The Authentic Kontakia

Tradition credited St. Romanos the Melodist with around a thousand kontakia, yet the surviving manuscripts preserve fewer than ninety under his name, of which modern editors accept roughly sixty as genuine. This file surveys the boundaries of the authentic corpus, the editorial division between Cantica Genuina and Cantica Dubia, and the remarkable range of subjects the secure hymns cover.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Shape of the Problem

The corpus of Romanos is one of the great editorial puzzles of Byzantine literature: an enormous reputation, a modest surviving body, and a wide grey zone between them. The hagiographical tradition, transmitted in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and repeated by later Byzantine writers, holds that Romanos composed “more than a thousand” kontakia across the feasts of the whole liturgical year (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, 1977). That figure is a hagiographical superlative rather than a catalogue entry; it expresses the sense, shared by the Byzantine Church, that Romanos was the kontakographer without peer, the poet whose name eventually attracted to itself a great mass of anonymous festal poetry. What actually survives is far smaller, and the gap between the legend and the manuscripts is precisely where the modern scholarship of the corpus does its work (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, vol. 1, 1970).

The reduction from a thousand to a few dozen is not an act of skepticism for its own sake but a consequence of how the kontakaria — the manuscript collections of kontakia — actually transmit the texts. Many hymns circulate anonymously; many bear acrostics naming “the humble Romanos,” the poet’s habitual signature, but acrostics could be imitated; and the festal calendar generated new kontakia for centuries after Romanos, some of which drifted under his name (Carpenter, vol. 1, 1970; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977). The editor’s task is to sift this inheritance.

The Disputed Numbers

How large, then, is the authentic corpus? The honest answer is that scholars give different figures depending on what they count.

[Disputed: the size of Romanos’s authentic corpus. Position A — the hagiographical tradition (the Byzantine Synaxarion; repeated in later vitae) credits Romanos with roughly one thousand kontakia, a figure most modern scholars treat as legendary hyperbole (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014). Position B — Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, in Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford, 1963), print fifty-nine hymns as genuine, and in the companion Cantica Dubia (Berlin, 1970) a further twenty-something of disputed or doubtful authenticity, for a total surviving under his name of roughly eighty-five to eighty-nine kontakia. Position C — counts of “about sixty genuine” are common in handbooks and depend on whether one or two borderline pieces are admitted; some reckonings of the manuscript total reach the high eighties when dubia and clearly spurious attributions are included (Maas–Trypanis, 1963, 1970; Carpenter, 1970–1973; Lash, On the Life of Christ, 1995).]

The cleanest way to state the consensus is therefore in ranges: tradition, about a thousand; surviving under the name, in the high eighties; securely genuine, about fifty-nine to sixty (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

The Maas–Trypanis Division: Genuina and Dubia

The standard critical edition is the two-part Oxford/Berlin set of Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis. The first volume, Cantica Genuina (Oxford, 1963), establishes the text of the fifty-nine kontakia the editors judged authentic, numbering them in a sequence (conventionally cited as “Oxford 1,” “Oxford 19,” and so on) that has become the standard reference grid for English-language scholarship (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Krueger, 2014). The companion volume, Cantica Dubia (Berlin, 1970), gathers the hymns whose attribution to Romanos is uncertain — pieces that resemble his manner, or bear his name in some witnesses, but lack the converging evidence of metre, acrostic, theology, and early attestation that secures the genuine hymns (Maas–Trypanis, 1970; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

The criteria for the division are technical. Maas, a master metrician, weighed the exact responsion of strophes (each kontakion’s strophes must scan identically to its first model-strophe, the heirmos), the integrity of the acrostic spelling out the poet’s signature, the consistency of vocabulary and theological idiom, and the testimony of the oldest kontakaria (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, SC 99, 1964). Where these aligned, a hymn was genuinum; where they pulled apart, dubium. The system is not infallible — later scholars have argued over individual cases — but it gave the field a disciplined common text (Carpenter, 1970; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

Alongside the Oxford text stands the Greek-French edition of José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, in five volumes of the Sources Chrétiennes series (SC 99, 110, 114, 128, 283; 1964–1981). Grosdidier de Matons made his own, somewhat more inclusive, selection and his own numbering, organized loosely by subject, so that scholars routinely cite a hymn by both systems — for instance the Lament of the Mother of God as Oxford 19 / SC 35 (Grosdidier de Matons, SC; Lash, 1995). His great monograph of 1977 remains the indispensable study of the corpus and its transmission. Ephrem Lash’s English selection, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (1995), translates the hymns on the Lord’s life from the Oxford text and is keyed to its numbering, making it the most accessible doorway to the genuine corpus (Lash, 1995).

Manuscript Transmission: The Kontakaria

The text of Romanos reaches us almost entirely through the kontakaria (singular kontakarion), the liturgical manuscript-books in which the kontakia were copied for use and preservation (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014). These are not author’s editions but service-books, organized by the church year, and they transmit the hymns as the rite came to use them rather than as the poet first delivered them. The most important witnesses are a small group of early codices, foremost among them the Patmiacus of the monastery of St. John on Patmos and the great kontakaria of Mount Sinai (the monastery of St. Catherine), supplemented by manuscripts now in the Vatican, Moscow, and elsewhere; from the agreement and divergence of these witnesses Maas and Trypanis reconstructed their critical text (Maas–Trypanis, Cantica Genuina, 1963; Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99, 1964). Crucially, the liturgical books almost never preserve a kontakion entire: by the time the surviving kontakaria were copied, the rite had already reduced most kontakia to their prooimion and first strophe alone, the form in which the kontakion still survives in today’s services. The long chains of strophes that make Romanos a dramatist had to be recovered from the older, fuller manuscripts and from the menaia and triodia that happened to preserve more (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; Lash, On the Life of Christ, 1995).

This pattern of preservation explains why the corpus shrank in transmission. The decisive cause was the rise of the kanon, the multi-ode hymn-form perfected in the seventh and eighth centuries by Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, and Cosmas of Maiuma, which gradually displaced the kontakion as the principal poetic genre of the Byzantine office (Krueger, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977). As the kanon took over the morning service, the full kontakion fell out of liturgical use; only its head survived in the books, and the great body of strophes was no longer needed, no longer copied, and in many cases lost. What the kontakaria therefore hand down is a corpus already attenuated by the very success of a rival form — a transmission history examined further in modern scholarship. The “thousand” of legend was thinned not only by the ordinary attrition of manuscripts but by a structural change in the rite itself.

The Thematic Cycles

The modern editions impose an order on this inheritance, and the Maas–Trypanis / Sources Chrétiennes arrangement groups the genuine hymns into recognizable thematic cycles that follow the arc of salvation history (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99–283, 1964–1981). An Old Testament cycle gathers the hymns on Hebrew scripture — Joseph, the Three Children, Elijah, Noah, Abraham — read throughout as types of Christ. A long life-of-Christ cycle runs from the Nativity and Theophany through the public ministry (Cana, the Samaritan woman, the leper, Lazarus) to the Passion. A Resurrection cycle gathers the several hymns Romanos devoted to Pascha and the empty tomb. A sanctoral group serves the saints and martyrs, and a penitential and eschatological group turns the whole art on the conscience of the hearer. The ordering is editorial convenience, not the poet’s own scheme, but it reflects the real shape of his ambition: to sing the entire economy of redemption across the year.

A fuller roll of named genuine kontakia, beyond the Passion and Nativity hymns treated elsewhere in this collection, conveys the range better than any summary. The Old Testament hymns include On Joseph (the patriarch sold into Egypt and raised to save his brothers), On the Three Children in the fiery furnace, and On Elijah the prophet (Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99, 1964; Maas–Trypanis, 1963). The paschal and pentecostal group includes On the Resurrection (Romanos left several such hymns) and On Pentecost, which sings the descent of the Spirit and the reversal of Babel; to these belongs On the Mission of the Apostles, on the sending-out of the Twelve (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Lash, 1995). Each draws the same lesson by the same means — dramatized speech in the service of a typological reading of scripture, the technique surveyed in the dramatic dialogues and Christology and Mariology sung.

The Range of Subjects

What the secure corpus loses in quantity it more than recovers in range. Romanos wrote across the whole sweep of salvation history, and the authentic hymns can be grouped by their material.

The great feasts of the Lord. The festal core includes two kontakia On the Nativity — the famous first (“Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One,” a dialogue of Mary and the Magi) and a second built on the lament of Adam and Eve — together with hymns On the Theophany, On the Presentation (the Meeting of the Lord), On the Resurrection (Romanos left several Resurrection kontakia), On the Ascension, and On Pentecost (Lash, 1995; Maas–Trypanis, 1963). These are treated more fully in the Nativity studies and in the theology section.

Old Testament narrative. Among the genuine hymns are kontakia drawn directly from Hebrew scripture: On Joseph (the patriarch sold into Egypt), On the Three Children in the fiery furnace, On Elijah, On Noah, and On Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac (Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99, 1964; Maas–Trypanis, 1963). Romanos reads each as a figure of Christ, a typological habit examined in Christology and Mariology sung.

New Testament narrative. The Gospel furnished Romanos his richest seam: On the Prodigal Son, On the Raising of Lazarus, On the Wedding at Cana, On the Samaritan Woman, On the Healing of the Leper, On the Multiplication of the Loaves, and a whole Passion cluster — On Judas, On Peter’s Denial, On the Harlot (the sinful woman who anointed Christ), On the Lament of the Mother of God at the Cross, On the Victory of the Cross, and the Resurrection hymns (Lash, 1995; Maas–Trypanis, 1963).

Saints and martyrs. Romanos also composed for the sanctoral calendar: a kontakion On the Martyrdom of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, hymns on other martyrs, and a moving piece On the Death of a Monk (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Carpenter, 1973).

Repentance and the Last Things. Finally a penitential and eschatological group — On Repentance, On the Ten Virgins (two kontakia on the parable), and On the Second Coming / the Last Judgement — turns the dramatic art of the corpus directly on the conscience of the hearer (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Krueger, 2014). These are the subject of the theology of repentance.

Across all these the recurring techniques are the same: a brief prooimion (refrain-prelude), a chain of metrically identical strophes bound by an acrostic, a shared refrain closing every strophe, and above all the dramatized direct speech that gives the genre its theatrical force — treated in the dramatic dialogues and described as a genre in the kontakion.

See Also

• The Dramatic Dialogues — the speech-technique that animates the corpus
• The Genre of the Kontakion — form, prooimion, acrostic, refrain
• Metre, Music, and Performance — the responsion that grounds the editorial criteria
• “Today the Virgin” — the most celebrated genuine kontakion
• Christology and Mariology Sung — the doctrine carried in the hymns
• Modern Scholarship — the editions and the authenticity debate

References

• Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
• Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Dubia (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970).
• José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283 (Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981).
• José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977).
• Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, 2 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970, 1973).
• Ephrem Lash, trans., St. Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ — Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
• Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
• Romanos the Melodist, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanos_the_Melodist