Romanos le Mélode

Origins and early life

Romanos the Melodist was born about 490 at Emesa in Syria, the city known today as Homs, into a Jewish family, and this fiche states plainly that he did not remain Jewish: the sources say he was a Christian deacon by early adulthood, and they do not settle whether his parents had already been baptised or whether he converted himself in his youth.

Work and career

He served as a deacon at the church of the Resurrection in Beirut before moving to Constantinople under the emperor Anastasius, where he was attached to the church of the Theotokos in the Kyrou quarter. There a tradition, first recorded in his Greek liturgical life, holds that he was given the gift of song in a dream on the eve of Christmas and then sang his kontakion on the Nativity before the court. He wrote in a Greek shaped by Syriac models, and scholars have traced the metrical and rhetorical form of his hymns back to the Syriac verse homilies of Ephrem and, behind them, to Hebrew liturgical poetry.

Around sixty of his kontakia survive, long narrative hymns in stanzas linked by a refrain, dramatic dialogues in which biblical figures speak; the Byzantinist Karl Krumbacher called him the greatest church poet of all time. The Akathist Hymn, still sung across the Orthodox world, has often been attributed to him. He died about 556 and is commemorated as a saint in the Eastern churches on 1 October.