St. Romanos the Melodist (6th c.)

DIMITRI CONOMOS

The greatest of all Byzantine poets. Little is known about his life, but it is likely that he was born in the city of Emesa, Syria, and that he was of Jewish origin. As a young man he served as deacon at the Church of the Resurrection in Beirut, before coming to Constantinople during the reign of Anastasius I (491–518), where he was attached to the Church of the Virgin in the Kyros quarter of the city. At an unknown time after his death (late 6th century) he was canonized as a saint of the Orthodox Church (his feast day is October 1).

Eighty-five kontakia attributed to Romanos have survived, thirty-four of which are on the person of Christ; the rest deal with other figures of the New and Old Testaments. Around sixty out of the eighty-five (those with his name as part of the acrostic) are considered to be genuine. A great number appear to be spurious (probably all those on martyrs and saints), for it has been proved that the acrostics were frequently falsified to include the poet’s name. The grand christological kontakia bear vivid dramatization; monologues are used to reveal the inner mind of his agents and dialogues to explain the motives of their actions. Opinions would no doubt differ as to which are the best, but On the Nativity, On the Presentation in the Temple, On Mary at the Cross, and On the Resurrection VI would be a reasonable shortlist. Romanos did not avoid contemporary topics, however, and the hymn On the Earthquake and Fire depicts the Nika Riots (532) and praises “the new Solomon,” Justinian I, for the restoration of Hagia Sophia.

Romanos’ language is the Atticizing “literary koine” or Hellenistic Greek, which does not escape the influence of the simple spoken language or that of the Scriptures, with their many Jewish-Greek elements. His style is marked by simplicity, dignity, and emotional directness, the sentences moving in short and uninvolved phrases well adapted to the intricate meters of which he is a master. In one kontakion only, On Judas, does he make use of rhyme, following the example of the Akathistos. His dialogues are embellished by rhetorical devices such as parallelism, oxymoron, and word play. Clarity of style, striking imagery, arresting similes, bold comparisons, sharp metaphors, irony, and a dexterous use of discourse characterize his writing and add dramatic tension.

The full texts of Romanos’ hymns first appear, without musical notation, in manuscripts of the 11th century. The music of the hymns of Romanos is unfortunately lost, but the dramatic character of their content suggests that they were chanted in a kind of recitative, resembling oratorio. Originally, the poems would have been recited in full during the services, and since the texts are very long, the musical texts were probably syllabic. This theory is partly based on the assumption that Romanos’ metrical system is stable and conforms to the principles of homotonia (identical stress patterns in corresponding verses) and isosyllabia (identical number of syllables in corresponding verses).