From Emesa to Constantinople

The little that can be said about the early life of St. Romanos the Melodist: a birth at Emesa in Roman Syria (modern Homs) in the last decade of the fifth century, the tradition of a Jewish-convert background, ministry as a deacon at Berytus (Beirut), and a move to Constantinople under the emperor Anastasius, where he served at a church of the Theotokos. Every one of these points rests on meagre, legend-laden sources — the Menaion, the Synaxarion of Constantinople, a passing mention in the eighth-century St. Germanus, and the Suda — none of them contemporary, so the historical biography is built from fragments and read with care.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Shape of What Is Known

It is a sobering fact about one of the greatest poets of the Christian East that almost nothing about his life can be established with the certainty a historian would wish. Romanos left a large body of hymns but no autobiography; the prose notices that survive are short, late, and shaped by the conventions of hagiography rather than by the interests of biography (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris, 1977, ch. 1; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, ch. 1). The principal witnesses are the liturgical commemoration in the Menaion for October (his feast falls on October 1), the entry in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, a brief reference in the writings associated with the eighth-century patriarch St. Germanus of Constantinople, and the article in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1; the OCA Lives of the Saints, “Venerable Romanus the Melodist,” October 1). From these, and from incidental clues internal to the hymns themselves, scholars reconstruct an outline — and they are careful to call it an outline.

The bare frame on which all the sources agree is this: Romanos was a Syrian by birth, served as a deacon in the East, came to Constantinople, and there composed the kontakia that made his name. The details that fill out that frame — his city, his ancestry, the emperor under whom he migrated, the church he served — are attested only in the later notices and must be weighed accordingly (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1; Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, Univ. of Missouri Press, 1970, introduction).

Emesa in Syria

The sources place his birth at Emesa, the Syrian city on the Orontes known today as Homs (the OCA Life, October 1; the Menaion for October; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1). Emesa was an old and prosperous town of Roman Syria, famous in earlier centuries for its great temple of the sun-god and for having given Rome an emperor, but by Romanos’ day a thoroughly Christianized provincial center within the Greek-speaking, Syriac-inflected world of the late Roman East. The dating of his birth is given conventionally as around 490, though the figure is an estimate worked back from the reigns of the emperors under whom he is said to have lived rather than a recorded date [Disputed: c. 490 (the OCA Life, October 1; Carpenter, Kontakia, 1970); some scholars prefer c. 485 or simply “the last quarter of the fifth century” (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1)].

That he came from Syria rather than from a Greek heartland matters for understanding his art. The kontakion as Romanos perfected it has deep affinities with the Syriac verse homily (memra) and the strophic teaching-hymn (madrasha) of writers such as St. Ephrem the Syrian, and a Syrian formation supplies the most natural channel for that influence (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, chs. 1, 5; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1; see the genre of the kontakion). The bridge between the Syriac and Greek hymnographic worlds runs, in part, through this Syrian deacon who wrote in Greek.

The Jewish-Convert Tradition

One of the oldest and most discussed features of his received biography is the tradition that Romanos was of Jewish ancestry — that he came from a Jewish family and was a convert, or the son of converts, to Christianity. This claim appears in the Byzantine notices and is reported in the Suda and the hagiographic tradition behind the Menaion (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1). Some modern scholars have found a degree of internal support for it in the texture of his Greek, pointing to what they describe as abundant Semiticisms and to a familiarity with Jewish exegetical and homiletic patterns; others caution that such features are equally explicable by his Syrian origin and his immersion in a hymnographic tradition (the Syriac one) that was itself steeped in scriptural and Semitic idiom, and that the convert tradition itself rests on late and unverifiable testimony [Disputed: the Jewish-convert background is reported by the Suda and the Menaion tradition and is thought by some to be reinforced by the “abundant Semiticisms” of the hymns (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1; Carpenter, Kontakia, 1970, introduction); others stress that the tradition depends on late sources and that the linguistic features are sufficiently explained by his Syrian formation, leaving the claim unproven (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1)]. The honest position is to report the tradition, name the argument made on its behalf, and mark that it cannot be confirmed from contemporary evidence.

Deacon at Berytus

Before his move to the capital, the sources place Romanos in church service at Berytus — Beirut, the great Phoenician city on the Syrian coast, then renowned for its law school and as a flourishing center of the Roman East (the OCA Life, October 1; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1). There, the tradition holds, he was ordained deacon and served in the Church of the Resurrection (the OCA Life, October 1; the Menaion for October). The diaconate is significant: it is in the rank of deacon, not priest, that Romanos served throughout his career, and the kontakion as he practiced it — a sung verse-sermon delivered from the ambo during the night office — fits the deacon’s liturgical role of proclamation and chant rather than the priest’s of consecration (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1; see the place of the kontakion in the rite). The earthquake-prone coastal city of Berytus would be destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 551, within Romanos’ own lifetime, though by then he was long gone to Constantinople.

To the Imperial Capital Under Anastasius

The decisive move of his life was the journey to Constantinople, which the sources date to the reign of the emperor Anastasius (the OCA Life, October 1; the Menaion for October; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1). Here a complication of the sources must be named: Byzantine history knew two emperors of that name, and the notices are not always explicit about which is meant. The mainstream scholarly judgment, required by the rest of his chronology, is that the emperor in question is Anastasius I (reigned 491–518), under whom the young deacon would have arrived in the capital while still a relatively young man, well before the great years of his maturity under Justinian (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1). The alternative reading, which would place his arrival under Anastasius II (713–715), is excluded by the firm sixth-century anchors of his career and is generally treated as a confusion in the later tradition (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1).

In the capital he attached himself to a church of the Theotokos — the notices name the church “in the quarter of Kyros” (ta Kyrou), a sanctuary of the Mother of God that the later tradition came to associate with the great Marian shrine at Blachernae, the city’s foremost center of devotion to the Theotokos (the OCA Life, October 1; the Menaion for October; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1). It is at this church of the Theotokos, in the night vigils of the Constantinopolitan rite, that the tradition sets the famous vision in which the Mother of God is said to have given him the gift of sacred song — a narrative reported strictly as tradition and pinned to its later attestation in the chapter on the Theotokos and the scroll.

Reading the Sources Honestly

What emerges from this survey is a biography drawn almost entirely from sources that postdate their subject, in some cases by centuries. The Menaion and the Synaxarion of Constantinople are liturgical-hagiographic compilations whose narrative layers accreted over time; the Suda is a tenth-century encyclopedia; even the eighth-century reference associated with St. Germanus is two centuries after Romanos’ death (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, ch. 1; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, ch. 1). None is a contemporary witness, and the Methodology of this collection requires that such hagiographical claims be pinned to their earliest written attestation rather than asserted as established fact (see the discipline of history and hagiography and the repository METHODOLOGY). The genuine historical anchor for Romanos is not the Life but the hymns: a substantial, securely transmitted body of Greek liturgical poetry whose theological depth and metrical mastery are beyond dispute, and whose Syrian roots and Constantinopolitan setting the prose notices, for all their lateness, at least consistently affirm (Maas–Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica Genuina, Oxford, 1963, introduction; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, introduction).

References

Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica Genuina, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris: Beauchesne, 1977.
José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964–1981.
Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, 2 vols., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.
Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints: “Venerable Romanus the Melodist,” October 1, oca.org.
The Menaion for the month of October (October 1).
Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. H. Delehaye, Brussels, 1902.