The pleasures of the chase: a motif in Digenes Akrites

Abstract

Thanks to the work of Stylianos Alexiou, the Escorial version of Digenes Akrites (hereafter ‘E’;) has taken its rightful place as part of the heroic poetry of medieval Christendom. Even if the claim for E's priority over the Grottaferrata version (G) does not meet with universal acceptance, E is at least in the field as an alternative. There are, perhaps, three main types of argument against the priority of G. The first is that the linguistic idiom betrays a second-order, solecistic ‘translation’ of a work in a less learned language; the second is that E has preserved proper names, military terms and so on which derive from the Eastern borders and which have been lost in G. Both of these have been expounded by Alexiou in some detail. A third type of argument might concentrate on what we may call the ethos of the E version as distinct from that of G, and one small detail of this is the subject of this note.