Grottaferrata version of the poem he cries out:
Digenis's reference to his wife as a xem, a foreigner, a stranger, an outsider, raises questions about the poem's concepts of familial and social relationships. In an earlier passage, which has been more discussed, Digenis is said to choose to live alone (monos):
In the following lines it becomes plain that his desire for solitude, which is also emphasized elsewhere in the poem, does not exclude the presence of his agouroif 'youngsters', a group of fighting retainers, as well as his wife and servants already mentioned. Here again we have a term which demands examination for its implications about the place of an individual in the family and society. This paper proposes to look at lexical clusters in Digenis Akritis connected with the words xenos and monos. Incidentally, it
will add to recent explorations of the poem's nature through comparison of the very different forms in which it has survived.
