ABSTRACT
It has for some time been generally recognized - thanks to the researches of Stilpon Kyriakidis (1946: 418), Henri Gregoire (1931b: 484) and Michael Jeffreys (1975: 200) - that, of the manuscripts of Digenes Akrites, only the two oldest, the Grottaferrata and Escorial manuscripts, can seriously be considered as being closest to the original form of the poem - whichever of the two we prefer. Of these two manuscripts, however, the Escorial text has not traditionally been accorded its true value, essentially because it was the last of the manuscripts to be discovered and published. By the time it was published, the Trebizond, Andros and Grottaferrata versions had already appeared, and as a result there were already current several idees fixes with relation to the dating and the character of the work in question. A further obstacle to the sound evaluation of the Escorial version was the severe corruption of the tradition in the manuscript; and the extremely inadequate text published by Hesselihg (1911-12) rendered the work all but incomprehensible. For that reason, little attention was attracted by the views of Krumbacher (1904-5:345) and Kyriakidis (1926: 20, 77), who at quite an early stage aligned themselves with the Escorial text as being the most authentic. The views of the editors Kalonaros (1941: 1, xxv; xxx) and Mavrogordato (1956: xv-xix) long held sway, and it was only after the new edition of 1985 that scholarly work based on the Escorial text began to appear.
