ALPHABET OF LOVE (mid-fifteenth century): From Rhodes (or another Aegean island) comes the collection Songs: Verses about Passion and Love. The hypothesis that this late Byzantine set of love poems originates from Rhodes is based on internal evidence, such as “That maiden, I kissed her; at Rhodes I left her.” The collection cannot be viewed as a medley of demotic songs because (for example) they use the wordέρωτας, and its plural έρωτες, instead of the vernacular word for “love” (αγάπη). The noun κατάλογι denotes a commoner’s song with an amorous theme. These texts were first edited by W. Wagner (1879) under the title The ABC of Love (Das ABC der Liebe). They were edited later (1913) by Hesseling and Pernot under the title Love Games . There are 112 poems, making a total of 714 unrhyming 15-syllable lines. Some of them were sorted into four alphabets. An interesting sequence is “Song of the Hundred Words” (at lines 140–330). Here a maiden poses consecutive questions to a “handsome, immature youth” who wishes to court her. He will have to “distinguish safely one by one” the hundred words she intends to recite and improvise 100 answers. The maiden counts as far as ten. Next she proceeds by decades. The youth wins his wager, so she concedes an embrace. Then she yields completely, with the result that he spurns her. The tone is uneven, but the poems show a naıve charm and wonderment at nature: “Dolefully, the nightingale calls at the dawning day, and hides its lovely voice, / So whoever hears that bird will say for sure it grieves.” Popular copies of The Alphabet provide five or more distichs to cover each letter, but Stephanides points out that this is not so challenging in Greek, where plenty of words begin with z- or x-.

da Merry, Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature, Greenwood Press 2004, pp. 13-14