It is the lengthiest and most famous of the acritic songs, Byzantine folk poems celebrating the lives and exploits of the Akritai, the inhabitants and frontier guards of the empire's eastern Anatolian provinces.

The acritic songs represented the remnants of an ancient epic cycle in Byzantium and, due to their long oral transmission throughout the empire, the identification of precise references to historical events may be only conjectural.

[5][6][7] The epic details the life of the eponymous hero, Basil, whose epithet Digenes Akritas ("two-blood border lord") alludes to his mixed Greek and Arab descent.

[7][10] The second half, in a more romantic atmosphere, discusses Basil's early childhood and later, often from a first-person point of view, his struggles and acts of heroism on the Byzantine borders.

The character became the archetype of the ideal medieval hero featuring in a number of folk songs popular throughout the Greek-speaking world, most prominently in Crete, Cyprus, and Asia Minor.

[13] The epic of Digenes Akritas is most commonly thought to have been first compiled around the 12th century AD building on earlier material which was primarily derived from oral sources.

[7] Comparative evidence suggests that word-for-word precision was a rare instance in the Byzantine period and it was typical for copies of literary works to involve some degree of variation.

Both texts give enchanting descriptions of the life of the martial societies of the border regions of the empire, while in the figure of Digenes are concentrated the legends that had accumulated around local heroes.

[19] There exists an Old Slavonic version of Digenis Akritas under the title Deeds of the Brave Men of Old (Дѣяніе прежнихъ временъ храбрыхъ человѣкъ), which is adapted from a line in the Grottaferrata manuscript.

Until then, the hero – variously referred to as Digenes, Constantine, or Giannis (John) – was only known through the songs and ballads of the Acritic Cycle that had been preserved in the oral tradition of the Greek-speaking world and had been collected and published around the same time.

[22] In the acritic tradition, the warriors are presented as paragons of elegance and nobility (Greek: λεβεντιά); they reside in luxurious houses typically on the edges of the Christian world, and sometimes bear names of the Byzantine aristocracy.

[24] Episodes from the Acritic cycle, as well as the epic of Digenes Akritas appear on more than 100 ceramic plates that have been found in various locations, from Contantinople and Thessalonica, to Athens and Corinth; the oldest of those dating back to the 12th century.

Some of those iconographic elements, like the outfit of the warrior and the heroic deeds, were also attributed to other lesser known akritai of the folk ballads and, as such, the identification of a depicted hero as Digenes may at times be presumptive.

[28] The Byzantine Akritai of this period were a military class responsible for safeguarding the frontier regions of the imperial territory from external enemies and freebooting adventurers who operated on the fringes of the empire.

[13] During this time, there seems to have been a conscious effort to employ classical literary genres as objects of imitation (mimesis), with the most striking revivals being that of ancient romance and epic poetry.

In the historical region of Cappadocia of the Byzantine Empire (Greek: Ῥωμανία, Rhomanía), a certain Doukas prince named Andronikos and his wife Anna, who already had five sons, prayed for a daughter.

Mousour was eventually baptized and, after their marriage, Eirene gave birth to their son who was named Basil (Greek: Βασίλειος, Basileios) Digenes Akritas.

Growing up, Digenes falls in love and elopes with Eudocia (Ευδοκία), the daughter of a Byzantine general and, after he manages to defeat his persecutors –Eudocia's brothers and their soldiers– he marries her.

It is written in a vernacular form of medieval Greek that is more familiar to modern-day speakers, compared to the more conservative language of the Byzantine ecclesiastical litterateurs and chroniclers.

[13] It is an extensive narrative text composed in fifteen syllable blank verse, henceforth the standard metre of Greek poetry, now with predominantly iambic rhythm.

240–3): The story of Digenes Akritas has left scattered signs of influence outside of the Byzantine world, including in Arabic and Slavic literature, but Its greater impact has been in modern Greek culture.

The epic tale of Digenes corresponds in many ways to the cycle of much shorter acritic songs, particularly from Anatolia, Cyprus and Crete, some of which survive until the present day.

In the later tradition, Digenes is eventually defeated only by Death in the figure of Thanatos/Charon, who had reportedly already wrestled with Heracles, after a fierce single combat on "the marble threshing floors".