The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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at least not if we think of sermons as preachers’ attempts to give an exegetical exposition of the lection in church during Sunday service. Kontakia contained homiletic elements, just as many Byzantine homilies included poetic and hymnal elements, yet the genres were performed differently. Homilies might constitute a part of the Divine Liturgy, and a bishop or a presbyter preached it with clerical authority. Kontakia, on the other hand, were not normally performed during the liturgy and not by the higher clergy; as a rule, male singers sang them during nocturnal services. As noted earlier, Romanos himself was a deacon according to tradition.25 Furthermore, the writers of kontakia fixed the text through the use of metrical patterns, refrains, and acrostics. While preachers could be open to performative improvisation, the singers of kontakia were stuck with their prewritten text.
That a soloist would sing rather than read the kontakion stanzas is clear from several verses; for instance in Romanos’s kontakion On the Resurrection VI, the singer concludes with a paraphrase of Our Father and a reflection on his own work as a performer:
Hallowed be your name always
through my mouth and my lips,
through my voice and my song [ᾠδῇ]. (XXIX 24.8–10)
The voice is song.
The ritual life of the city in this period belonged to what modern liturgists call the Constantinopolitan rite; its distinct office is described as “the sung office” (asmatikē akolouthia).26 Despite its name, the late ancient rite that developed in the metropolis left room for a relatively small hymnographic repertoire.
It is still unclear how closely the kontakion was connected to a specific service. Our earliest evidence points to nightly vigils, and so do later liturgical manuscripts, yet these popular vigils were probably not entirely fixed events in this early period. As far as we can tell, they might feature responsorial or antiphonal psalmody as well as readings from Scripture and saints’ lives, and even processions. People would gather to prepare and await the coming feast or to commemorate a certain event. Romanos performed his hymns during such services, as a flexible part of the vigil.27 Kontakion performance outside church walls cannot be ruled out, either; its form makes it applicable in many contexts.
Since no liturgical manuals of sixth-century Constantinople have survived, we do not know the exact location of the kontakion in the rite, then, but the performer seems to have sung the hymns from the ambo, as the later story of Romanos’s inspiration suggests. The ambo was literally the central focal point in a Byzantine church. Apart from the altar area in the east, the ambo made up the most important liturgical “stage,” and this liturgical platform can inform our interpretation of the kontakia. The ambo consisted of an elevated marble platform on columns and was located in the middle of the nave.28 One should not equate the ambo with a modern pulpit for preaching, for it did not serve as the main venue for sermons.
The sixth-century poet Paul the Silentiary gives us a verbose and creative description of the ambo in the renovated Hagia Sophia of 562. He says: “As an island rises amidst the waves of the sea, adorned with cornfields, and vineyards, and blossoming meadows, and wooded heights, while the travellers who sail by are gladdened by it and are soothed of the anxieties and exertions of the sea; so in the midst of the boundless temple rises upright the tower-like ambo of stone adorned with its meadows of marble, wrought with the beauty of the craftsman’s art.”29 In Hagia Sophia this highly visual spot was where the patriarch crowned the new emperor. During regular services, clergy would mount the stairs of the same podium to read from the Scriptures, as would singers to intone the hymns. The ambo functioned as a focal point of several ecclesiastical rituals. At least in bigger churches like Hagia Sophia a choir stood underneath the ambo. Paul describes it in this way: “Underneath the stone there is, as it were, another chamber, wherein the sacred song is raised by fair children, heralds of wisdom. What is roof for those below is a floor for those above; the latter is like a spreading plain, made level for the feet of mortals, while the underside has been cut out and hollowed by the mason so that it rises from the sacred capitals, curving over with artful adornment, like the bent back of the hard-shelled tortoise or the oxhide shield which the agile warrior holds over his helmet when he leaps in the Pyrrhic dance.”30 By likening the choir to the performers of the so-called pyrrhic dance—an ancient war drama that by the second century had become a mythological performance31—the poet suggests a theatrical connection for this liturgical stage. I shall return to the theater theme below; for now note simply that the motif surfaces in the Silentiary’s text.
Paul wrote one poem to describe the whole church, and another only to describe the ambo. This fact attests to the importance of the liturgical platform. Its significance for the interpretation of the kontakia lies first and foremost in the performative setting that it created: The words would echo from a place of authority in the congregation’s midst. Hence it makes sense to read all the scenes in the hymns as emanating from a slightly elevated spot in the middle of the crowd.
While the song echoed from the ambo, the congregation intoned the refrain; in the larger churches, the choir under the ambo probably took the lead.32 The congregation’s vocal involvement in the performance must have contributed to their cognitive participation, as the refrain resounded in their ears even after they had left the nightly gathering. The refrains made listeners into singers.
The night is a potent time and has different symbolic values than daytime. A century before Romanos’s writings, Sozomen relates how the Virgin Mary provided healing during nocturnal incubation at the Church of Anastasia. The seventh-century Miracles of St. Artemios refers to the nightly singing of Romanos’s hymns at an incubation site.33 The dark hours hide their secrets and prepare the floor for a new morning with new potential; the gloomy absence of light yields the shimmering of imagined worlds. Kontakia, with their exiting fables and existential stories, can be seen as distant relatives of campfire tales and the cinema. Paul the Silentiary describes in detail how the lights, the glass, and the metal glittered like stars in Hagia Sophia’s night. In his vision the sunrise is already present in the night. His full descriptions are too long to be included here, but he sums up: “No words are sufficient to describe the illumination in the evening: you might say that some nocturnal sun fills the majestic temple with light…. Countless other lights, hanging on twisted chains, does the church of ever-changing aspect contain within itself; some illumine the aisles, others the center or the east and west; others shed their bright flame at the summit. Thus the bright night smiles like the day and appears herself to be rosy-ankled.”34 We do not know for sure what churches—or streets—Romanos wrote his many kontakia for. Some of them may have been performed in Hagia Sophia, but not all. In any case, the Silentiary’s imaginative and idealized lines give us some hints about nocturnal impressions in the great churches, between gloom and intense glow. In the darkness, the beams of anticipation flicker through “the church of ever-changing aspect [αἰολόμορφον ἀνάκτορον]” as the night evokes expectation and transformation.
Rhetorical Strategies and Compositional Techniques
Kontakia constitute occasional poetry. The stories are “local.” Romanos wrote each one of his for a particular feast, and they were probably intended to be performed in a particular shrine. Some were even written for a unique event. The theodicean hymn On Earthquakes and Fires, for instance, Romanos seems to have written for a historical situation rather than a liturgical feast; On Life in the Monastery greets novices who enter some form of monastic life. As a whole the corpus does not comprise one grand vision of the world, but a series of lesser narratives, a cycle of stories strung together by the appearances of the same characters. While some hymns vividly describe the sinner’s torment in Gehenna,35 the Easter hymns brim with Resurrection joy, and On the Presentation in the Temple clearly states that Christ has not come so that some people should fall, but for the Resurrection of all.36
Late ancient authors were attuned to the incomprehensibility of reality. Augustine of Hippo’s student Orosius (ca. 375–420) reflected on his own historiography and confessed: “I have woven an inextricable hurdle of confused history and entwined the uncertain courses of wars waged here and there with