Romanos the Melodist

What is known of Romanos comes from a few lines in Byzantine church calendars and from his own hymns. He was born around 490 in Emesa in Syria, today's Homs, possibly to a family of Jewish origin, as some later sources say. He served as a deacon at the Church of the Resurrection in Berytus, modern Beirut, and in the reign of Anastasius I (491–518) he moved to Constantinople, where he was attached to the Church of the Theotokos in the district called τὰ Κύρου (ta Kyrou). He seems to have spent the rest of his life there, in the capital of Justinian, in the years when Hagia Sophia was being built.

The legend of his calling is told in the synaxarion for his feast day. Romanos, it says, had a poor voice and no talent for singing, and was mocked by the other clergy. On Christmas Eve he fell asleep in church and the Virgin appeared to him holding a scroll, and told him to eat it. He swallowed it, woke, mounted the ambo and sang, for the first time, «Ἡ Παρθένος σήμερον τὸν ὑπερούσιον τίκτει». The story is an image of inspiration, like Ezekiel eating the book, but it tells us how the Byzantines thought of him: as a singer first and a theologian second.

He died in the 550s and was buried in the church where he had served. Tradition credits him with a thousand kontakia; around eighty survive under his name, of which some sixty are considered genuine. The Orthodox Church honours him as a saint.

The kontakion is a sermon in song. It opens with a short prelude (προοίμιον) in its own melody, then unfolds in eighteen to twenty-four long stanzas called οἶκοι (houses), all built on the same metrical pattern, each ending in the same refrain that the congregation sang back. The first letters of the stanzas form an acrostic, often «τοῦ ταπεινοῦ Ῥωμανοῦ» (of the humble Romanos). The verse is not classical: it is rhythmic, based on the stress accents of the spoken Greek of the day, and the language is the clear Greek of the Bible and the liturgy, full of dialogue and dramatic turns.

Romanos's subjects are the feasts of the church year and the stories of the Bible, but he tells them as drama. In the kontakion on the Nativity the Virgin speaks with the Magi; in the one on Mary at the Cross she argues with her son, who explains why he must die; Judas, Peter, the Prodigal Son, Lazarus, the Ten Virgins and the Three Children in the furnace all have their own poems, each a small play with voices. The prelude of the Nativity kontakion, Ἡ Παρθένος σήμερον, became and remains the hymn of Orthodox Christmas, and the short hymn «Ψυχή μου, ψυχή μου, ἀνάστα, τί καθεύδεις;» (My soul, my soul, arise, why do you sleep?), sung in Lent with the Great Canon, is also attributed to him. Whether he also wrote the Akathist Hymn, «Τῇ ὑπερμάχῳ στρατηγῷ», is debated, and many scholars think not. In the eighth century the canon displaced the kontakion in church, and only the preludes and first stanzas of his poems stayed in use; scholars recovered the full texts from manuscripts in modern times.

Any Greek who goes to church at Christmas hears Romanos: «Ἡ Παρθένος σήμερον» is sung on 25 December and broadcast on radio and television, and its last line, «παιδίον νέον, ὁ πρὸ αἰώνων Θεός» (a new child, the God before the ages), is as familiar as a carol. The Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 1 October, together with the Protection of the Virgin, and church singers (ψάλτες) regard him as their patron; schools of Byzantine music and choirs across Greece and Cyprus carry his name. Extracts from his hymns appear in the lyceum anthology of Modern Greek literature, whose first pages are Byzantine. A learner can listen to a recording of the Christmas kontakion and follow the Greek, which is surprisingly close to the modern language, or read the Nativity hymn in a bilingual edition.

• He hid his signature in his poems: the first letters of the stanzas often spell «τοῦ ταπεινοῦ Ῥωμανοῦ», «of the humble Romanos».
• Of the thousand kontakia that tradition attributes to him, only about eighty survive, and his full poems were unknown to most readers until scholars printed them from manuscripts in modern times.
• According to the legend, he could not sing until the Virgin made him swallow a scroll in a dream on Christmas Eve.
• His feast day, 1 October, is shared with the Protection of the Theotokos, one of the most popular feasts in Greece.