Songs and Music in Digenes Akrites
Songs and Music in Digenes Akrites

Summary/Abstract: The present paper, focused on the Grottaferrata version of Digenes Akrites, offers an investigation of the poem’s episodes dealing with music and songs, from a double, socio-cultural and literary perspective. The description of Digenes and his Girl as musicians and the constant association of music with sweetness and enjoyment appear at odds with the standards of a Christian, orthodox society: they suggest a world open to the pleasures of the senses, that is an aspect of Byzantine life that the ideologically correct discourse tried to conceal. The depiction of the protagonists under the guise of musicians is also original from a literary point of view, as shown by the comparison with ancient Greek and Komnenian novels, for only Longus’ and Eugenianos’ works, deeply indebted to the pastoral tradition, offer a significant place to musical sequences. On the contrary, in the Late Byzantine vernacular novels, musician heroes of the same kind as Digenes become standard characters, and the authors of all these texts follow the model of the Byzantine epic in inserting love-songs into the narrative. Thus, the Digenes poem seems to have played a seminal role in paving the way for new literary developments in the Late Byzantine period.

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