ROMANUS THE MELODIST. - Born in Syria to an Israelite family, in the last quarter of the 5th century: having gone to Constantinople in the last years of the reign of Anastasius I (491-518), after being converted to Christianity, he was a deacon in the church of the Virgin, where he was later buried. His death must be placed not long after the middle of the 6th century.
According to the biographical sources, R. is said to have composed about a thousand hymns, which is certainly a hyperbolic number: about 85 hymns of his survive in the manuscripts (among them some twenty apocryphal), for which a comprehensive critical edition is still lacking.
The literary sources of R. are, obviously, the Old and New Testaments: but he also drew on his fellow countryman St. Ephrem, on the Greek Christian orators, and on the Lives of the Martyrs.
R. is almost unanimously regarded as the greatest Byzantine Christian poet. He undoubtedly succeeded in drawing from his profound religiosity a sincere poetic inspiration, which often manifests itself in an intimately dramatic form and does not let itself be oppressed by the cumbersome structure of the kontakion, but pours forth broad and powerful in effective descriptions, availing itself of a new, agile and living language, admirably adhering to his always clear thought. In short, he truly created a new poetry, new in form and in spirit, which interpreted the needs of his time and, within the framework of the sumptuous and passionate Byzantine liturgy, gave voice to the yearning of the adoring crowds; which, finally, had a decisive importance in the evolution of religious poetry, not only Byzantine.
But, alongside these merits, one cannot forget the oratorical tone that sometimes weighs down the poetry with theological disquisitions and polemics; a certain tendency to grasp and depict, of religious inspiration itself, rather its external aspects than intimate religiosity; the precious and heavy baroque quality of many images: and above all, in the whole of his work, a sensation of monotony, generated not by the necessarily monotonous inspiration, but rather, one might say, by the difficulty of intimately varying the substance of the hymn.
Bibliography6 works
Raffaele Cantarella