Table Of ContentDIGENES AKRITES
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY
BY
JOHN MAVROGORDATO
FORMERLY BYWATER AND SOTHEBY PROFESSOR
OF BYZANTINE AND MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE
AND LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
AND FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W.I
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY IBADAN NAIROBI LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONG TOKYO
FIRST PUBLISHED 1956
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
FROM SHEETS OF THE FIRST EDITION
1963, 1970
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
MANY years ago my friend Petros Petrides, himself born at Nigde in
Kappadokia, used to tell me about the stories of Digenes, which
were to inspire his own dramatic symphony first performed in
Athens in May 1940. When at last I started to read for myself
this heroic poem of Twyborn the Borderer, who guarded the marches
of the Byzantine Empire in the tenth or eleventh century, I was
alone in the country, and found my way through the text as best I
could; if some of the notes now published sound like an ingenuous
soliloquy, it is from that early period they must have survived—
excusata suo tempore, lector, habe; exsul eram. Later on I was back in
London, and there enjoyed the advice and encouragement of Nor-
man Baynes, of F. H. Marshall, and of Romilly Jenkins; somehow
or other my translation and a few lectures were on paper in 1938;
and not long afterwards, thanks perhaps largely to their continued
interest, I found myself living in College at Oxford and on the same
staircase as my friend R. M. Dawkins. Many were now the anxious
days and black nights in the course of which we talked about nearly
everything in the world. I do not remember that in fact we ever
talked about the Warden of the Marches. But Dawkins had such
a lively knowledge of the land and the people and the language of
Greece, and such an affection for them all, ancient, mediaeval, and
modern, that his talk and his example were a university; and this is
the place in which I must say how much I owe consciously and
unconsciously to his learning and judgement.
It was some years later, and I was no longer living in Oxford,
when the Delegates of the Clarendon Press gave me one of the
pleasantest surprises of my life by undertaking the publication of
this work. By this time most of my books had had to go into store;
and as I had been brought up to fill every margin with notes—not to
mention several cardboard boxes full of half-sheets of paper—many
of my cherished references had now become inaccessible. Perhaps
that does not matter as much as I thought it did. But it has taken a
long time to reconstitute the commentary and do all that was
necessary; and I am immensely grateful to the readers and experts
of the Press whose patience and skill have been at my service on
every page.
3
PREFACE
The Greek text here printed is that of the Grottaferrata MS. of
Digenes edited by Emile Legf and and published in Paris (by Maison-
neuve) in 1892. A few passages to fill up gaps in the narrative have
been borrowed from the Trebizond MS., edited by C. Sathas and
Legrand and published in Paris in 1875; ajid from the Andros MS.,
edited by A. Meliarakes and published in Athens in 1881, these
passages amounting to 117 and 26 lines respectively. A second
edition of Legrand's text revue et corrigee was issued in 1902, but all
the errors I have noticed appear in both editions. Legrand can
never be sufficiently honoured for his great services to the study of
post-classical Greek, and above all for his two large collections of
Monuments pour servir d I'etude de la langue neo-hellenique, but much
of his work contains small inaccuracies. Some light may be thrown
on these by an affectionate tribute he pays to his wife in the preface
to the third edition (Paris, 1900) of the Cretan pastoral The Fair
Shepherdess. He there tells us that in order to lighten his labours she
had learned to read and write the Greek characters and so for many
years had copied out all his Greek texts for him: 'ma femme
transcrivait avec une exactitude d'autant plus surprenante (ce qui
peut sembler paradoxal) qu'elle savait moins la langue.' Of the slips
in his Grottaferrata text and apparatus criticus a few erratic punctua-
tions and accents have been silently corrected. Otherwise his text
and apparatus have been exactly reprinted and any emendations I
have been obliged to make are recorded only in my own notes.
In his introduction Legrand recalls that on the publication in
1875, edited by Constantine Sathas and himself, of the Trebizond
MS.—the first to be discovered—the interest excited had led to the
publication of the Oxford MS., which was included by S. P. Lam-
pros in his Romans grecs en vers (Paris, 1880), and of the Andros MS.,
edited by Meliarakes (Athens, 1881). Lampros in his introduction
(pp. xc—ci) describes the manuscript which he had seen in the
autumn of 1879 in the library of the Greek monastery at Grotta-
ferrata near Frascati. It is a manuscript of the fourteenth century
written on 79 leaves of paper (5^ X 8£ inches—14x21 cm.) of which
the first 73 contain the text here printed.
Joseph Miiller of the University of Turin had already called
attention to this manuscript, and had himself made a copy of it
which he had shown to Legrand and had subsequently presented
to the German scholar Wilhelm Wagner (editor of Medieval Greek
iv
PREFACE
Texts, London, 1870; Carmina Graeca Medii Aevi, Leipzig, 1874; and
Trots poemes grecs, Berlin, 1881). After Wagner's premature death in
1880 this copy had been returned to Miiller and has never been
heard of again.
Meanwhile Nicolas Polites in Athens, fired by the description
given by Lampros, had asked the librarian at Grottaferrata to have
the manuscript copied for him; and Legrand through the French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs had asked for a loan of the precious
volume which in due course reached him in Paris. Lampros and
Polites withdrew in his favour, and Legrand with his friend Jean
Psichari read over together the copy which he had made, and
certified its accuracy, in May 1887.
The most important thing about my translation is that it follows
the Greek line for line, so that the original can always be referred to
without delay. This has involved a good deal of compression but few,
if any, sacrifices. On the rare occasions on which some Greek word
has had to be omitted the fact has been recorded in the notes. This
does not apply to particles which the Greek author uses almost
indiscriminately in order to fill up his line. In order to empty the
English line I have omitted Tors', 'howevers', and 'yets> by the bushel,
and 'huts' by the load; thus not only lightening the metre but im-
proving the style. In English a minimum of such words is a condition
of good writing, as a minimum of gestures is a condition of good
speaking.
Secondly, this translation has been kept as literal as possible. First
finished in December 1938, it had to be copied out. In the first ten
weeks of 1939 it was not only copied out but completely rewritten
from beginning to end, because almost every line as it came up for
approval was changed so as to give a more literal representation of
the Greek, even if it produced less tidy metre and less conventional
English. One result of this insistence on literalness has been an
occasional loosening of the metre; so that instead of five feet and ten
syllables some lines (e.g. 3314) have three beats each followed by a
varying number of unaccented syllables.
Thirdly, I have never tried to improve the Greek original. (Well,
hardly ever.) Clumsy Greek has often been turned into clumsy
English. I have resisted the temptation to conceal silliness or bathos,
PREFACE
and to make the English line more poetical than the Greek line which
it is supposed to represent.
Generally speaking I have used a basis of ordinary conversational
English; the fundamental rule for the structure of this groundwork
being that there shall be no inversion of the natural order of words.
To reinforce this natural order there has been an avoidance of con-
ventionally poetical usages. I have never used the second person
singular, except where God is addressed. The heroine, when she is
referred to, perhaps with some mystical significance, as Kore, is called
the Girl rather than the Maiden or the Virgin.
On the other hand, although based on natural speech the diction
is one definitely removed from that of common talk. It is what
Aristotle in his Poetics calls exellagmene; it is changed over from the
customary dialektos, the conversation of ordinary life. This translation
in fact uses a written language and not a spoken language. And why
not? Does anybody suppose that the Greek was not an artificial
language? It is only as a result of contemporary fashions, English as
well as Greek, that one has to defend the perfectly natural division of
the written from the spoken language. This division connotes the
artificiality of the written language. But all writing is an artifice and
it can never be anything else. The words commonly used in streets and
fields are often better than others, but they are not in themselves
patterns laid up in heaven.
Having laid down the ground, a written language free from inver-
sions and poetical conventions, based on ordinary speech but clearly
divided from it, we proceed to colour it with reminiscences of the
Bible, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of the Ballads; inevitable
reminiscences, not because they are beautiful English, and recall
beauty by association even when they have it not in the immediate
use; but because these exactly represent the Greek of the ancient classics,
which the redactor of this version was attempting to revive, with
painful but with loving artifice, in the middle of the eleventh century.
His is certainly an artificial language. There is only one characteristic
of his style which he shares with the good conversationalist and the
good letter-writer: that he often begins a sentence without knowing
how he is going to end it.
This is not the place to examine other characteristics of his style,
notably his mixture both in vocabulary and in syntax of elements
from every period, from Homer, from the Septuagint, and from
vi
PREFACE
contemporary folk-song. This eclecticism shocks the grammarians,
and it shocks the Athenian demotics; but it does not shock anyone
who has a sense and a love of the Greek language as a whole, to
whom no part is unclean. It does not shock me, and I have some-
times even attempted to reproduce it in English. In passages where
the Greek is peculiar, and possibly corrupt, or the words rare or
remarkable, or the meaning doubtful, the original was sometimes
quoted in the notes, without comment, so as to call attention to the
fact that further elucidation was required. But many of these mere
exclamation marks were afterwards left out in order to save space.
The lines of this edition are numbered on two systems. The num-
bers in the margins of the right-hand pages, that is of the English
version, include not only Grottaferrata but also the passages borrowed
from the Trebizond and Andros versions to fill up gaps in the narra-
tive. This numeration, running from i to 3850, is used in the notes
and in the Index of Greek Words. The Greek text of the Grottaferrata
and other versions on the left-hand pages have each book numbered
separately—(GRO Book I, 337 lines; Book II, 300 lines; Book III,
343 lines; Book IV, 1093 lines; Book V, 289 lines; Book VI, 845 lines;
Book VII, 229 lines; Book VIII, 313 lines; TRE and AND, Books I
to X); this numeration given on the left-hand pages is to be associated
with the number of the book in Roman figures given at the top of
the page, and both the line-numbers and the Roman book-numbers
must be used for reference to the Greek text. (Note, however, that
the TREbizond and ANDros versions, each divided into ten books,
are not numbered by separate books but straight through from
beginning to end—3182 and 4778 lines respectively.)
J. N. M.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION xi
FIRST BOOK 2
SECOND BOOK 24
THIRD BOOK 44
FOURTH BOOK 66
FIFTH BOOK 142
SIXTH BOOK l62
SEVENTH BOOK 2l6
EIGHTH BOOK 232
APPENDIXES A-D
A. GENEALOGY OF DIGENES 253
B. CONSPECTUS OF VERSIONS
AND EPISODES 257
C. LIST OF BOOKS 26l
D. REFERENCES TO ACHILLES
TATIUS, HELIODORUS,
AND MELITENIOTES 265
INDEX OF GREEK WORDS 267
INDEX TO INTRODUCTION 271
INTRODUCTION
i. DISCOVERY
IN the middle of last century nothing was known of the Byzantine
epic of Digenes Akrites; but the atmosphere had been prepared by the
publication of several ballads of what is now called the Akritic Cycle
(a name first used by Legrand in 1874). The discussion of these—(in
particular a paper by Biidinger who had used the headline 'A Greek
Mediaeval Popular Epic', although the Song in question, The Sons
ofAndronikos, was only seventy lines in length)—had opened the way
for further revelations of an heroic age of mediaeval Greece.
(i) The discovery was made at Trebizond. Manuscripts could not
be photographed at Trebizond, and after considerable correspondence
the precious work was sent to Paris by post; and in 1875 Sathas and
Legrand published Les Exploits de Digenis Akritas—epopee byzantine du
dixieme siecle... d'apres le manuscrit unique de Trebizonde. The manuscript
is said to be not earlier than the sixteenth century. There are several
gaps in it. The poem is divided into ten books of which the first and
the last are missing altogether; there remain 3,182 lines of it.
This manuscript was afterwards returned to the hands of Sawas
loannides, the Trebizond schoolmaster, author of a statistical history
of Trebizond, who in May 1868 had received it from a monk at
the monastery of Soumela. (For the present state of the monastery of
Soumela see D. Talbot Rice in Byzantion, v. 72 ff.) He published
another edition of it at Constantinople in 1887," and then deposited
it in the library of the Filologikos Syllogos. All the archives of this in-
stitution are said to have been removed to Angora by the Turkish
Government and the fate of the Digenes manuscript is unknown;
but in the opinion of Kyriakides (conveyed in a private letter 7
April 1936) it must, for the present at least, be regarded as lost.
(ii) Before the learned world had had time to digest this, several
1 Epos Mesaionikon / ek tou kheirografou Trapezountos / O Basileios Digenes
Akrites / O Kappadokes / ypomnematisthen ekdidotai / ypo / Sabba loannidou /
... en Konstantinoupolei/ . . . 1887.
The text is fairly correct and is supplemented by about 700 lines from the OXF
and AND versions. loannides regards Digenes as a fully historical figure of the
Kappadokian aristocracy who lived from 936 to 969 against a background slightly
adjusted from the chronicle of Kedrenos.
xi
