Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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Byzantine hymnographer and deacon. Born in
kontakion, it is more accurate to call him the
perfector of this genre: his hymns are the most perfect examples of this
form, whose invention antedates him. The kontakion is
credited with introducing the ‘accent’ (or ‘Byzantine’) metric into Greek
poetry (contrasted with the earlier ‘quantitative’ or ‘Hellenic’ metric).
Romanos’s kontakia have also been singled out as the
first examples of chancel drama, and the predecessor of the medieval mystery
and passion plays. Romanos’s hymns are rhetorically elegant, theologically
sophisticated, aesthetically sublime, and psychologically profound; Karl
Krumbacher termed him ‘the greatest Church poet of all time’.
Little is known of Romanos’s life. The liturgical ‘Menaia’ and ‘Synaxaria’ of
the Byzantine Orthodox Church are our sole sources. They state that he was
born in Emesa and was ‘of the Hebrew race’. He became a deacon in
kontakia: ‘Today the
Virgin gives birth to the super-essential one’. Famed during his own life
for his popular hymns, he is reported to have composed about a thousand kontakia, although only 59 have been preserved.
(Another 29 kontakia have been attributed to Romanos,
but Maas and Trypanis correctly reject them. The Akathistos hymn of the Orthodox Church has sometimes been
attributed to him, although without convincing evidence.) Because Romanos
references the destruction of Constantinople by earthquakes and subsequent
fires, his death must be placed after 552 or possibly 555, for in those
years earthquakes devastated Constantinople.
From an historical and textual standpoint, Romanos’s hymns are significant
for four reasons. 1. They are a window into the layperson’s mind at the time
of Justinian, for Romanos was writing for the common person. The hymns are
not the high theology argued between bishops, vying for political advantage.
Rather, the hymns are pastoral works, addressing the concerns of the average
person and communicating the mysteries of the faith in a form understandable
to the laity. 2. Romanos’s hymns provide strong evidence for a link between
Syr. Christian culture and the Greek, Byzantine world. Romanos’s dependence
— both literary and structural — upon the Syriac
madrāšā (stanzas, a refrain, an acrostic, with
rhyme) closely parallels that of the kontakion. Other
forms used by Ephrem’s Syriac hymns and sermons (the memrā, which is a metrical sermon, and the soghithā, which has a dramatic, epic element, and which often uses
dialogue in a free recreation of a biblical episode) find their distinctive
characteristics transplanted into the Greek world in the kontakia of Romanos. As a literary form, the kontakion was clearly derived from Semitic (specifically, Syriac)
poetic forms. And the Syriac corpus of Ephrem was clearly Romanos’s model
for his Greek hymns. 3. Romanos’s Greek hymns furthermore betray his
dependence on Syriac literary sources. His appropriation of Ephrem has been
discussed; but he also used Syriac biblical texts, sometimes verbatim. He
often quotes the Gospels in the form of
before denying Jesus (when Peter hears
the cock crow and then weeps, that is his second
episode of weeping) (so also the ‘Gospel of the Nazoraeans’).
[Bibliography updated by M. Doerfler]