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CHAPTER 1

The Song and the City

ROMANOS THE MELODIST (CA. 485–CA. 560)

According to stories later told, the Virgin Mary appeared one sixth-century night to a young man of Syrian descent. The Constantinopolitan winter had pulled dark curtains around the city, and yet people were gathering in the suburb of Blachernae. The famous Marian shrine outside the city walls would attract faithful all year round, but, of course, Christmas Eve—like other feasts with a strong Marian bent—drew considerable crowds. People were thronging, and chants charged the air like incense. The night was filled with excitement.

This man from the eastern provinces was normally stationed at another Marian shrine, the old Church of the Theotokos in the western part of town, namely in the ta Kyrou district—or at least that is how some versions of the story go.¹ He had to walk a little distance to get to Blachernae, but this young adult was not unused to travel. Like so many men who had grown up in other parts of the empire, he had come to the capital to seek his fortune. From his hometown, the city of Emesa (Homs), he had journeyed to Berytus (Beirut), where he was ordained a deacon. Such a childhood and youth may have meant acquaintance with Syriac as well as Greek verse; long before he arrived in Emperor Anastasius I’s (491–518) Constantinople, church services had presumably exposed him to liturgical poetry in both these languages. The Byzantine Empire was a multilingual realm, and urban people often mastered more than one tongue.

It was Christmas and most probably freezing cold, but he had made his way across streets packed with sellers and entertainers, out to the popular sanctuary down by the Golden Horn. And it was there, during the night, that the Mother of God approached him. In a dream or a vision the artless young man suddenly saw the Virgin Mary herself standing in front of him. She held up a scroll, a written text rolled up. And then she moved it toward his mouth. “Swallow it!” she said. He may have been baffled, but he opened up and ate it. This enigmatic scroll, the legend says, transformed the hoarse lad. His voice turned sweet and gentle. After their secret encounter he mounted the ambo, a raised platform in the middle of the church nave, and began to sing “The Virgin today gives birth.” This Christmas hymn remains his most famous song.² This Christmas hymn also, incidentally, gives a strongly Mariocentric version of the events in Bethlehem.

The name of the young man was Romanos, whom history has called “the Melodist.”³ The legendary episode brings the story of his life in close contact with that of Mary’s: As a maiden, the Virgin had received the Word into her body through divine intervention; now young Romanos received a text into his own body through her intervention. The incident gave birth to song.

Eating writing was not an entirely new phenomenon; in fact there are biblical models. When Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, God’s voice commanded: “O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” The author of the New Testament Apocalypse had a similar vision; he had to swallow a scroll that an angel gave to him.⁴ Through scrolls, God bestows unique insights on chosen seers. What makes Romanos’s case special is that he received the edible document neither from God nor from God’s angel; his inspiration came from the Mother of God. She instigated his production of exceptional words and granted him the supernatural talent to sing them. The story reflects a pairing of the Theotokos (i.e., the Mother or “Birth giver” of God) and the poet, not unlike the pairing of Gabriel and Mary through the story of the Annunciation. In the history of Romanos reception, the Virgin and the singer become two inseparable persons. The so-called Menologion of Basil II, an eleventh-century Byzantine manuscript now in the Vatican Library, depicts Romanos the Melodist reclining in the fields on a red blanket (Figure 1).⁵ He receives the scroll from the Virgin, who stands behind him. The viewer sees Romanos lying stretched out in the Constantinopolitan night. The Virgin is about to penetrate his lips with the scroll, rendering him at the same time closed and unclosed. Although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that it is about to open; although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that this mouth is going to unseal a host of songs. Romanos’s posture is strikingly reminiscent of Mary’s in the traditional Byzantine Nativity icon (Figure 2). The image suggests for a moment an almost confusing identification of the Virgin with her servant, the singer.

Figure 1. Romanos and the Virgin Mary, illumination from the Menologion of Basil II (ca. ad 1000), Vat. gr. 1613, 78. Vatican Library. Reproduced by permission of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. © 2016 BAV.

From a strict historical point of view, we know very little about Romanos’s life; the stories recounted here derive from later legendary sources. Some of them place the scroll episode in Blachernae, and others do not. There are vague historical traces indicating that Romanos had a Jewish background, in which case he must have left his ancestral tradition for Christianity, but this piece of information is highly unspecific, late, and unreliable. That he came from Emesa and Berytus is more plausible, for his songs show Syriac influence. And it is not historically improbable—but a pure speculation—that he attended the famed law school in Berytus some years after Severus of Antioch (ca. 465–538) had graduated from it. What we know with a higher degree of certainty is primarily what Romanos himself tells us indirectly through his songs. We are able to establish that he lived in sixth-century Constantinople, and that the Constantinopolitans cherished his songs and his talent. He seems to have created a workshop for writing hymns, for a number of transmitted hymns bear his name even though the modern editors think other poets wrote them. Already by the year 641, the city venerated him as a saint on his feast day, October 1.⁶ Much later, that same day would turn into a minor Marian feast, the celebration of the Virgin’s Protecting Veil (skepē). The standard icon for the feast merges the two: Romanos stands right underneath the Virgin in Blachernae (Figure 3). She protects with her veil, and he performs his songs.

Figure 2. Byzantine tempera icon of the Nativity of Christ (eighth/ninth cent.) from Sinai. Published through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai.

Figure 3. Russian tempera icon of the Virgin’s protecting veil (Pokrov) with Romanos (Novgorod school, sixteenth cent.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org.

Before the poet died in Constantinople sometime around 560 he had composed at least sixty long liturgical hymns called kontakia—and probably many more.⁷ The epithet “Melodist” (Gr. Melōdos) indicates that he was not only a poet but also a singer in church, who performed his own hymns. The incident with the scroll—when Romanos received the charism from his muse—has made him an example of those who take their wisdom from the Virgin, and yet it also indicates that she made him a performer.⁸ She turned a man without a voice into a vocalized singer. The moment he had eaten her scroll, he burst out in song and performed a hymn. He received a voice. Through his hand, in turn, Mary was not merely spoken of but came most explicitly to be speaking herself, in dialogues and monologues. Through the performance of his hymns, she raised her voice and was heard in the great churches and streets of the imperial city. As we shall see in this book, Romanos envisaged the Mother of God to be the voice of her people. According to the legend, contrariwise, Romanos gave her a voice and spoke for her, he who had received his voice from her hand. The story of the scroll attests to the lasting imprint that hearing Mary’s words through his words left on the imagination of the Christians in Constantinople—so much so that posterity could not distinguish their voices.

The first poetic words that Romanos uttered, according to the legend, were “the Virgin today gives birth.” This may be taken to mean that through her intervention, she gave birth to her own voice in a man’s body. From this Marian beginning evolved a remarkable career in song, yielding vivid verbal displays that filled churches with imaginary dramatics. Through Romanos, Mary staged herself. If, in other words, we would like to understand how the Virgin Mary is imagined in this period, we have to turn to Romanos the Melodist. We shall never be able to read the scroll that he digested, but the present book studies the texts it produced. Can they give us a hint about why later generations came to regard Romanos and the Virgin as inseparable? How could his songs generate the legendary scroll?

THE RISE OF THE KONTAKION

From a literary perspective, the sixth century was a prolific period. Such outstanding figures as the historian Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 490–562), the poet Paul the Silentiary (d. ca. 580), and the poet and historian Agathias Scholasticus (ca. 532–80) all benefited from the favorable air of relative meritocracy under the sixth-century emperors, as did Romanos. He wrote dramatic poetry, and his songs epitomize an ecclesiastical attempt to appropriate more advanced poetic expressions for liturgical use.

The fourth and fifth centuries had seen wandering but highly influential poets, especially from Byzantine Egypt. Cyrus of Panopolis (d. 457) was one of them. He was also the one who allegedly built the Marian church in ta Kyrou to which Romanos was connected.⁹ Poets were becoming an important intellectual group, and the period has been described in terms of “poetic revival.”¹⁰ This resurgence gradually shaped the ecclesiastical discourse. By Romanos’s time, both the religious and the secular worlds of the empire prized poetry. Public and private readings amounted to popular events that were not presented only for the privileged few. When the Latin poet Arator (sixth century) performed his metric paraphrase of the Acts of the Apostles for the pope in Rome in the year 544, some of the clergy begged him to do it again for the whole city. The open event drew a large audience and went on for four days.¹¹ People in Constantinople, too, appreciated epic and encomiastic poetry, and authors were able to seek the patronage of the aristocracy, or even of the emperor himself.¹²

The same period experienced striking poetic innovation in religious circles in the eastern part of the empire. Synagogues, churches, and schools fostered the peculiarly simultaneous rise of a particular form of religious poetry. Various Eastern Mediterranean communities all started to retell their sacred stories in longer stanzaic and metrical hymns. The piyyut emerged among Jews, while the madrasha appeared in Syriac-speaking Christian circles. The Greek counterpart is commonly known as kontakion.¹³ In addition to having a general metrical structure, these genres share such important compositional features as a refrain, which stitched the dramatic or epic content together, and an acrostic, which strung the stanzas into a long chain. How the three genres relate to one another historically is an unsettled question, but it has been suggested that the kontakion depends on the madrasha.¹⁴ Even a fourth genre, which would rise to prominence in Constantinople from the seventh century, evolved in Jerusalem during the same period; this Greek canticle hymn is known as kanon. Its shape and use were, however, somewhat different.¹⁵

Most of Romanos’s works belong to the former Greek genre, the kontakion, which was unique to Constantinople and its rite. He was neither the first nor the only kontakion writer, but posterity has regarded him as the master of the genre.¹⁶ The Melodist’s hand fashioned the kontakion into a dramatic form, exploiting its narrative potential to a degree that must have made the songs stand out—and indeed still makes them stand out—as singularities in the realm of liturgical verse. He engaged Christian stories more or less well known, and his songs excited by the use of drama and suspense, appealing to the listeners’ sensory imagination and animated curiosity. Playfulness alternates with wit; thrill is achieved next to awe. The narrative of the hymns yearns to titillate its audience. The psychological depth of the characters makes them attractive. Lending a voice to previously voiceless persons and speechless scenes, Romanos provokes the fancy of the assembly. Erotic and sexual allusions undermine congregational sleepiness. The hymnographer gives an ecclesiastical reply to the general desire for more exciting poetry. With the kontakion, the Christian prose heritage of biblical stories and hagiography comes to life in a poetic configuration.

Other poets had transmitted new—often Christian—stories in the form or language of the classical world. Arator did this in Rome, and Empress Eudocia (ca. 401–60) did it in the Greek East, with her Homeric centos and her poem on the Martyrdom of St. Cyprian. In the same century, Nonnus of Panopolis wrote a hexameter paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The authors of kontakia, on the other hand, chose a new genre that did not emanate scents of ancient culture or traditional elites; instead they communicated in an accessible language and employed refrains that encouraged popular participation. The audience did not have to be learned to understand.

The sixth-century Melodist tells us nothing of who his benefactors were, and we do not know in what literary circles he moved.¹⁷ We can merely surmise that he, as the highly skilled and utterly sophisticated poet that he was, must have interacted with other authors and literati.

The Form of the Kontakion

A prelude (called koukoulion in Greek and often described as a prooimion) opens the kontakion. This first introductory stanza is normally shorter than the other stanzas and deviates metrically from them. In the Patmos kontakarion, the most complete collection of Romanos kontakia, the preludes as well as the refrains are written in the more readable uncial style, while the rest of the stanzas are in a more cursive minuscule; hence the preludes stand out graphically (see Figure 4).¹⁸ Many kontakia appear with different preludes in different manuscripts, so the prelude seems to have been a flexible part of the composition. Since it does not contribute to the acrostic, and since its metrical structure differs from the other stanzas, writers and rewriters could achieve prelude variation without changing the rest of the hymn. The shared refrain is the formal feature that links the prelude to the other stanzas. In general, the content of a prelude relates fairly loosely to the narrative of the hymn—in the form of a prayer, a setting of the scene, or an interpretation of the festal theme.

Figure 4. Romanos’s On the Nativity I from the Patmos kontakarion (P 212 f. 121r). Photo: Ioannes Melianos, Library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian.

After the prelude, the main body of the kontakion follows. It consists of metrically identical stanzas (oikoi). The word “metrical,” however, is not entirely accurate if by “meter” we mean a pattern of feet consisting of long and short syllables. The Koine Greek of the sixth century had abandoned the pitch accents of classical Greek for a stress accent more similar to that of modern English or modern Greek. Since the kontakion poets did not attempt to write in an atticizing style, they did not have to conform to the feet-based meters of classical poetry. Instead, a kontakion stanza consists of a set of kola. In the manuscripts, kola are usually separated by a dot or another kind of punctuation. Together, all the kola in one stanza make up a complex pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. This complex pattern is repeated identically in every stanza, so that all the stanzas of a given kontakion share the same rhythmical pattern.

Those kontakia counted as genuine by the Oxford critical edition comprise between eleven and forty stanzas. A stanza usually consists of approximately ten lines, although one should be aware that the grouping of two or three kola into lines or verses is a product of the critical editors.¹⁹ The last line(s) of the stanza constitutes the refrain. The melodist must have chanted the kontakia to a fairly simple and syllabic melody, but the sixth-century melodies have not been transmitted to us, so we do not know exactly how Romanos sang his songs.²⁰

One will not encounter the term “kontakion” in late ancient sources, for it was not in use until the ninth century.²¹ When the poet names his works he uses terms like “hymn” (humnos), “praise/story” (ainos), “song/ode” (ōdē), “psalm” (psalmos), “word/song/tale” (epos or epē), “poem” (poiēma)—and once even “entreaty” (deēsis) and “prayer” (proseuchē). Applying a variety of terms for very similar texts, Romanos obviously does not intend them as genre labels in a strict sense, but he indicates that his stories were sung and performed. The rubrics of the manuscripts often say adomenon or psallomenon, signaling that the kontakia were sung.²² The “readers” were in other words listeners, who, through the refrains, became coperformers.²³

The Kontakion and Church Services

Poets composed their kontakia for special occasions, and, although there are notable exceptions, most of the kontakia we have can be tied to the festal calendar of the church. Before Christianity gained a hegemonic position in the empire, civic festivals had featured festal oratory and hymnody to be performed as a part of the celebrations. With the new role of the Christian religion, ecclesiastical hymns and homilies filled a similar function. Rhetorical speeches and hymns would achieve a new content, yet the practice of celebrating popular public festivals did not change. Neither did Christians cease to compose elegant texts for their festal occasions.²⁴ Kontakia came to play a role as festal poetry for the new Christian festivals.

Modern commentators often call the kontakia sermons, but this designation is not entirely accurate, 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 a mad fury, having followed them with words from their traces. And, as I see it, I have written about these in a so much more disordered way as I have tried to maintain their order.”³⁷ Orosius expresses the sense that history is simply too complicated to fit into a neat and tidy narrative. Related is the awareness of writers that the world appears too complex to grasp. What has been called a “theology of limited and partial understanding of events” in Byzantine literature ruled out any quest for exhaustiveness and defied calls for complete comprehension from the reader.³⁸ The compositional approach to narratives favored associative links and juxtapositions, episodic variety, and multiplicity. In his texts Romanos actually undermines his own omniscience as an author; only God can understand the world in its totality and the causal relation between occurrences in its complexity.³⁹ Consequently, the integrity of the kontakia’s thought world yields not so much to a pursuit for univocity throughout the corpus as to readings acknowledging that individual kontakia represent particular occasions, and that within each hymn persists a play of equivocal elements. The changing cycle of the Christian year renders a God who is sometimes dead and sometimes alive.

Paradoxes and tensions were in other words deeply embedded in the poetics of the day.⁴⁰ Byzantine authors often arranged clauses paratactically or asyndetically; complementary or even contrasting images were juxtaposed in ways that bring to mind the aesthetics of shimmering mosaics—dissimilar pieces side by side come together and make up a more complex whole. Romanos worked with contradictions and frictions—as does a modern-day moviemaker by the technique of crosscutting. The kontakia create a magic lantern of ever-moving imagery. Swarms of images cluster together in a single kontakion—or even in a single strophe. After the Archangel Gabriel has visited the Virgin and she has been transformed by the Annunciation event, Joseph meets her and exclaims puzzled: “Who is she?”

—Terrible and sweet appears the one who’s with me, who paralyzes me;

I gaze at burning heat and snowstorm, a paradise and a furnace,

a smoking mountain, a divine flower sprouting,

an awesome throne, a lowly footstool. (XXXVI 13.4–7)

If our first question to this text is “What does the snowstorm symbolize?” or “Where has the poet taken ‘smoking mountain’ from?” we miss a much more acute point. It was part of a late ancient Marian poet’s task to be able to integrate Old Testament imagery into the ecclesiastical poetry that he or she wrote, but that does not mean that it ends there, nor that our interpretation should end there. To a listener this passage does not primarily present a complex web of secret Marian symbols; no less does it represent allegorical or typological Old Testament interpretation. Such readings do not take the hymn’s narrative into consideration; they forget that people first and foremost heard kontakia rather than studied them.⁴¹ If we attend to how the passage evokes Joseph’s impressions or emotions in the story—which is what the story itself explicitly describes—we discover the image of an overwhelmed Joseph who does not understand Mary. She simultaneously attracts him and scares him; she has a perplexing effect on him, and he does not know how to behave. To someone like him she has become entirely inexplicable. The stanza tells us a great deal about whom the Virgin and Joseph are turning into on this occasion, and about their relationship. On the other hand, it tells us very little about Isaiah 46:1, Psalm 103:32 or 143:5, or other scriptural passages.⁴²

Romanos worked to indicate the Virgin’s immediacy. Poetical and rhetorical strategies of late antiquity served to blur the distinction between the world of the audience and the story world. Writers would lead the listener to “sense” literary creations.⁴³ With their use of ekphrasis (descriptive language), they compelled the shaping of images in the minds of the audience; through the employment of enargeia they sought to make vivid imaginary and sensual experiences out of spoken words, transforming “hearers into spectators.”⁴⁴ Late ancient schoolbooks (progymnasmata) would teach the students to compose their texts in such a way—with pictorial, colorful, and brilliant descriptions—that the listeners could not help but see the very scenes before their eyes. Although aware of the performative and even fictive nature of the text, the audience should become involved in the dialogue or the action, seeing what the characters saw, hearing what they heard. When hymn writers adapted such methods, they placed the congregation in the middle of the sacred, mythic drama. Devotees turned into active participants in the scene that was being played out in front of them. Hence the Virgin Mary was able to emerge as a personal presence, a desirable body, and a voiced authority.

In general, the Romanos corpus exposes an orientation toward the sensual details of mythic life.⁴⁵ Things visual, touchable, or imaginable take precedence over anything metaphysical. When the apostles have to say farewell to Jesus, the man with whom they have shared so much, it is as if they cannot perceive divinity beyond his corporeality. He is about to ascend to heaven, and they exclaim:

—We have been wounded, enchained by your most sweet appearance;

there is no god but you. (XXXII 4.9–10)

There is no god but the corporeal Christ; the whole Godhead comes together in the Son here on earth, the one who can be touched and seen. The transcendent collapses into the palpable. This theology of the palpable can be observed in other contexts too. Romanos does not shy away from calling Christ “the father,” while the impalpable Holy Spirit is sometimes completely blotted out from the story.⁴⁶ A horizontal perspective dominates and renders a very earthly version of the Trinity. As the God of Romanos has so definitely taken on flesh, the Mother’s role becomes all the more vital.

BETWEEN CHURCH AND THEATER

Mary gave Romanos a scroll, which turned him into a singer. Yet Romanos was not the only performer who interacted with the Virgin. John Moschus (ca. 550–619/634) relates another story from the sixth century. A mime by the name of Gaianas performed a show in a theater in Heliopolis. He was ridiculing the Mother of God before the crowds. Unfortunately for him, the Theotokos herself appeared and begged him to stop. He chose, nonetheless, to blaspheme her again. Mary kept returning with her demand. This continued for a while, but when she showed herself to him the fourth time, she did not say a word; she merely touched his body parts with her finger. When she left, the mime found his body crippled: He “lay there like a tree-trunk.”⁴⁷

The story shows us a dramatic clash between Mary and mime in a sixth-century cityscape, as a contemporary writer might imagine it. The Virgin was enacted in the theater, vividly represented as an object of scorn, and, by implication, an object of interest. Consequently, she herself entered the theatrical world, concerned about what happened there, and she interfered. Her intervention resulted in permanent marks on the actor’s body; she destroyed his instrument, the mimetic tool. The Virgin had to protect her reputation from smears.

What connects these two stories is not only their characters’ proximity in time and place and the presence of the Virgin. More emphatically, both stories show Mary to be concerned about her public appearance; it matters how the urban community construes her. As a contested figure, she ultimately decides to intervene, physically and palpably. The stories present a Theotokos as worried about what happens outside the nave as inside; she takes control over voices portraying her voice and bodies mimicking her gestures. Years later “all the trees … bent to the ground and venerated her,”⁴⁸ but in the sixth century and early seventh century, things were undecided, and the Virgin had to struggle for her standing.

We may think of theatrical entertainment and ecclesiastical cult as two entirely separate worlds, but the truth is that they often came uncomfortably close to each other in late ancient Constantinople. The entertainers could not escape the influence of religious stories, and religious stories could not escape the influence of the entertainers. Just as Mary might call in on popular amusement every now and then, actors did not avoid performances in the churches. Another story from John Moschus tells of mimes who go to church, and there is no reason to think that other performers did not enter through the church doors as well.⁴⁹ After all, liturgical services in Constantinople themselves amounted to important performances. The liturgical historian Robert Taft suggests that “liturgy was a major part of public entertainment in the Christian metropolises of Byzantium.”⁵⁰ As a matter of fact, the Byzantines consciously used dramatic vocabulary about their ecclesiastical rituals. Bishop Basil of Seleucia (d. after 468), for instance, embraced the notion of church as theater or dramatic performance (theatron): “If someone said that the Church is a theatre [θέατρον] common to both angels and men, he would not be mistaken. It is a theatre in which Christ is praised both by invisible and visible nature, a theatre in which the Lord’s miracles are woven together for our ears as delightful hymns.”⁵¹ The stage and the nave both attempted to present marvelous or mythological stories in dramatic ways, through or accompanied by song.

Byzantines did not stage comedies and tragedies in a classical form. Their dramatic taste had changed. There was a tendency to pick out spectacular highlights from the classics and construct more vaudeville-like shows to please the crowds. The very word theatron gradually lost its specific meaning in late antiquity and was not restricted to signify a theater of an Athenian sort, or a play enacted on such a stage. It meant rather a place for public display or show, or a crowd gathered around to witness some dramatic performance.⁵²

In Constantinople it was the hippodrome rather than a theater that made up the entertainment hub. The great horse race arena, with a length of almost four hundred feet, stretched out along the Great Palace and furnished the people with dramatic entertainment of different sorts. And the palace was not its only neighbor; some two hundred feet up the street from the hippodrome rose Hagia Sophia, the imperial church. These three locations all featured performances that were—each in its separate way—highly ritualized and dramatic. The court life of the palace followed its own ceremonial “liturgy.” The hippodrome thrilled its vast audiences with chariot races, and here mimes and other performers did their acts. And not least, it served as venue for the praise and celebration of the emperor. The same can be said about Hagia Sophia, however, where for instance the patriarchal crowning of a new emperor would take place in front of the massive crowd. In the hippodrome, the Blue and Green factions sponsored the arena games and organized the performers, and these powerful factions led the cheering and acclamations as a ritualized spectacle.⁵³

While the performances in the hippodrome were officially sanctioned, they did not occur as frequently as the entertainment outside. Street-corner spectacles were less structured, but no less dramatic. Jugglers, mimes, and jesters entertained the public, as did erotic dancers and actors. Especially on festival days, the performers filled the city space—some on provisional stages, others simply in the streets. Some pre-Christian festivities continued to be popular throughout late antiquity, and new Christian festivals were added to the calendar, so the big cities like Constantinople did not lack occasions for festive entertainment. In the fourth century, the rhetorician Libanius of Antioch (ca. 314–93) pointed out that “people love festivals, because they release them from their labors and sweat, and offer opportunities to play and feast and live life as pleasantly as possible.”⁵⁴ Similarly, the fifth-century archbishop Proclus of Constantinople exclaims: “Many different festivals brighten the life of mankind, altering the pains and toils of life through the cycles of festivities. Just as those who escape from a storm at sea delight in reaching the harbor as if it were the embrace of life, so too after various circumstances of life do people celebrate festivities and take delight in the festival as the mother of our freedom from care.”⁵⁵ Mime acts, often performed on such religious feast days, included bawdy dialogues and daring songs.⁵⁶ The populace loved this chaotic and sometimes violent amusement in the streets.

Theatrical displays and other forms of nonecclesiastical amusement provided a tempting alternative for many people. It also provided preachers and liturgical poets with a great challenge. “If hymns and homilies contained biblical portraits that were livelier, bolder, or even shocking in comparison with scholarly commentaries, we should not be surprised,” Susan Ashbrook Harvey remarks.⁵⁷ Many preachers and poets strove to capture congregations with exciting tales and thrilling language, audacious heroes and awesome deeds.

Already the famed church father Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–90) had expressed the insight that teaching becomes easier if you express your doctrine in a pleasing way: “Verse-making … is pleasant as a medicine for low spirits and, by sugaring the pill of instruction for young people as well, it makes sermonizing enjoyable.”⁵⁸ With an increasingly hegemonic position in the empire, the Christian cult became more resourceful. Crowds of people, wealthy and poor, would attend the rituals. If hagiography can be called “the television of the Middle Ages” because of its mass appeal and its educational purpose,⁵⁹ Romanos’s hymnographic corpus might campaign for the title “the movies of Late Antiquity.” Like Gregory, the Melodist understood well that in order to capture a whole city he had to fascinate the people and thrill them. He exploited the possibilities of sugared pills to the full. We may discover an important key to his popularity in the way he learned from mimes and matched the outward forms of entertainment in the Byzantine capital by saturating the religious language with drama, fascinating effects, and surprising scenes.

The repertoire of religious stories was, in other words, expanding in this period. Sexually charged stories surfaced in religious writings as well as in profane ones. We should not be tempted, therefore, to interpret any tension between theatrical performances and ecclesiastical performances as a direct conflict between pagan and Christian cultures. In the sixth century most actors probably belonged to the Christian faith, and the world of entertainment they represented formed an integral part of the Christian culture. Pagan festivals had formerly added color to civic life in Roman cities; now Christian festivals increasingly filled the urban spaces. Stational liturgies enlivened the streets, and the liturgies proper performed within church buildings exhibited majestic grandeur and splendid processions. Popular fairs and nightly festivities accompanied the celebrations of saints and sacred events.⁶⁰

Mimes occupied the streets, but so did the church. Robert Taft has noted that “the sources in this epoch tell us almost nothing about Constantinopolitan liturgical services other than the eucharist and stational processions.”⁶¹ Stational processions involved large segments of the population; even the emperor and the patriarch would participate on certain occasions. On a day assigned to stational liturgy, people gathered in one of the large forums of the city, and after some prayers they began to move. Eventually, after a long walk and many hymns, the procession ended up in the church where the liturgy of the day was being celebrated.

As one scholar has observed recently, the city “functioned as the theatre for an elaborate and colorful ritual.”⁶² Modern churchgoers may be used to thinking of church services as something that happens within the church walls; in sixth-century Constantinople the ecclesiastical rituals were claiming the streets. Christianity was confidently turning the public thoroughfares into places of its own enactment as a civic religion.

Such processions contributed to the liturgification of the city space. As John Baldovin has pointed out, “churches, shrines, and the yearly calendar of feasts, fasts, and commemorations provided the raw material of the ritualized identity of … Constantinopolitan culture.”⁶³ Christianity had become something tactilely perceptible in sixth-century Constantinople.⁶⁴ It is not implausible that the people intoned a kontakion as they slowly moved through the thoroughfares of the city. Like other hymns they may well have filled the Constantinopolitan air during the outdoor processions.

The dramatic Christian consecration of time and space affected the everyday life of the Christian subject more than any church council. The city infrastructure was progressively integrated into an imperial Christian ceremonial, in which the populace participated actively. A massive Christianization marked the period, and sixth-century Constantinople was still a new city in the process of becoming. Churches were being built, the liturgical calendar of feasts was being developed, and the great city was about to find its sacred symbol.⁶⁵ Emperor Justinian (ca. 482–565), who supported the erection of outstanding churches and pilgrimage sites, actively sponsored and enforced the Christian renewal. Relics, processions, church buildings, hymns, images, vestments, crosses, and healing water cluttered Justinian and Theodora’s capital. Romanos writes in the new kontakion genre, and his songs ring with the joy of novelty and youthfulness. Regeneration replaces degeneration. God existed from the beginning, of course, but to us, says the poet, “has been born a new [νέον] Child.”⁶⁶ This phrase turns into the refrain of his On the Nativity I: “a new Child, God before the ages.” Like other writers of the period, Romanos seems taken by the youthful vitality of Constantinopolitan life.

It is true that a number of ecclesiastical authors reveal skepticism toward performers or the theater. Neither Tertullian (ca. 155–240) nor John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) showed much appreciation for the stage.⁶⁷ Romanos’s older contemporary Jacob of Serug (ca. 451–521) was deeply critical of theatrical performances. It was not the performances themselves that he opposed, however, it was their mythological, irreverent, or untrue content. The church, he says, has finer songs and truer dramas.⁶⁸ In a homily in which he has described the resurrection of Lazarus, he goes on to compare this Christian spectacle with theatrical spectacles: “Tell me now, o discerning ones, at which spectacles dost thou marvel? At the dissolute dancing which is upon the stone [i.e., in the theater], or at the walking of the buried one? … Which sight amazes thee the more, and attracts the parties to marvel at it? The dead man who is alive and dances for joy, or the living man who mimics a dead man?”⁶⁹ Jacob is basically saying: Our spectacles are as dramatic as theirs; the stories in the church are no less spectacular than those performed by mimes. Jacob knew, in other words, that he had to compete with actors for the people’s attention.

Critical remarks regarding the stage did not issue only from the ranks of the clergy; bias toward performers features in the writings of several highbrow authors.⁷⁰ It is no coincidence, for instance, that when Procopius wanted to deride Empress Theodora (ca. 497–548), he chose to portray her as an actress and a prostitute.⁷¹ Actors, mimes, and harlots found themselves at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, and they formed an easy target for authors who felt a need to rail against moral degeneration. On the other hand, the elites depended on the performers for their official events and ceremonies.⁷² A Roman rhetorician like Quintilian (ca. 35–100) could express a significant unease with sending a young student of oratory to learn from a comic actor. The actor should be involved “only in so far as the future orator needs a knowledge of delivery,” Quintilian says, for “I do not want the boy we are educating for this purpose to have a weak and womanish voice or to quaver like an old man.”⁷³ Quintilian’s warning reeks with the ambivalence that characterizes many a learned approach to actors. Even though encounters with stage performers involved dangers, Quintilian did not recommend avoiding them all together. One might learn from the actors, in other words, but their ways may also “infect the mind” of the young. Quintilian sensed that it was difficult to keep the worlds of the orator and the actor uncontaminated by one another.

We know that in the late ancient period orators and actors competed for audiences, and that people would leave a show halfway through to go and listen to an orator, or the other way around.⁷⁴ Not only did the entertainment scene burst into colors during festivals; the festivities were also the occasions for which liturgical poets like Romanos wrote their hymns. While church singers might excel from the ambo with their tales of biblical heroes, actors would sing dramatic excerpts of heroes and divinities from classical tragedies. The various performers in the late ancient cities might ridicule or disdain one another, but they could not afford to forget about their competitors.

Mime actors were not the only jesters around. The Roman Empire in Romanos’s day represented a world in which Christianity, less tied up with external enemies, developed a diversity of heterogeneous voices. Some were “seeking the alternate ways to virtue,” as Leontius of Neapolis put it in the seventh century, that will “shake [the] soul from its sleep.”⁷⁵ A jester-like folly can be observed in Leontius’s literary life of Symeon the Fool, a saint whose alleged sixth-century asceticism consisted of ridiculing people in the city of Emesa and acting like a fool: “The manner of his entry into the city was as follows: When the famous Symeon found a dead dog on a dunghill outside the city, he loosened the rope belt he was wearing, and tied it to the dog’s foot. He dragged the dog as he ran and entered the gate … On the next day, which was Sunday, he took nuts, and entering the church at the beginning of the liturgy, he threw the nuts and put out the candles. When they hurried to run after him, he went up to the ambo, and from there he pelted the women with nuts.”⁷⁶ Like mimes, holy men committed themselves to extreme methods. In order to capture or awaken the minds, they would pursue dramatic effects. Another radical practice consisted of spending years on top of a pillar. The great Syrian stylites Symeon the Elder (ca. 389–459) and Symeon the Younger (ca. 521–92) drew vast crowds to their pillars as they themselves stood there loftily, colonizing the liminal space between heaven and earth. Constantinople had its own pillar saint, Daniel the Stylite (ca. 409–93), who allegedly spent more than thirty years on a pillar a few miles north of the city.

In a similar vein, hymnographers and preachers might turn unexpected or even shameful behavior into piety similar to that of Symeon the Fool.⁷⁷ Jacob of Serug, for instance, examined the deeds of Leah, Rachel, and Ruth from the Old Testament and exclaimed: “When and how have women so run after men as these women…. It was because of [Christ] that they acted without restraint and schemed, putting on the outward guise of wanton women, despising female modesty and nobility, not being ashamed as they panted for men.”⁷⁸ By doing the opposite of what virtuous women were expected to do, these women engage in a paradoxical piety. Romanos the Melodist has one heroine, a former prostitute, fall in love with Jesus and behave as if drunk in his company.⁷⁹

Romanos developed basic stories that the congregation may have been familiar with into exciting tales or dramas. This insight does not imply that the hymns amount to nothing more than entertainment. Are Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas “only” beautiful music? No more than cantatas can kontakia be reduced to their mere aesthetic or amusement value. Romanos’s poetry is certainly theological, but the point here is that he speaks theology in a language which is not meditative. In his versions, he creates tension and suspense, and makes sure that the audience will always have something interesting to “look at”: The ironic Christ surprises the listener.⁸⁰ Peter’s fear of a stammering little girl’s voice may arouse the audience’s Schadenfreude.⁸¹ Adam and Eve’s marriage seems rather unhappy; in On the Nativity II she resembles a merchant’s wife as she desperately tries to awaken her oversleeping husband in the gloomy underworld.⁸² Mary and Joseph do not enjoy an entirely balanced relationship either. “Where were you, wise man?” Mary asks a Joseph who was absent when he should have been present, and who clearly understands nothing of what is going on after Gabriel’s visit.⁸³ Characters like Mary—often discreet and inconspicuous in gospel stories—can play a vivid and vital part in the kontakia.

The ridiculed Adam and the befuddled Joseph add humor to the stories—as does, perhaps, the Virgin’s use of Old Testament imagery to denote intercourse.⁸⁴ In On Joseph II, the Egyptian woman’s sexual advances are so violent and vivid—and explicit in nature—that some commentators have found it difficult to accept that they were actually performed in a church.⁸⁵ Paradoxical language serves not only to illustrate the Incarnation; calling a harlot a “wise woman” or letting the creator of milk suck at a human nipple may also induce a tickling sensation in the listener somewhere between shock and astonishment.

A few lines from On the Massacre of the Innocents exemplify Romanos’s inclination to employ striking visual effects. The stanza recounts the slaughter of innocent babies in Bethlehem. The children are quite literally stricken at their mothers’ breasts:

Some were cut in pieces;

others had their heads cut off at their mothers’ breasts

while pulling at them and drinking milk,

so that from the breasts hung, then,

the sacred heads of the infants

holding on to the nipples

by the teeth in their mouths. (III 14.3–9)

Another arresting example consists of a dialogue between Hades and Thanatos (Death), in which the latter is sick and tired of feeding the former with corpses.⁸⁶ Hades struggles with a habit of overeating and is on the brink of vomiting. At that moment he observes, in a surreal vision, how Lazarus’s corpse recovers from putrefaction inside him:

—I see the limbs of Lazarus, those that corruption dissolved,

they are waiting to rise again; they are rehearsing their mobilization,

for they creep like 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 devotion an unrealistic dream. Those who heard his songs found themselves in the tension between glittering mosaics and odorous bodies, between the lamps flickering in the incensed air and the darkness that seeped from everyday worries.

Drama and Dialogue

The origin of Greek drama lies within the religious or cultic sphere, and the prevalence of dialogue in Romanos’s most celebrated kontakia may lead us to actually perceive them as dramas.¹⁰⁵ Stage performances in late antiquity relied heavily on music and choir song, while kontakia were sung performances that often included narrative drama. The kontakia were probably neither staged nor enacted by masked impersonators, but in the margins of On Mary at the Cross in the Patmos kontakarion, the scribe has indicated which lines are Christ’s and which ones are Mary’s (see Figures 5 and 6). Although we do not know the rationale behind this, it does suggest a performative awareness of the dialogue’s dramatic potential. Perhaps different cantors sang the different characters’ parts in some performances.

Figure 5. Romanos’s On Mary at the Cross from the Patmos kontakarion (P 213 f. 96v). Photo: Ioannes Melianos, Library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian.

Dialogues create a dramatic effect and allow characters to come to life; in late ancient handbooks, the common technique of characterization through speech imitation is called ethopoiia. John Chrysostom’s teacher, the famous rhetorician Libanius, includes 27 ethopoiia exercises in his Progymnasmata. The assignments teach the students to imagine, for instance, “what words would Chiron say when he hears that Achilles is living in the girls’ quarters?” or “what words would a prostitute say upon gaining self-control [σωφρονήσασα]?”¹⁰⁶ Romanos was probably trained the same way, and, as a matter of fact, his hymn On the Harlot is partly made up of a prostitute’s monologue as she gains self-control over her passions. Dialogues also ensure that the storytelling is carried out neither in slow motion nor in “fast forward,” giving the story the sense of real-time verisimilitude that a dramatic play can convey.¹⁰⁷

Figure 6. Romanos’s On Mary at the Cross from the Patmos kontakarion (P 213 f. 97v). Photo: Ioannes Melianos, Library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian.

Romanos himself was well aware of the dramatic aspects of his compositions; the kontakia bring quite a bit of dramatic vocabulary into play. In On the Holy Virgin, he talks about the divine dwelling place in heaven as opposed to the cave in the earth—or the cave in Mary. The words he uses, however, allude to the theater:

—So, Mary, sing hymns for Christ

……………………….

who inhabits the firmament as a tent/stage [σκηνήν] on high,

and is laid in a cave/off-stage [σϖηλαίῳ] below. (XXXVII 13.1, 4–5)

In On the Woman with an Issue of Blood, Christ speaks about revealing the “dramatic plot” (to dramatourgēma) to his disciples,¹⁰⁸ and On the Victory of the Cross refers to the “dramatic events” (dramata) of the Crucifixion.¹⁰⁹ It is true that the word drama had a wide range of meanings in Romanos’s lifetime and could simply denote what was fictional,¹¹⁰ but such connotations would not really make sense in the given context. It is more likely that he intends to speak about the dramatic action of the Crucifixion than the fictional plot of the same event. In On the Man Possessed with Devils Romanos’s conscious allusions to the theatrical world become apparent. The very practice of singing ritual hymns is a blow to the demons, he asserts. How? He answers:

When we make a comedy [κωμῳδοῦμεν] of [the demons’] fall, we cheer;

truly the Devil wails when we display the pompous “triumph” [θρίαμβον] of the demons

and make a tragedy [τραγῳδῶμεν] of it in our assemblies. (XI 2.5–7)

As Christ’s servants, who love always

to endure and sing to his glory,

who has now pilloried [ϖομϖεύσαντες] the devil … (XI 25.1–3)

Romanos does not suggest that the congregation staged tragedies and comedies in church, but he plays with the theatricality of what they are doing. By the sixth century, “tragedy” could actually refer to torture, and “comedy” could imply ridiculing.¹¹¹ Romanos furthermore exploits the diverse semantic field of thriambos. This word for triumph or triumphal processions was initially connected to Dionysus and festal processions to his honor; by the sixth century, it had taken on the meaning of mock displays or ridiculing processions.¹¹² The ironic “triumph” comes to imply derision and defeat. One meaning of the verb pompeuō is to mock publicly, as in a procession through the streets. Some centuries earlier, execution of criminals had been a part of mythological performances in the Roman Empire.¹¹³ We do not know if the same was true of Justinian’s period, but Procopius describes how certain convicts “had their privates removed and were paraded [ἐϖόμϖευον] through the streets.”¹¹⁴ Romanos seems to have this sort of ritual maltreatment in mind for the devil. Through ritual activities the liturgical participants inhabit the mythic space and play out the roles of the mythic drama. To sing a hymn is to scorn the devil. The poet does not launch his songs as a one-way communication, but as dramatic interaction, in which the audience takes part in the action of the public displays of ridicule.

Public performances thrilled Byzantines, and cultic life proceeded through city streets, between houses of worship, baths, and amusement spaces. The imperial couple Theodora and Justinian themselves embodied the marriage between power and performance. In such a climate, liturgy and drama could not but overlap and intermingle. Romanos situated the characters of the Christian drama in his own world. Between rituals and religious mass media, the Virgin Mary came to occupy a central position in the civic imaginary of the sixth century. A liturgified city integrated her into its rites, making her available and accessible for a wide audience, in texts merging popular imagination with ecclesiastical teaching.

THE VIRGIN IN THE CITY

This book is about ways to imagine the Virgin Mary in sixth-century Constantinople. In recent decades, scholarship has tried to map the remnants of a late ancient Mariology. Yet key texts like the Protevangelium and the Akathistos, for instance, are notoriously hard to date, they are impossible to place in space, and no one has been able to give even a plausible suggestion as to who the authors were. With Romanos, on the other hand, we are able to sketch not only a vague early Christian Mary but a geographically and temporally specific Virgin. From these songs the contours of a sixth-century Constantinopolitan Mary may emerge.

But what frame of reference did Constantinopolitans have for understanding a virgin’s and a mother’s life? If we want to appreciate how she is cast in relation to contemporary women, we need to ask who they were.¹¹⁵ Before turning to the Mother of God herself I shall dwell on the life of ordinary women in the city and sketch a general overview of what society expected of a girl as she progressed from her childhood to her adult years.

Women’s Life in the City

Late ancient society was a gendered society. The paternally headed household made up its cornerstone, and female life was in principle assigned to its domestic sphere. Girls would normally not get any education except for the homeschooling that well-off parents might offer them. Young girls would pass quite quickly from the state of childish innocence to an age where they would either get married or enter a convent. Already before a girl was in her teens, she could be taken as a wife. Procopius describes the perfect bride as someone “blessed with a nurture sheltered from the public eye, a woman who had not been unpracticed in modesty, and had dwelt with chastity, who was not only surpassingly beautiful but also still a maiden.”¹¹⁶ Procopius was probably not the only man who valued sheltered and modest beauty. In reality, of course, not every woman lived as sheltered from the public as this; some women or girls even had to work outside their home.

Church services represented one exception to the rule of women’s seclusion at home.¹¹⁷ Pious women would go to church on a daily basis. Michael Psellus (1018–ca. 1076) says of his young daughter Styliane, who died before the age of marriage: “She was more eager than all others going to the temple [for vespers], spontaneously racing there as though in flight. She revealed her reverence for God by standing without leaning and by paying close attention to the hymns. She chanted the psalms at vespers that she had learned all by herself and memorized the Davidic sayings immediately upon hearing them. She sang along with the choir.”¹¹⁸ This text, of course, represents a different time than that of Romanos, and it presents a highly idealized image of the young girl. Nevertheless it does give us a glimpse into a Byzantine world where a maiden went to church in the evening and sang the hymns together with the choir. Other sources describe women’s participation in vigils and nocturnal processions.¹¹⁹ Inside churches a partial “seclusion” was provided by the fact that women and girls were physically separated from the male participants.

The marriage was usually arranged by the parents, who might even have betrothed their daughter to an older boy (or man) from an early age. Alternatively, they might have pledged her to a monastery. The wedding constituted a major threshold for a girl. It took her from maidenhood to womanhood. Society expected a married woman to be faithful to her husband and dedicated to family life. Above all, she should bear children and rear them. Women who found themselves unable to become pregnant often made intense efforts—prayers, visits to holy shrines or holy men, anointing themselves with holy oils, and so on—in order to remedy their condition.

Most married women did get pregnant. Some families would then engage a wet nurse, but the majority of mothers nursed their own babies for two to three years. More than their Greco-Roman ancestors, the Byzantines expected a mother to nurse her own babies and be a part of her children’s education and upbringing.¹²⁰ There seems to have been a growing ideological focus on the maternal role, a feature we shall also encounter in Romanos’s characterization of Mary.

In connection with death rituals, women played a vital part. It was a female duty to wash the corpse, to follow the funeral procession, and to lament the dead. Women would tear open their clothes and loosen their hair, scream, and ululate.¹²¹ How a woman herself was expected to die is a question I shall leave unanswered since Romanos does not follow the Virgin Mary that far.

Romanos’s Virgin Mary was cast in a dynamic correlation to the ideals of female life and the social world in which real women lived. Throughout this book I demonstrate how this relationship works, and argue that the poet construes her neither as a simple reflection of Constantinopolitan ladies nor as a negation of the same.

Marian Doctrine and Devotion

In the summer of 431, Emperor Theodosius II summoned clergy to a council in the Church of St. Mary in the city of Ephesus. Among the disputes that he asked them to resolve was the conflict over the term “Theotokos” (i.e., “She who gave birth to God”). Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople (ca. 381–451) had forbidden his congregations in the capital to use this epithet for the Virgin Mary. His ruling met with great hostility among believers, not only in Constantinople, but even in Alexandria. Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444) led the fervent opposition to Nestorius. He argued that humanity and divinity are actually brought together and integrated in Christ’s person; divinity is not something Christ acquired during his life, but it was there from the very beginning when “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Hence Mary did give birth to divinity in a certain sense. The council treated this issue with great severity, and eventually it concluded that the title “Theotokos” was acceptable to the official church in the Roman Empire.

Instead of solving the issue all together, however, the Council of Ephesus fueled new Christological debates that led to additional councils. The most fateful one gathered in Chalcedon just outside Constantinople twenty years later. This council and its doctrine would alienate a large portion of the Christian Church within the Roman Empire. A substantial opposition believed that the clear distinction that the council made between the human and divine natures in Christ jeopardized the unity of Christ’s person. It was precisely to this unity that Cyril had appealed for his defense of the Theotokos title.

Neither Ephesus nor Chalcedon has direct relevance for Romanos, but the two councils had opened up conflicts that had a devastating effect on the feeling of concord in the empire. Thus Emperor Anastasius I, who ruled when Romanos first arrived in Constantinople, wanted to abandon Chalcedon. Chalcedon also elevated the dignity of Constantinople’s bishop, and it contributed to a general centralization of power in Constantinople, which was not popular in all the provinces. The consequence was that Constantinople’s hold on Alexandria and Antioch weakened. A hundred years after the assemblies, Emperor Justinian strove desperately to solve the pressing issue in order to create unity in the imperial church. The powerful empress Theodora sided with the anti-Chalcedonians, while the emperor took a more indecisive stand, for he wanted peace with Chalcedon-friendly Rome. As the emperor and empress were well aware, this was not merely a dogmatic question for the educated theologians but an issue as fundamental to the empire as the military wars they were fighting both with the Sasanians in the east and the Ostrogoths in the west. The church of Constantinople had been raised to the rank of patriarchate, and its ecclesiastical authority matched the political authority of the emperor. Was Constantinople able to keep a disintegrating church unity together?

The emperor summoned a new council in the summer of 553. This time Constantinople itself was chosen as the location. The council took a Christological position often termed “neo-Chalcedonian,” which hoped to reunite the parties and end the conflict. Without abandoning the Chalcedonian distinction, the council in the imperial city tried to revive the language of unity in Christ’s person from the Cyrillian tradition and Ephesus. This Second Council of Constantinople embraced the paradoxical—and by now traditional—phrase “Theotokos,” which implies that God is born from a human. More controversial was the fact that the representatives also approved the so-called theopaschite formula, “one of the Trinity suffered on the cross.” God died.¹²² Adherents to the Cyrillian side favored such language because it did not make a clear distinction between a human nature connected to suffering and the divine nature that is beyond suffering. It is impossible to state that only the human aspect of Christ died; nor can we say that Mary gave birth only to his humanity, for Christ cannot be separated into two distinct entities.

When the human and divine aspects are seen as interwoven, the human mother gets more clearly interlaced into the weave. Hence neo-Chalcedonianism served to integrate the Virgin more firmly into the divine economy. And as we shall see, with his On Mary at the Cross, Romanos displays a Virgin Mother who gets woven into the neo-Chalcedonian fabric of redemption as a distinct sacred persona. The council Fathers in Constantinople also sanctioned the Marian epithet “Ever-Virgin.”¹²³ Since Mary gave birth to Christ, this epithet also has a paradoxical ambiguity to it. While God goes through the bloody transformation of human birth and death, the human mother does not transform but stays a virgin. In a linguistic atmosphere where human and divine properties intermingle radically, Romanos seeks to present a plausible version of the Virgin Mary.

Modern historiography has often seen the conciliar decrees of Ephesus as a Mariological turning point. Such a notion ascribes a bit too much importance to an ecclesiastical meeting, and attests rather to our need for historical milestones in the chaotic past. Church councils did not create devotion to the Virgin. In general, councils served to negotiate between existing devotional practices rather than invent new ones. Their judgments may prove useful to us, however, since they give indications of the discourse climate. These meetings defined what language was proper for Christian believers.

The Christian interest in the Virgin did not emerge in the fifth century, and the Theotokos title clearly existed prior to the Ephesus council. Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–73) had written hymns with a developed awareness of Mary’s important role a century earlier. We have evidence that both individual and liturgical prayers were addressed to Mary in the latter part of the fourth century, and Stephen Shoemaker traces the first Marian feasts and the expectation of her intercession back to this period.¹²⁴ Even earlier, in the second century, the Protevangelium of James presents the life of the Virgin Mary in narrative. The first-century Gospel of Luke, in its very opening chapter, displays a young maiden who hears “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” from the archangel Gabriel. In the same chapter Elizabeth calls Mary the “Mother of my Lord,” and the Virgin sings out the Magnificat about herself.¹²⁵ While some texts from this early period appear entirely riveted by the young maiden from Nazareth, it is true that other texts show little or no interest. We have to admit that the testimonies from the first three centuries are scattered, and that most of the texts are hard to place both in time and space. We cannot, in other words, reconstruct a plausible history of early Marian thought and devotion.

The Council of Ephesus did coincide with an upsurge in Marian devotion and dedications, and it is likely that its decision was seen as a green light for a more outspoken Marian cult: new churches were built and new shrines appeared. In Constantinople, for instance, both the Blachernae Church and that at Chalkoprateia were established as Marian shrines in the fifth century. The former housed the relic of the Virgin’s robe while the latter later came to accommodate her girdle.¹²⁶ It was also in the fifth century that Marian literature started to flourish. We have several Greek post-Ephesian homilies that are either dedicated to the Virgin or meditate on her role. These include works ascribed to Basil of Seleucia, Theodotus of Ancyra (d. ca. 445), Antipater of Bostra (d. ca. 458), and Hesychius of Jerusalem (d. after 451). Proclus of Constantinople sermonized zealously against Nestorius and wrote a number of important Marian homilies.¹²⁷ It is possible that even the majestic Marian poem Akathistos was written during this century and in the same metropolis.¹²⁸ The early witnesses to a tradition of Mary’s Dormition or Assumption into heaven can also be dated to the fifth century.¹²⁹

The bulk of Marian literature from this period does not explore the personal features of the Virgin, her feelings, or her interaction with other persons in various settings. They tend rather to interpret her as a personification of the incarnational mystery. Mary becomes a way to understand Christ or a symbol entangled in the cluster of salvation. In her womb fifth-century authors find a lens through which the divine Word may be appreciated fully. This is the same way that the Council of Ephesus had dealt with her. The council subscribed to Cyril’s view: “If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy Virgin is the Mother of God [i.e. Theotokos] (for she bore in a fleshly way the Word of God become flesh), let him be anathema.”¹³⁰ His words were included among the decrees of the council. Failure to acknowledge the indisputable connection between the Virgin and the divine incarnation—failure to see the Incarnation in her—became a token of dissent.

An alternative way to present the Virgin in fourth-and fifth-century literature was as a model for the virginal monks and nuns of the growing ascetic movement. Ecclesiastical authors hoped that celibate ascetics would find inspiration in a woman whose virginity came to accommodate God. The great Alexandrian archbishop Athanasius (295–373), for instance, writes in a letter to virgins:

[Mary] desired good works, doing what is proper, having true thoughts in faith and purity. And she did not desire to be seen by people…. Nor did she have an eagerness to leave her house, nor was she at all acquainted with the streets; rather she remained in her house being calm, imitating the fly in honey. She virtuously spent the excess of her manual labour on the poor. And she did not acquire eagerness to look out the window, rather to look at the Scriptures…. And she did not permit anyone near her body unless it was covered, and she controlled her anger and extinguished the wrath in her inmost thoughts. Her words were calm; her voice, moderate; she did not cry out…. There was no evil in her heart nor contentiousness with those related to her, except concerning the civic life…. Instead of wine, she had the teachings of the Saviour, and she took more pleasure in the latter than in the former, so that she too received the profitable teachings and said, “Your breasts, my brother, are better than wine.” … This is the image of virginity, for holy Mary was like this. Let her who wishes to be a virgin look to her, for on account of things like this the Word chose her so that he might receive this flesh through her.¹³¹

This is only an excerpt; Athanasius describes at length how an ascetic virgin should behave, and he ascribes it all to Mary. In the present context it is worth noting that the Alexandrian bishop depicts an emotionally controlled person who is corporeally secluded and never cries out or raises her voice. The only sort of conflict she engages in concerns the reprobate civic life. Instead of wine, she drinks wisdom from her brother’s (i.e., son’s) breasts. Romanos, as we shall see, deviates drastically from such a characterization—so much so that he virtually turns it upside down.

It is this fourth-and fifth-century period that in many ways has shaped our modern ideas about the Virgin Mary in late antiquity: the Christological Theotokos of Ephesus, the womb of incarnation, a mediation in flesh between divinity and humanity, an ascetic virginity—these are all notions that accord with twentieth-century perceptions of the Virgin in early Christianity. And these notions have been used to interpret the sixth century and the poetic Mother of God in Romanos. The view is still current that Romanos in essence reproduced the Mariology of the great figures of the past, specifically their strictly Christological Mariology.¹³²

Construction Work and Marian Cult

It is true that Romanos’s oeuvre is clearly influenced by figures of the past. No literature can escape the past, and no language can avoid relying on former linguistic expressions. Stylistic elements as well as literary motifs from several Greek homilists can be traced in the Melodist’s songs. The Syriac verses of such writers as Ephrem the Syrian and Romanos’s older contemporary Jacob of Serug show remarkable resemblances with the poetry of the kontakia.¹³³ Nevertheless, this book argues that in the realm of Marian representation, Romanos deviates both from ascetic strands and from the Christological strand of earlier Marian texts. He reveals a developed fascination with Mary’s personal qualities, and he takes interest in various aspects and stages of her life, her psychology, and her emotions. She breastfeeds instead of drinking from Christ’s breasts, and Romanos emphasizes her maternity as much as her maidenhood. Mary emerges as a separate and highly verbal person on the civic stage that Romanos creates. Instead of merely pointing to her son, she stands next to him and cooperates with him. The kontakia do not encourage their listeners to interpret or imitate the Virgin; they urge the audience to relate to the Mother of God as a sovereign being. The poet is passionately concerned about the faithful’s relationship with Mary. He fosters her cult.

Romanos saw the ecclesiastical promotion of several Marian feasts, or even their introduction into the Constantinopolitan calendar:¹³⁴

1. The Feast of the Annunciation on March 25 was introduced during Romanos’s time in Constantinople, and his kontakion is the oldest festal hymn extant. In earlier centuries, the Annunciation event had been celebrated as a part of the Christmas festival.

2. The Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin on September 8 was possibly introduced in the same century, in which case Romanos’s kontakion is the oldest hymn for this feast too.¹³⁵

3. The February 2 Feast of the Presentation was introduced in the same period. It was a Christological feast that had strong Marian traits.¹³⁶

4. The December 25 Christmas celebration was not new in Constantinople, but Romanos shows us a palpably Marian version of this feast.

5. The Feast of the Dormition was probably introduced in Constantinople after Romanos’s death; at least we do not have a Dormition hymn from his hand.

Romanos wrote his kontakia about the Virgin for these and other festivals, and he expected his listeners to take part in the ritual celebrations of the Mother of God. He gave narrative content to the cultic events. In several instances the kontakion stories portray the Virgin surrounded and extolled by the people, as if in a cultic setting. On the Annunciation starts by underlining that the “we” of the audience are praising her “as blessed when we cry every day: ‘Hail, unwedded bride!’”¹³⁷ The hymn goes on to invite everyone to come along to the Virgin Mary

and greet her as Mother and Nurse of our life;

for it is fitting not only for the general to greet the empress,

but even for the lowly is it possible to see and salute her,

she whom all peoples call blessed as Mother of God and shout:

—Hail, inviolate one, hail, maiden divinely called! (XXXVI 1.2–6)

Although the regal scene in which this laudation is set depends on figural speech, one can hardly exclude a cultic reading. The urban we praise her on a daily basis, Romanos says, and they gather around to greet her and salute her as Mother and Nurse. On the Nativity II assumes a similar situation of communal Marian exaltation when the Virgin proclaims to her son:

I am pure, as you came forth from me;

…………………………

therefore the whole of creation dances together, crying to me:

“Graced One!” (II 1.8–11)

The people should celebrate the Virgin; she may prove invaluably helpful to them, as she reveals in a prayer to her son:

You have made me the mouth and the boast of my entire race,

and your world has me

as a powerful protection, a wall and foundation.

They look to me, those who were cast out

of the paradise of pleasure. (I 23.4–8)

The hymns place Mary in the center of the world, a location strikingly close to Constantinople.

In Romanos’s day, splendor and pompous rituals alternated with military campaigns on many fronts. Constantinople faced immense challenges. The disastrous Nika riots of 532, which spread from the hippodrome, and the subsequent fires in Constantinople turned large parts of the downtown area, including Hagia Sophia, into ruins, and tens of thousands lost their lives. The outbreak of a bubonic plague in 542 killed approximately half the city’s population. Other natural catastrophes, such as a series of devastating earthquakes, threatened the feeling of stability in this period. For many people, these were horrible years.

All this destruction also meant that Justinian’s reign became a period of reconstruction. The Mother of God took center stage on this rebuilt scene, according to Procopius’s description: “We must begin with the churches of Mary the Mother of God. For we know that this is the wish of the Emperor himself, and true reason manifestly demands that from God one must proceed to the Mother of God. The Emperor Justinian built many churches to the Mother of God in all parts of the Roman Empire, churches so magnificent and so huge and erected with such a lavish outlay of money, that if one should see one of them by itself, he would suppose that the Emperor had built this work only and had spent the whole time of his reign occupied with this alone.”¹³⁸ Under Justinian’s reign the Pege Church of the Theotokos was built right outside the city walls of Constantinople, as was the outstanding Nea Church of the Theotokos in Jerusalem.¹³⁹ Romanos got to see the Blachernae Church, which housed the famous relic of the Virgin’s robe, reerected. Emperor Justinian probably deposited the relic of Mary’s girdle in the Chalkoprateia Church.¹⁴⁰ These churches amount to the most important Marian shrines in the capital. Archaeological evidence points to an upsurge in the depictions of the Virgin on jewelry and clothing in the second half of the century.¹⁴¹ Mary featured in several media.

Hellenic cities would nurture close relationships with specific gods or goddesses and accommodate civic cults. The city on the Bosporus had engaged divine protectresses before; it had invoked goddesses such as Rhea, “the mother of gods,” Tyche, or the fertility mother Cybele for protection and prosperity.¹⁴² Temples and pagan statues were still not extinct from the urban landscape of the city in late antiquity. A cultic model for venerating a civic protectress existed, and as the city was progressively Christianizing itself, it looked to the Mother of God for a new shelter. By the time of the Avar siege of 626, the Virgin Mary had appeared as the city’s defender, and in the centuries leading up to Iconoclasm, Constantinople developed a close relation with the Virgin Mary as she took over the role of protectress of Constantinople.¹⁴³ Yet Romanos’s poetry suggests that Constantinopolitans had already started to wait for her protection in the sixth century. One of his kontakia conveys a prayer to God which shows that the powerful protectress may hit hard:

Have compassion even now on your people and your city,

with a powerful hand strike down those who are against us

by the intervention of the Theotokos. (LII Pre. 4–6)

The intercessions of the Theotokos approximate that of violent intervention on the city’s behalf.

As we shall see, Marian virginity plays an important part in Romanos’s works. He hardly misses a chance to underscore her virginity. How can this be? Why highlight virginity if the kontakia aims at evoking corporeal interaction and maternity? What does Marian virginity signify in the civic context—would monastics constitute his main audience after all? By investigating how the kontakia imagine Christian Constantinople to relate to the Mother of God, I will suggest what devotional bonds these texts have in mind.

Romanos’s kontakia make up the most important literary expression of Marian piety in sixth-century Constantinople.¹⁴⁴ An important step in understanding conceptions of Mary in late ancient Constantinople relies on our assimilation of Romanos’s writings. And yet the image of Mary in his hymns has not attracted much scholarly attention since Paul Maas complained about how completely colorless Romanos’s Theotokos was from a dogmatic point of view, and C. Chevalier concluded that there is more of a Fra Angelico Madonna in Romanos than of a carnally opulent Raphael Madonna.¹⁴⁵

Some scholars have proposed a redating of the evolving cult of the Virgin to the post-Iconoclastic period.¹⁴⁶ With Romanos’s towering Theotokos figure, we should be able to say something about Marian cult in Constantinople. The question, of course, relies heavily on what one means by “cult.” What does it involve? How broad a phenomenon does a certain kind of veneration have to be in order to qualify as cult? One cannot, of course, confirm or refute the existence of social patterns or ritual forms just by reading the kontakia, but the songs can surely give us some perspectives. Although literary texts, like the hymns of Romanos, hardly provide us with anything definite—and we should be cautious about treating texts as if they were mere comments on the paratext—there are ways to address these issues.

I suggest asking what kind of Marian cult the kontakia themselves constitute. Let us simply take a definition of “cult” from the encyclopedia Religion Past and Present. It has the following basic description: “The major elements of a cult are rituals, often including sacrifice, together with prayers, mythological narrations or enactments, and other forms of religious expression such as music and dance. There is also the ‘tending’ of sacred images and other cult objects, as well as care of places of worship, especially the altar. Cultic observances are often linked to specific sacred sites and sacred times and seasons. Usually a cult exhibits its characteristic forms during feasts and festivals at certain intervals.”¹⁴⁷ Devotional life in Constantinople was tied up with public life. In the age of Justinian and Theodora, its inhabitants celebrated Marian feasts, erected shrines, venerated her relics, and (perhaps in a small scale) painted her icons. The kontakia constituted a vital part of this evolving Mariocentricity. They were “mythological narratives or enactments” written for ritual occasions, “times and seasons … feasts and festivals.”

This book challenges the assumption that we may possibly exclude Marian cult or the notion of her motherhood from the pre-Iconoclastic period. Romanos contributed to the shaping and development of the Marian cult in Constantinople. His texts do not first and foremost reflect a cult that was played out in an external history somewhere else, but the kontakia themselves represent cultic activity. These texts performed add up to cult. In On the Nativity II the listener meets a couple who fall down in prayer and prostrate (“prayer”) themselves before the Virgin Mary.¹⁴⁸ In On the Annunciation the crowds hail and acclaim the Theotokos.¹⁴⁹ By blurring the distinction between the crowd in the text and the crowd of the audience, the poet turns the performance of the song into cult. In the moment of their utterance the hymns evoke and enact the Mother of God, hallow and hail her.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The Virgin in Song explores the characterization of the Virgin Mary in the corpus of Romanos. How does he develop her character in relation to her son, and how does he develop it in relation to other people? By “other people” I do not only mean other characters in the kontakia, but, more importantly, I explore how he establishes a relationship between her and his audience. To show how Romanos works with the Marian character I concentrate on the kontakia in which she plays an important role. Rather than picking out assorted lines or statements from various kontakia, I follow the narrative development of individual hymns. Otherwise one risks reducing the dynamics of storytelling and the elasticity of narrative sections in relation to the composition as a whole.

The study tracks three different ways of imagining the Virgin’s corporeal and relational presence in sixth-century Constantinople: with an erotic appeal, with nursing breasts, and with a speaking voice. These three categories generate a structure that loosely follows the chronology of the Virgin’s life:

Chapter 2 engages Mary as a young maiden, on the verge between a girl’s life and married life. She is subject to erotic gazes and implicated in sexually charged gender play. I deal with the tacit eroticism evoked by the secret encounter between a young maiden and a male messenger, as Romanos tells it for the feast of the Annunciation. The focus of the chapter is the kontakion On the Annunciation, a hymn in which scholars and translators have shown little interest. It is the oldest extant hymn for what emerged as the new spring festival of the Annunciation. Since English translations of this kontakion are difficult to get hold of, and since my argument partially rests on a wording that is suppressed in other translations, I have included a translation of the full hymn as Appendix 1.

Chapter 3 explores the representation of the young mother and how she breastfeeds in Romanos. Rejecting a mundane interpretation, I ask if her nursing does not involve an exaltation of her person. The discussion relates to Romanos’s most famous hymn, On the Nativity I, written for the Christmas festival. The hymn On the Nativity of the Virgin is also considered in this chapter.

Chapter 4 focuses on Mary’s voice, how the Mother speaks to the listeners, how her voice relates to death and suffering, and how it takes part in the generation of new life. The interpretation engages primarily On the Nativity II, which is a Christmas hymn with a paschal theme, and On Mary at the Cross, the oldest extant hymn to make Good Friday into a Marian event.

All three of these chapters pose a Virgin Mary at odds with what Romanos’s contemporaries would expect from a virgin. The antithetic tension of the almost untranslatable refrain line “chaire numphē anumpheute” (“Hail, unwedded bride!”)¹⁵⁰ composes a common thread; it displays her as always already a bride, engaging yet not engaged, fruitful but never fecundated. The conclusion sums up how Romanos recasts Marian virginity in song.