A case study in Byzantine dragon-slaying : Digenes and the serpent

Digenes Akritas, called Akrites in our earliest sources, is the hero of several texts from the medieval and early modern periods and of several Modern Greek folk songs. Six Greek and one Slavic version of the epic survive. The earliest manuscript, named after the monastery at Grottaferrata, has been dated to approximately 1300. It has been argued that the long narratives are attempts to form a single cohesive story out of loosely connected songs about a hero who may have lived in the ninth century, during the reign of Basil I.1 The songs and epics of Digenes have been mined for historical information more often than they have been studied as works of verbal art.Not