ABSTRACT
A glance no further than the Bibliography to this book will show that there is indeed, as Paul Magdalino observes in his paper here, a'Digenes Akrites industry'; and it would be by no means out of place to ask why this is so. The papers in the present volume place Digenes Akrites in a number of (complementary or even conflicting) Byzantine and post-Byzantine contexts, and in doing so once again confirm the curious but enduring attraction of this work. Part of the attraction is precisely that the work is itself-in all of its versions - 'akritic': at the borders of several genres and historical contexts, it continues to pose elusive questions which are not unimportant for an assessment of what Byzantine literary culture was. Though Digenes Akrites (as Magdalino pertinently reminds us) occupies only a very small and arguably peripheral part of Byzantine literary production, and though, indeed, its influence on post-Byzantine and Modern Greek literature is less far-reaching than the traditional literary histories suggest (cf. Kechagioglou 1986; Ricks 1989a; also Trypanis 1981: 501), its origins can be seen as reaching far back, beneath the surface stream of learned literary production, to a long-standing oral tradition (so, most recently and soberly, Sifakis 1992). If Byzantine literature is a 'distorting mirror', then Digenes Akrites continues to attract those, from Krumbacher and Gregoire on, who are determined to see behind it.1
