Cassia

CASSIA (Κασία, Ικασία, Ελασία, all forms easily reducible to the single, preferable one: Κασσία. The islanders of Κάσος would like her to be their fellow citizen, whence Κασσιανή, though without foundation). - Byzantine poetess, b. very probably in Constantinople at the end of the 8th century or in the early years of the 9th, and who lived, it seems, until after 850.

As a young woman of rare beauty, she would have obtained, according to Simeon Magistros, the golden apple from the emperor Theophilus and would have become his spouse, had a ready and modest answer, by which the emperor was offended, not caused him to prefer her rival Theodora. There are those who think that C. had from her earliest years consecrated her virginity to the Lord, thus explaining the answer given to the emperor, and considering her the recipient of three letters addressed to a young Constantinopolitan woman named C. by St. Theodore Studites. Still young, she founded in Constantinople a monastery, which took its name from her and into which she withdrew, to spend there, having become a nun, the rest of her years. The poetic compositions that are preserved of her were written in this second period of her life and are naturally divided into two classes: profane poems, or Sentences, and liturgical poems: Idiomela, Hymns and an entire Canon for the dead. In the former the verses are iambic trimeters; the subject matter very varied; the style simple, without ornament and without pretension: they reveal themselves as the work of a woman of advanced age. The religious poems are, in literary value, superior to the profane ones, and C.'s poetic inspiration develops more freely in them. In the Idiomela C. is also the author of the musical part. Some of these poems have passed into the official hymnography of the Greek Church. Besides the episode that would have made her empress, others are told, which turn C.'s life into a novel, so that, especially in the last century, it has tempted the pen of several novelists and poets.

Graziella Miot