ROMANUS MELODUS, ST.

Preeminent religious poet of the Eastern Church; b. Emesa, Syria, c. 490; d. Constantinople, c. 560. Legendary evidence indicates that Romanus was of Jewish origin. He served as a deacon in Beirut, Lebanon, before arriving in Constantinople during the reign of anastasi us i (491–518). According to hagiographic sources, the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a dream on Christmas Eve and, upon handing him a piece of paper, instructed him to swallow it. After awakening, Romanus mounted the pulpit in the Church of the Virgin Mother and sang his most famous work, On the Nativity I. Of the 1,000 poems that legend attributes to Romanus, only 85 have survived, and the authenticity of a number is doubtful. His possible authorship of the monumental akathistos hymn is an open question.

The verse form employed by Romanus is the Kontakion, a term derived from the staff around which the inscribed scroll was wrapped. Every Kontakion is organized in an intricate strophic system, most frequently consisting of 24 stanzas. Each stanza is a perfect structural imitation of the first. The metrical system, unlike classical quantitative patterns, is based on stress-accent, whose rhythmic arrangement was undoubtedly influenced by the melody to which the poem was originally sung. His honorific title, The Melodist, indicates that Romanus also composed the music, none of which survives.

A short prefatory stanza, the koukoulion, though metrically and melodically independent of the rest of the poem, introduced a refrain with which every stanza concludes, but it does not contribute to the initial-letter acrostic that signs the work. The language of Romanus is the standard literary koine, strongly influenced by the usages and vocabulary of scriptural Greek.

The Kontakion was sung after the reading of the Gospel in the morning Office, and its themes and techniques are characteristic of its liturgical function, that of a verse sermon. Most probably a preacher chanted the work, while the choir or the congregation sang the refrain. Themes suggested by the life and ministry of Christ, Old Testament events, and the deeds of martyrs and saints are woven together with flamboyant exegetical displays and elaborate antiheretical digressions to inspire and instruct the congregation. Romanus frequently dramatized his Biblical and patristic source material by exploiting suggestions of soliloquy, interior monologue, and dialogue and by paying careful attention to scene and plot arrangement and to adroit transition and climax.

There is no evidence that the Kontakia were ever theatrically produced. Rather, the poetically pregnant biblical phraseology and rhetorical figures, such as antithesis, parallelism, anaphora, paradox, and various types of wordplay, situate the Kontakion in the tradition of the great rhythmic prose homilies of the fifth and early sixth centuries. In this historical context the direct and indirect influence of Syriac literature, and especially of ephrem the syrian, is considerable.

The sweeping grandeur of such Kontakia as the Nativity poem and some of the Passion–Resurrection cycle justifies the critical opinion that rates these works as masterpieces

of world literature and their author as perhaps the greatest religious poet of all time.

Feast Day: Oct. 1.

Bibliography: p. maas and c. a. trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, v.1, Genuina (Oxford 1963), v.2 Dubia, Spuria et Fragmenta (in press). h. g. beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich 1959) 425–428. m. carpenter, Speculum 7 (1932) 3–22. l. paton, ibid. 553–555. e. wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (2d ed. Oxford 1961). j. grosdidier de matons, ed., Romanos le Mélode, 3 v. (Sources Chrétiennes, ed. h. de lubac et al. (Paris 1941–) 99, 110, 114; 1964–65), v.1 Hymnes I–VIII, v.2 Hymnes IX–XX, v.3 Hymnes XX–XXXI. j. grosdidier de matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris 1977). w. l. petersen, The Diatessaron and Ephrem Syrus as sources of Romanos the Melodist (Louvain 1985). r. j. schork, Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit: Romanos the Melodist (Gainesville, Fl.1995).

[r. j. schork]