Romanos the Melodist

Romanos the Melodist, known in Greek as Romanos Melodos, was the principal hymnographer of the Byzantine Church in the sixth century and the classic master of the kontakion, a form of homiletic verse sung during the night office. He was born in the later fifth century at Emesa (modern Homs) in Syria. Ancient notices present him as a Syrian by origin who received a Christian education and was ordained to the diaconate. A later medieval tradition asserted that he had been born to a Jewish family and converted; that claim is not independently confirmed and is treated with caution by modern historians. After serving as a deacon in Berytus (Beirut), he moved to Constantinople while Anastasius I was still emperor, thus no later than 518.

In Constantinople he was associated with the Church of the Theotokos in the Kyros quarter of the city. Hagiographical accounts, preserved in the Constantinopolitan synaxarion, relate that he was at first an unskilled singer and was ridiculed by other clergy. On Christmas Eve the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a vision and commanded him to swallow a scroll. When he awoke he went to the ambo and chanted, for the first time, the kontakion on the Nativity whose opening words are "Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One." Whether or not the miracle is taken as historical, it became the traditional origin story of his vocation and of that particular hymn, which remained among the best known of all Byzantine kontakia.

As a poet Romanos wrote in a flexible, dramatic Greek, often constructing his hymns as dialogues among biblical characters or as vivid retellings of Gospel scenes and of episodes from the lives of saints. The kontakion as he practiced it consisted of a short prelude (prooimion or koukoulion) followed by a series of strophes (oikoi) linked by an acrostic, frequently spelling his name, and by a repeated refrain. Medieval lists credited him with as many as a thousand kontakia; of the corpus that survives, scholars generally regard on the order of sixty to eighty hymns as authentic or as very probably his. He worked in the capital during the long reign of Justinian I and thus in a period of intense liturgical and architectural patronage. The Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos has at times been ascribed to him, but that attribution is now generally rejected or regarded as unproven.

Romanos died in Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century. Tradition holds that he was buried at the church of the Theotokos where he had ministered. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which keeps his feast on 1 October; he also appears in Eastern Catholic calendars and in the Roman Martyrology on the same date. Although the kontakion as a living compositional genre was later largely displaced by the kanon, a number of his hymns continued to be sung, and his reputation as "the Melodist" remained fixed in Orthodox memory. Modern students of Byzantine literature and liturgy still treat his kontakia as central evidence for sixth-century preaching, devotion, and poetic technique in the Greek East.