Manuscripts and Publications
Erotokritos was written around 1600 and initially circulated in manuscripts. Today, the only surviving copy is the 1710 Ionian manuscript, which is housed in the British Museum and comes from Lord Harley’s private collection. It was purchased in 1725 on behalf of the lord by its owner, Nikolaos Rodostamos of Corfu.
The manuscript is adorned with 121 miniatures, with titles in some places written in Italian, large capital letters with floral motifs, and scattered plant themes. The manuscript likely copied an older text written in Latin characters, a fact confirmed by the way it transcribes the Latin alphabet into the Cretan idiom.
Erotokritos was first printed in 1713 in Venice, at the printing house of the Italian Antonio Bortoli. Three copies of this first edition survive: one in the Gennadius Library in Athens, one in the Biblioteca Civica of Vicenza, and one in the Public Central Library of Grevena.
The editor of the first edition states that he consulted “many and various manuscripts” to correct the work, while he asks readers, if they have other manuscripts available, to send them to him so that he can “reprint” it later in an improved version. The work was reprinted in the same printing house in 1737, and a copy of this edition is located in the National Library of Greece. Several reprints followed, again in Venice at the printing house of Nikolaos Glykys, and later at the “Phoenix” printing house, all of which repeated the choices of the 1737 edition. Less carefully edited editions were also produced in Athens at the same time.
The first philological edition was carried out by Stefanos Xanthoudidis in 1915 and was based on the Ionian manuscript. In the introduction to this edition, Xanthoudidis scientifically established for the first time the Cretan origin of the poem and its dating, while addressing issues that would later concern research, such as the identification of the poet and the discovery of literary sources. The next philological edition was that of Stylianos Alexiou in 1980, which reconnected the text with the tradition of the Venice edition. Today, the text of Bortoli’s edition is accessible through the edition edited by Georgios Savvidis.