The invasion and riposte, the hatred for the invader, the desire for revenge, the fate of female prisoners and the endeavours undertaken to achieve their rescue, all inspire the poet who, based on direct narrations by eyewitnesses, organises and develops this pool of information and emotions into a live language with an easily memorable verse.
The poet also narrates in recitation, or in a simple, recurring, and easily taught pace, the enslavement, duels, massacres, escapes, release of captives, and often the bonds of affection between kidnappers and women that led to marriage and reconciliation.
The preservation of such important oral songs in Asia Minor up to 1922, when the entire region was depopulated of Greeks, proves that Kougeas's assumption is valid.
A famous theory from specialist Roderick Beaton is that the poem of Digenes Akritas was first written in the capital, Constantinople, during the twelfth century, using elements from the military landed aristocracy, originally from the empire's Asian provinces.
Following Byzantine successes against the Arabs after the tenth century, the borderlands were stabilised, tensions between them settled down, and attention was diverted away from foreign affairs towards internal dangers.
The most well known oral songs were written down and copied in great numbers, the most exceptional case being the Digenes Akritas which was well known even in Western Europe, outside the Byzantine Empire.
With the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) signaling the death of the "Megali Idea", and along with population exchange that emptied Anatolia of Greeks, the legend of Akritas was weakened, although not completely erased.
After World War II, Nikos Kazantzakis planned on writing his own poem centered on Acritas, who this time would not be the personification of a nation but of the higher and continuous spiritual fight of man.