BASILIUS DIGENES ACRITAS  ,

Byzantine national hero. probably lived in the loth century . He is named Digenes (of double birth) as the son of a Moslem father and a Christian mother; Acritas (c.xpa, frontier, boundary), as one of the frontier guards of the empire, corresponding to the Roman milites limitanei . The chief duty of these acritae consisted in repelling Moslem inroads and the raids of the apelatae (cattle-lifters), brigands who may be compared with the more modern Klephts . The original Digenes epic is lost, but four poems are extant, in which the different incidents of the legend have been worked up by different hands . The first of these consists of about 4000 lines, written in the so-called " political " metre, and was discovered in the latter part of the 19th century, in a 16th-century MS., at Trebizond; the other three MSS. were found at Grotta Ferrata, Andros and Oxford . The poem, which has been compared with the Chanson de Roland and the Romance of the Cid, undoubtedly contains a kernel of fact, although it cannot be regarded as in any sense an historical record . The scene of action is laid in Cappadocia and the district of the Euphrates . Editions of the Trebizond MS. by C . Sathas and E . Legrand in the Collection des monuments pour servir a l'etude de la langue hellinique, new series, vi . (1875), and by S . Joannides (Constantinople, 1887) .

See monographs by A . Luber (

Salzburg, 1885) and G . Wartenberg (Berlin, 1897) . Full information will be found in C . Krumbacher's Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, p . 827q (2nd ed., 1897) ; see also G . Schlumberger, L'E°popee Byzantine d la fin du dixicme siecle (1897) .