ROMANO il MELÒDE. — Born in Syria to an Israelite family in the last quarter of the 5th century: having gone to Constantinople in the final years of the reign of Anastasius I (491–518), after converting to Christianity, he became 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, a certainly hyperbolic figure: about 85 hymns of his remain in the manuscripts (including some twenty apocryphal ones), for which an overall critical edition is still lacking.
The literary sources underlying R.’s work are, obviously, the Old and New Testaments; but he also drew upon his fellow countryman St. Ephrem, the Greek Christian orators, and the Lives of the Martyrs.
R. is almost universally regarded as the greatest Byzantine Christian poet. He undoubtedly succeeded in drawing sincere poetic inspiration from his profound religious faith, an inspiration that often manifests itself in an intimately dramatic form and does not allow itself to be oppressed by the cumbersome structure of the kontakion, but pours forth broadly and powerfully in effective descriptions, making use of a new, agile, and lively language, wonderfully faithful to thought that is always clear. In short, he truly created a new poetry, new in form and spirit, which interpreted the needs of his time and, within the setting of the sumptuous and passionate Byzantine liturgy, gave voice to the longing of the adoring crowds; and which, finally, was of decisive importance in the development of religious poetry, not only Byzantine.
Yet alongside these merits, one cannot overlook the oratorical tone that at times weighs down the poetry with theological discussions and polemics; a certain tendency to grasp and depict, in the same religious inspiration, external aspects rather than intimate religious feeling; the precious and ponderous baroque quality of many images; and above all, in the work as a whole, a sense of monotony, generated not by an inspiration that was necessarily uniform in tone, but rather, one might say, by the difficulty of varying the substance of the hymn inwardly.