DIGENES ACRITAS, BASILIUS, Byzantine national hero, probably lived in the loth century. He is named Digenes (of double birth) as the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother; Acritas (dKpa, frontier, boundary), as one of the frontier guards of the empire. 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 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 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 d l'etude de la langue neo hellenique, new series, vi. (1875), and by S. Joannides (Constantinople, 1887) . See monographs by A. Luber (Salzburg, 1885) and G. Warten berg (Berlin, 1897) . Full information will be found in C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (2nd ed., 1897) ; see also G. Schlumberger, L'Epopee Byzantine h la fin du dixieme siecle (1897).