Romanos the Melodist

Romanos was born about 490 at Emesa in Syria, the city now called Homs. Byzantine sources say his family was Jewish, and that he was baptized as a boy. He served as a deacon at Berytus, modern Beirut, and then moved to Constantinople in the reign of the emperor Anastasius, sometime around 515, attached to a church in the quarter of Kyros. He died after 555.

The story his tradition tells about him is that he could not sing. Given the lesson to chant on Christmas Eve in the great church, he made such a poor job of it that he was humiliated in front of the congregation and the emperor. He wept before the icon of the Virgin, fell asleep in the church, and dreamed that she gave him a scroll and told him to eat it. He woke, went up to the ambo, and sang, out of nothing, the hymn that begins 'Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being.' Whatever a reader makes of the dream, the hymn is real, and it is still sung on Christmas Day across the Orthodox world.

What he wrote is called the kontakion, a long metrical sermon in eighteen to thirty stanzas, all built on the same rhythmic pattern, each ending in the same refrain that the congregation sang back, with the opening letters of the stanzas spelling out an acrostic that usually says 'by the humble Romanos.' Ancient notices credit him with a thousand of them; about sixty survive complete.

They are not hymns in the modern sense. They are preaching in verse, and they are dramatic. Romanos takes a Gospel scene and lets the people in it talk. Mary argues with the magi and with Joseph. Peter protests. The devil and Death hold a nervous conversation about what is happening in the tomb. Adam and Eve speak from Hades. The woman with the ointment reasons herself into the room. Judas is given lines. The doubting of Thomas, the raising of Lazarus, the ten virgins, the prodigal, he works them as scenes with dialogue, so that a congregation standing in a dark church heard the Bible argued out loud in front of them.

His hymn on the Nativity was sung at the imperial banquet at Constantinople every Christmas for centuries. His penitential kontakion is the ancestor of the great Lenten hymns of the Byzantine rite.

Over time the full kontakia were displaced in the services by another form, the canon, and today usually only the first stanza and refrain of each is chanted. But the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God, one of the most beloved services in Orthodoxy, belongs to the same tradition and has often been attributed to him.

The Eastern Orthodox church keeps his feast on 1 October and calls him simply the Melodist. Critics have ranked him with the greatest religious poets in any language.

Sources: Romanos the Melodist, Kontakia (Greek text ed. Maas and Trypanis; English translations by Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, and Ephrem Lash, On the Life of Christ); the Byzantine synaxarion for 1 October; Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography.