bears with swords
![A couple canoodles on a Byzantine Plate](https://www.eudaemonist.com/images/digenes.gif)
In the same sense that The Need for Roots is primarily concerned with finding reasons for the fall of France and the Vichy government, Mavrogordato’s introduction to Digenes Akrites – while still an entertaining and enlightening excursion through the manuscript tradition and historical context of the poem – is less about Byzantine poetry than it is about the decay of empires, particularly those of Mediterranean: the moral questions of Cyprus and Algiers (among others) form an uneasy resonance with the heroic (but not at all admirable) predations of Basil the border guard.