ABSTRACT
Together with a new edition of the Escorial Digenes Akrites,1 Professor Stylianos Alexiou gave us a bold thesis. He proposed that E was, via a lost indirect ancestor, the version closest to the original Digenes Akrites (for which he accepted a twelfth-century date) and argued for the chronological and qualitative primacy of the Escorial over the Grottaferrata version.2 Alexiou's edition and the thesis of E's 'double primacy' has proved a powerful catalyst in the study of akritic poetry. In subsequent studies a number of scholars have accepted that E is older - and some also better - than G, and regard the matter as now closed.3
