The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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ants now after the worms withdrew
and the stench was dismissed. (XIV 12.4–7)
The poet goes on to describe how the two figures of the underworld stand terrified and watch Lazarus’s body being reordered with hair and skin and inner organs, veins and arteries and blood.87
Romanos’s hymns must have seemed both groundbreaking and breathtaking in their outreach, opting, as they do, for the interior space of their audiences. With psychological characterization the kontakia appeal to the psychological depths of the listener, reflecting in his or her idealized self. In doing so they come to enter into the interiority of the individual Christian subject, and those who hear the songs learn to see inside themselves like Hades.88
There is nothing to indicate that the sixth-century public was offended by the at times rather daring content of Romanos’s poetry. Constantinople was a violent and vibrant city, filled with colors, smells, and noises, resplendent in visual effects, dirty and often cruel. Such realities might not only be experienced outside the church walls.
The narrative framework of the hymns usually stems from the biblical or hagiographic story worlds, but the kontakia do not simply represent attempts to fit old narratives into a new meter. The poet interacts freely with existing traditions and lets his own inventiveness contribute to the shaping of the narratives. Appealing to the listeners’ imagination, the hymn for Pentecost exclaims: “Let us think that the fire is roses!”89 In other words, let us interpret and experience this story together! The audience may read the flames on the apostles’ heads as flowers. In On the Ascension the singer starts the hymn by exhorting: “Let us open up our perceptions together with our senses…. Let us imagine that we are on the Mount of Olives and gaze at the Redeemer as he rides on a cloud!”90 Dialogues and actions come out as imaginary dialogues or deeds when the poet introduces them saying he thinks (hōs oimai) this is what happened.91 Introducing the Samaritan woman’s inner monologue, the narrator says: “perhaps she was seized by thoughts similar to something like this.”92 And likewise with another holy woman’s monologue: “The hemorrhaging woman was probably not just thinking, but said to herself.”93 Such cues—the “perhapses” and the “probablys”—invite the audience to take part in the imaginative process of inventing the story, as creative coworkers rather than passive listeners. Romanos was well aware that the reader shapes the text, and that the author, to a certain extent, is dead.
On top of the fascinating possibility of peeking in on subterranean dialogues, or seeing other sides of gospel characters, Romanos’s relatively simple and yet poetically refined language must have sounded with sublime beauty in the ears of the gathered Constantinopolitans. The songs did not await contemplation but animation.
Audiences
Who were the people who listened to these kontakia which singers performed after sunset? We do not know exactly. Yet we know of preachers from the same period who gave sermons at night. In their preaching they would address both sexes, rich and poor, young and old.94 One such preacher was Leontius the Presbyter. He was a sixth-century presbyter in Constantinople. The editors of his works have investigated his homilies in order to determine what kind of audience he composed them for. They conclude that since Leontius’s corpus cannot be “called either intellectual or demanding, and it is seemingly intended as much to entertain as to edify,” it points “to the simplicity of his hearers.”95 Hence, they suggest, the congregation must have included workers, artisans, and generally economically underprivileged people, rather than monks and nuns. As Leontius’s and Romanos’s writings share several common features, there is reason to believe that the same could be true of the Melodist’s hymns.
The slightly later Miracles of St. Artemios relates how a woman with her sick son stayed in the ta Kyrou Church of the Mother of God. This was the church where Romanos had composed his hymns, according to the Romanos legend, and we can assume that his poetry was still being sung in the church complex. At a certain point, someone approached the help-seeking mother in a dream and told her to go to the shrine of St. Artemios at St. John Oxeia instead, the latter being one of several complexes in Constantinople where people sought healing through rites of incubation. The shrines were within walking distance from one another, so she took her son there, and eventually the Virgin Mary came and cured him.96 As already mentioned, the same miracle collection describes the shrine in the Oxeia district as a place where Romanos’s kontakia were being sung during vigils, among common people who stayed close to the relics and waited for healing.97
These miracle stories were written after the death of Romanos, but they suggest the same as the survey of Leontius’s homilies, that common people heard his kontakia. The editor of Romanos’s corpus José Grosdidier de Matons at one point asked himself if these hymns were not too entertaining and too imaginative for ascetic monks.98 Maybe they were, but monks did not make up his primary audience for most of the kontakia. He probably wrote them for a general public, and not for an exclusive religious elite. We can safely assume that a broad cross-section of the city stood and listened when Romanos’s stories resonated between church walls.
If a modern churchgoer were transferred into a service in a sixth-century church in Constantinople, he or she would probably be shocked. The late ancient places of worship tended to lack the disciplined tranquillity that many people today associate with a space of devotion. Although an ordered structure may have been the ideal, the reality on the ground could involve disordered motion, and even commotion. Several texts from the period attest to homilists’ concern about the unruliness of the faithful. A century prior to Romanos, for instance, Proclus of Constantinople (d. 446) sighs to his congregation: “I see that you are crowded together by force, and that it would be better at this point to finish my discourse.”99 The preachers expected acclamations and response, but they also had to put up with movement, disturbance, and fuss. Joking and general irreverence were not uncommon; more extreme issues included clerical fighting and obscenities.
Any preacher or poet, therefore, had to struggle to attract the full attention of the audience. The venerated bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom loomed as one of the most outstanding preachers of the fourth century, which is why he came to be called Chrysostom (“Golden mouth”). He was well aware that if his sermon did not excite people, they would soon turn their eyes and ears elsewhere, to their neighbor—or to the boy or girl on the other side of the aisle.100 His bitter complains to the congregation speak for themselves; when he did not succeed in drawing people’s attention, the church would sound like crowds in the market, the house of worship resembling places of laughter, nudity, drunkenness, and lewdness: “great is the tumult [here in church], great the confusion, and our assemblies differ in nothing from a vintner’s shop, so loud is the laughter, so great the disturbance; as in baths, as in markets, the cry and tumult is universal…. [W]e behave ourselves more impudently than dogs, and even to the harlot women we pay greater respect than to God…. [I]f any one is trying or intending to corrupt a woman, there is no place, I suppose, that seems to him more suitable than the church.”101 We may have to allow for a certain hyperbolic exaggeration, but even so it is clear that his assembly nauseates the homilist. It has been suggested that one reason for keeping men and women apart in church was to avert flirting.102 Liturgical events featured many focal points.
A century after John Chrysostom had complained to his audience, Jacob of Serug criticized the congregation for only being physically present; they seem impatient, he says, their minds straying off to their businesses: “amid the markets thy mind is wandering, (taken up) with reckonings and profits; fetch it…. Stand not with one half of thee within and one half without.”103 Many people, of course, stood with one foot here and one there. They would cheer at the horse races in the hippodrome and get excited by the mimes, but under a dome—or even out in the streets—they would hear a singer perform his religious songs.
Into such untidy rituals Romanos tossed his narrations. The hymns concerned themselves with “the multitude on the streets as well as in the churches.”104 His poetry addressed people who had perhaps not changed their habits and weeded out their vices, their virginity long gone and their wholehearted