Digenes Akritas is a medieval Greek romantic epic that emerged in the 12th-century Byzantine Empire. 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. Set during the Arab-Byzantine wars, the poem reflects the interactions, along with the military and cultural conflicts of the two polities. The epic consists of between 3,000 to 4,000 lines and it has been pieced together following the discovery of several manuscripts. An extensive narrative text, it is often thought of as the only surviving Byzantine work truly qualifying as epic poetry. Written in a form of vernacular Greek, it is regarded as one of its earliest examples, as well as the starting point of Modern Greek literature.

The Song of Armouris or the Lay of Armouris is a medieval Greek heroic poem of the middle Byzantine period. Dating from the 11th century, it is probably one of the oldest surviving Acritic songs, narrative heroic songs or ballads celebrating the lives and exploits of the Byzantine Akritai. Written in vernacular medieval Greek, it is, along with the more famous Digenes Akritas, the earliest example of Byzantine folk poetry and Greek vernacular literature. Its plot is based on the Byzantine-Arab conflict and describes in political verse the efforts of a young Byzantine akrite warrior to rescue his father from captivity.