The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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from Byzantine Egypt. Cyrus of Panopolis (d. 457) was one of them. He was also the one who allegedly built the Marian church in ta Kyrou to which Romanos was connected.9 Poets were becoming an important intellectual group, and the period has been described in terms of “poetic revival.”10 This resurgence gradually shaped the ecclesiastical discourse. By Romanos’s time, both the religious and the secular worlds of the empire prized poetry. Public and private readings amounted to popular events that were not presented only for the privileged few. When the Latin poet Arator (sixth century) performed his metric paraphrase of the Acts of the Apostles for the pope in Rome in the year 544, some of the clergy begged him to do it again for the whole city. The open event drew a large audience and went on for four days.11 People in Constantinople, too, appreciated epic and encomiastic poetry, and authors were able to seek the patronage of the aristocracy, or even of the emperor himself.12
The same period experienced striking poetic innovation in religious circles in the eastern part of the empire. Synagogues, churches, and schools fostered the peculiarly simultaneous rise of a particular form of religious poetry. Various Eastern Mediterranean communities all started to retell their sacred stories in longer stanzaic and metrical hymns. The piyyut emerged among Jews, while the madrasha appeared in Syriac-speaking Christian circles. The Greek counterpart is commonly known as kontakion.13 In addition to having a general metrical structure, these genres share such important compositional features as a refrain, which stitched the dramatic or epic content together, and an acrostic, which strung the stanzas into a long chain. How the three genres relate to one another historically is an unsettled question, but it has been suggested that the kontakion depends on the madrasha.14 Even a fourth genre, which would rise to prominence in Constantinople from the seventh century, evolved in Jerusalem during the same period; this Greek canticle hymn is known as kanon. Its shape and use were, however, somewhat different.15
Most of Romanos’s works belong to the former Greek genre, the kontakion, which was unique to Constantinople and its rite. He was neither the first nor the only kontakion writer, but posterity has regarded him as the master of the genre.16 The Melodist’s hand fashioned the kontakion into a dramatic form, exploiting its narrative potential to a degree that must have made the songs stand out—and indeed still makes them stand out—as singularities in the realm of liturgical verse. He engaged Christian stories more or less well known, and his songs excited by the use of drama and suspense, appealing to the listeners’ sensory imagination and animated curiosity. Playfulness alternates with wit; thrill is achieved next to awe. The narrative of the hymns yearns to titillate its audience. The psychological depth of the characters makes them attractive. Lending a voice to previously voiceless persons and speechless scenes, Romanos provokes the fancy of the assembly. Erotic and sexual allusions undermine congregational sleepiness. The hymnographer gives an ecclesiastical reply to the general desire for more exciting poetry. With the kontakion, the Christian prose heritage of biblical stories and hagiography comes to life in a poetic configuration.
Other poets had transmitted new—often Christian—stories in the form or language of the classical world. Arator did this in Rome, and Empress Eudocia (ca. 401–60) did it in the Greek East, with her Homeric centos and her poem on the Martyrdom of St. Cyprian. In the same century, Nonnus of Panopolis wrote a hexameter paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The authors of kontakia, on the other hand, chose a new genre that did not emanate scents of ancient culture or traditional elites; instead they communicated in an accessible language and employed refrains that encouraged popular participation. The audience did not have to be learned to understand.
The sixth-century Melodist tells us nothing of who his benefactors were, and we do not know in what literary circles he moved.17 We can merely surmise that he, as the highly skilled and utterly sophisticated poet that he was, must have interacted with other authors and literati.
The Form of the Kontakion
A prelude (called koukoulion in Greek and often described as a prooimion) opens the kontakion. This first introductory stanza is normally shorter than the other stanzas and deviates metrically from them. In the Patmos kontakarion, the most complete collection of Romanos kontakia, the preludes as well as the refrains are written in the more readable uncial style, while the rest of the stanzas are in a more cursive minuscule; hence the preludes stand out graphically (see Figure 4).18 Many kontakia appear with different preludes in different manuscripts, so the prelude seems to have been a flexible part of the composition. Since it does not contribute to the acrostic, and since its metrical structure differs from the other stanzas, writers and rewriters could achieve prelude variation without changing the rest of the hymn. The shared refrain is the formal feature that links the prelude to the other stanzas. In general, the content of a prelude relates fairly loosely to the narrative of the hymn—in the form of a prayer, a setting of the scene, or an interpretation of the festal theme.
Figure 4. Romanos’s On the Nativity I from the Patmos kontakarion (P 212 f. 121r). Photo: Ioannes Melianos, Library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian.
After the prelude, the main body of the kontakion follows. It consists of metrically identical stanzas (oikoi). The word “metrical,” however, is not entirely accurate if by “meter” we mean a pattern of feet consisting of long and short syllables. The Koine Greek of the sixth century had abandoned the pitch accents of classical Greek for a stress accent more similar to that of modern English or modern Greek. Since the kontakion poets did not attempt to write in an atticizing style, they did not have to conform to the feet-based meters of classical poetry. Instead, a kontakion stanza consists of a set of kola. In the manuscripts, kola are usually separated by a dot or another kind of punctuation. Together, all the kola in one stanza make up a complex pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. This complex pattern is repeated identically in every stanza, so that all the stanzas of a given kontakion share the same rhythmical pattern.
Those kontakia counted as genuine by the Oxford critical edition comprise between eleven and forty stanzas. A stanza usually consists of approximately ten lines, although one should be aware that the grouping of two or three kola into lines or verses is a product of the critical editors.19 The last line(s) of the stanza constitutes the refrain. The melodist must have chanted the kontakia to a fairly simple and syllabic melody, but the sixth-century melodies have not been transmitted to us, so we do not know exactly how Romanos sang his songs.20
One will not encounter the term “kontakion” in late ancient sources, for it was not in use until the ninth century.21 When the poet names his works he uses terms like “hymn” (humnos), “praise/story” (ainos), “song/ode” (ōdē), “psalm” (psalmos), “word/song/tale” (epos or epē), “poem” (poiēma)—and once even “entreaty” (deēsis) and “prayer” (proseuchē). Applying a variety of terms for very similar texts, Romanos obviously does not intend them as genre labels in a strict sense, but he indicates that his stories were sung and performed. The rubrics of the manuscripts often say adomenon or psallomenon, signaling that the kontakia were sung.22 The “readers” were in other words listeners, who, through the refrains, became coperformers.23
The Kontakion and Church Services
Poets composed their kontakia for special occasions, and, although there are notable exceptions, most of the kontakia we have can be tied to the festal calendar of the church. Before Christianity gained a hegemonic position in the empire, civic festivals had featured festal oratory and hymnody to be performed as a part of the celebrations. With the new role of the Christian religion, ecclesiastical hymns and homilies filled a similar function. Rhetorical speeches and hymns would achieve a new content, yet the practice of celebrating popular public festivals did not change. Neither did Christians cease to compose elegant texts for their festal occasions.24 Kontakia came to play a role as festal poetry for the new Christian festivals.
Modern