CASSIA (Kasia, Ixasia, Elxasia—all forms easily reducible to the single, preferable form: Kasia). The islanders of Kasia would like her to be their fellow citizen, hence the name Kasia, though without foundation.
—Byzantine poetess, born most probably in Constantinople toward the end of the 8th century or in the early years of the 9th, and who appears to have lived beyond the year 840.
A young woman of rare beauty, she is said by Simeon Magistros to have obtained the golden apple from Emperor Theophilus and to have become his bride, had not a prompt, modest reply—though one that offended the emperor—caused him to prefer the rival Theodora. Some think that C. had from her earliest years consecrated her virginity to the Lord, thus explaining her response to the emperor, and consider her the recipient of three letters addressed to a young Constantinopolitan woman named C. by St. Theodore the Studite.
Still young, she founded in Constantinople a monastery that took its name from her and in which she later withdrew, spending the remainder of her days there as a nun. The poetic compositions that survive from her were written during this latter period of her life and naturally fall into two classes: secular poems, or Sentences, and liturgical poetry—Idiomela, Hirmoi, and an entire Common of the Dead. In the former, the verses are in iambic trimeters; the subject matter is highly varied; the style is simple, unadorned, and unpretentious—works revealing a woman of advanced years. Her religious poetry is, in literary merit, superior to her secular verse, and her poetic inspiration finds freer expression here. In the Idiomela, C. is also the author of the musical setting. Some of these poems have passed into the official hymnography of the Greek Church.
Besides the episode that might have made her empress, other tales are told of C.’s life that turn it into a romance, so much so that, especially in the past century, it has tempted the pens of several novelists and poets.