CASSIA (Κασία, Ικασία, Ελασία, all forms easily reducible to the single, preferable form: Κασσία. The islanders of Κάσος would like to claim her as their fellow citizen, hence Κασσιανή, though without foundation). — Byzantine poetess, born most probably in Constantinople toward the end of the eighth century or in the early years of the ninth, and apparently living until after 850.
A young woman of rare beauty, she would, according to Simeone Magistros, have received the golden apple from the Emperor Teofilo and become his wife, had not a ready and modest answer, which nevertheless offended the emperor, caused him to prefer her rival Teodora. Some believe that C. had consecrated her virginity to the Lord from her earliest years, thus explaining the answer given to the emperor, and regard her as the recipient of three letters addressed by St. Teodoro Studita to a young Constantinopolitan woman named C. While still young, she founded a monastery in Constantinople, which took its name from her and into which she withdrew, becoming a religious, to spend the remainder of her years there. The poetic compositions preserved from her were written during this second period of her life and naturally fall into two classes: secular poems, or Sentences, and liturgical poems: Idiomela, Irmi, and an entire Canon for the dead. In the former, the verses are iambic trimeters; the subject matter is highly varied; the style is simple, without ornament or pretension: they reveal the work of a woman of advanced age. The religious poems are, in literary merit, superior to the secular ones, and C.’s poetic inspiration develops more freely in them. In the Idiomela, C. is also the author of the musical portion. Some of these poems have entered the official hymnography of the Greek Church. Besides the episode that was supposed to have made her empress, other episodes are also recounted which turn C.’s life into a romance, so that, especially in the last century, it attracted the pens of several novelists and poets.
RUB.: Poems by C. are found in Christ-Paranikas, Anthologia graeca carminum christianorum, Leipzig 1871, p. 103 ff. Krumbacher, p. 715 ff.; id., Katia, in Abhandl. der bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich 1897, pp. 305–70; B. A. Mystakides, in Ogulobbia, 1 (1926), pp. 247–51, 314–19. See also S. Pétridès, C., in Revue de l'Orient chrétien, 7 (1902), pp. 218–44; J. Psicharis, C. et la pomme d'or, in Annuaire de l'École des hautes études, Paris 1910–11, pp. 1–54. Graziella Miot