ABSTRACT
The literary importance of Digenes Akrites is self-evident to scholars who think of Byzantium as the nursery of Modern Greek literature. Those who are interested in Byzantine literature for its own sake - not to mention those who value it as a refrigerator for the preservation of the classical tradition - might be forgiven for wondering what the Digenes Akrites industry has to do with them. Byzantine literary critics, or critical Byzantine litterateurs, would not have rated any version of the text at all highly on either technical or ethical grounds. The direct and indirect allusions to Digenes in the Ptochoprodromic satires do not in themselves offer convincing evidence that the akritic poems influenced or inspired production in serious Byzantine literary circles.1
