Re-Introducing Digenis Akritis: A Byzantine Poem of Strength, Weakness, and the Disturbing Absence of God

Abstract

Digenis Akritis, a twelfth-century Byzantine poem, recounts the life of Basil, a fictional hero of mixed descent (Byzantine and Arab), on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the ninth or tenth century. Since the poem’s rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, virtually all scholars have regarded Basil’s heroic nature as a given, and his transgressions (mostly sexual) as no more than one might expect of a man of action in a violent world. In contrast, I shall argue that the poem was intended as a cautionary tale of human weakness. My study has two parts. The first focuses on Basil as a man of uncontrollable impulses, leading a largely solitary life-except for the wife whom he adores and betrays. In encounters with other women, he is moved not just to infidelity but to sexual and even fatal violence; then, seized by guilt, he seeks to atone by creating ever more elaborate (and isolated) garden paradises. Throughout these experiences, Basil never seeks spiritual guidance, or asks God for forgiveness. The second part deals with the story’s possible origins. As no other extant work of Byzantine literature is thematically comparable, I trace those origins to Western Europe. French chansons de geste of the late twelfth century, and their close German derivatives, pioneered the realistic depiction of imperfect characters. Digenis Akritis emerges not just as a study in impulse and isolation, but as a rare instance of Western cultural influence in Byzantium.