The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist

By Thomas Arentzen

According to legend, the Virgin appeared one Christmas Eve to an artless young man standing in one of Constantinople's most famous Marian shrines. She offered him a scroll of papyrus with the injunction that he swallow it, and following the Virgin's command, he did so. Immediately his voice turned sweet and gentle as he spontaneously intoned his hymn "The Virgin today gives birth." So was born the career of Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485-560), one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium, author of at least sixty long hymns, or kontakia, that were chanted during the night vigils preceding major feasts and festivals.

In The Virgin in Song, Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in these kontakia and the ways in which the kontakia echoed the cult of the Virgin. He focuses on three key moments in her story as marked in the liturgical calendar: her encounter with Gabriel at the Annunciation, her child's birth at Christmas, and the death of her son on Good Friday. Consistently, Arentzen contends, Romanos counters expectations by shifting emphasis away from Christ himself to focus on Mary—as the subject of the erotic gaze, as a breastfeeding figure of abundance and fertility, and finally as an authoritatively vocal woman who conveys the secrets of her son and the joys of the resurrection.

Through his hymns, Romanos inspired an affective relationship between Mary and his audience, bringing the human and the holy into dialogue. By plumbing her emotional depths, the poet traces her process of understanding as she apprehends the mysteries that she embodies. By giving her a powerful voice, he grants subjectivity to a maiden who becomes a mediator. Romanos shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812293913

Thomas Arentzen

Thomas Arentzen is Reader in Church History and Researcher in Greek Philology at Uppsala University, and Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christian Studies at Sankt Ignatios College (Stockholm).

Book preview

The Virgin in Song

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

SERIES EDITORS

Daniel Boyarin

Virginia Burrus

Derek Krueger

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Virgin in Song

MARY AND THE POETRY OF ROMANOS THE MELODIST

Thomas Arentzen

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia

THIS BOOK IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A COLLABORATIVE GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Arentzen, Thomas, 1976– author.

Title: The Virgin in song : Mary and the poetry of Romanos the Melodist / Thomas Arentzen.

Other titles: Divinations.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Divinations: rereading late ancient religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016045439 | ISBN 9780812249071 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Romanus, Melodus, Saint, active 6th century. | Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—In literature. | Christian poetry, Byzantine—History and criticism. | Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—Poetry—History and criticism. | Hymns, Greek—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC BV467.5.R63 A74 2017 | DDC 264.2/3—dc23

LC record available at

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045439

for Benedicte

CONTENTS

A Note on Editions and Translations

List of Abbreviations

1.  The Song and the City

2.  On the Verge of Virginity

3.  The Mother and Nurse of Our Life

4.  A Voice of Rebirth

Conclusion. Virginity Recast

Appendix 1. On the Annunciation

Appendix 2. Catalogue of Hymns Referred to in the Study

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A NOTE ON EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

Scholars use one of the following two critical editions of the Romanos corpus:

1. Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis carried out the first and only complete critical edition of Romanos’s kontakia, Sancti Romani Melodi cantica: Cantica genuina (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). It includes the fifty-nine kontakia that the editors considered authentic. The OE also has a supplementary volume of pseudo-Romanos, Sancti Romani Melodi cantica: Cantica dubia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).

2. José Grosdidier de Matons produced a French edition, Romanos le Mélode: Hymnes I–V (Paris: Cerf, 1964–81), in SC. This unfinished edition in five volumes consists of fifty-six hymns that the editor considered authentic. Thirty-two additional kontakia were intended to appear in the PE.

In this book the OE text and numbering is used. The texts in PE do not deviate radically from those in the OE, but the PE editor regarded more kontakia as genuine. For a directory of kontakia with their PE and OE numbering, see Appendix 2.

All the kontakion translations in this book are my own. For other English translations, consult the bibliography.

References to the Old Testament follow the LXX numbering. English scriptural quotes are taken from the NRSV translation. Greek names are not transliterated consistently, but are given in their most conventional English forms.

ABBREVIATIONS

The Virgin in Song

Let us beware that … our ancestors do not feel shame for us and that we are not ashamed before them.

—Patr. Pavle of Serbia

CHAPTER 1

The Song and the City

ROMANOS THE MELODIST (CA. 485–CA. 560)

According to stories later told, the Virgin Mary appeared one sixth-century night to a young man of Syrian descent. The Constantinopolitan winter had pulled dark curtains around the city, and yet people were gathering in the suburb of Blachernae. The famous Marian shrine outside the city walls would attract faithful all year round, but, of course, Christmas Eve—like other feasts with a strong Marian bent—drew considerable crowds. People were thronging, and chants charged the air like incense. The night was filled with excitement.

This man from the eastern provinces was normally stationed at another Marian shrine, the old Church of the Theotokos in the western part of town, namely in the ta Kyrou district—or at least that is how some versions of the story go.¹ He had to walk a little distance to get to Blachernae, but this young adult was not unused to travel. Like so many men who had grown up in other parts of the empire, he had come to the capital to seek his fortune. From his hometown, the city of Emesa (Homs), he had journeyed to Berytus (Beirut), where he was ordained a deacon. Such a childhood and youth may have meant acquaintance with Syriac as well as Greek verse; long before he arrived in Emperor Anastasius I’s (491–518) Constantinople, church services had presumably exposed him to liturgical poetry in both these languages. The Byzantine Empire was a multilingual realm, and urban people often mastered more than one tongue.

It was Christmas and most probably freezing cold, but he had made his way across streets packed with sellers and entertainers, out to the popular sanctuary down by the Golden Horn. And it was there, during the night, that the Mother of God approached him. In a dream or a vision the artless young man suddenly saw the Virgin Mary herself standing in front of him. She held up a scroll, a written text rolled up. And then she moved it toward his mouth. Swallow it! she said. He may have been baffled, but he opened up and ate it. This enigmatic scroll, the legend says, transformed the hoarse lad. His voice turned sweet and gentle. After their secret encounter he mounted the ambo, a raised platform in the middle of the church nave, and began to sing The Virgin today gives birth. This Christmas hymn remains his most famous song.² This Christmas hymn also, incidentally, gives a strongly Mariocentric version of the events in Bethlehem.

The name of the young man was Romanos, whom history has called the Melodist.³ The legendary episode brings the story of his life in close contact with that of Mary’s: As a maiden, the Virgin had received the Word into her body through divine intervention; now young Romanos received a text into his own body through her intervention. The incident gave birth to song.

Eating writing was not an entirely new phenomenon; in fact there are biblical models. When Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, God’s voice commanded: O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. The author of the New Testament Apocalypse had a similar vision; he had to swallow a scroll that an angel gave to him.⁴ Through scrolls, God bestows unique insights on chosen seers. What makes Romanos’s case special is that he received the edible document neither from God nor from God’s angel; his inspiration came from the Mother of God. She instigated his production of exceptional words and granted him the supernatural talent to sing them. The story reflects a pairing of the Theotokos (i.e., the Mother or Birth giver of God) and the poet, not unlike the pairing of Gabriel and Mary through the story of the Annunciation. In the history of Romanos reception, the Virgin and the singer become two inseparable persons. The so-called Menologion of Basil II, an eleventh-century Byzantine manuscript now in the Vatican Library, depicts Romanos the Melodist reclining in the fields on a red blanket (Figure 1).⁵ He receives the scroll from the Virgin, who stands behind him. The viewer sees Romanos lying stretched out in the Constantinopolitan night. The Virgin is about to penetrate his lips with the scroll, rendering him at the same time closed and unclosed. Although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that it is about to open; although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that this mouth is going to unseal a host of songs. Romanos’s posture is strikingly reminiscent of Mary’s in the traditional Byzantine Nativity icon (Figure 2). The image suggests for a moment an almost confusing identification of the Virgin with her servant, the singer.

Figure 1. Romanos and the Virgin Mary, illumination from the Menologion of Basil II (ca. ad 1000), Vat. gr. 1613, 78. Vatican Library. Reproduced by permission of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. © 2016 BAV.

From a strict historical point of view, we know very little about Romanos’s life; the stories recounted here derive from later legendary sources. Some of them place the scroll episode in Blachernae, and others do not. There are vague historical traces indicating that Romanos had a Jewish background, in which case he must have left his ancestral tradition for Christianity, but this piece of information is highly unspecific, late, and unreliable. That he came from Emesa and Berytus is more plausible, for his songs show Syriac influence. And it is not historically improbable—but a pure speculation—that he attended the famed law school in Berytus some years after Severus of Antioch (ca. 465–538) had graduated from it. What we know with a higher degree of certainty is primarily what Romanos himself tells us indirectly through his songs. We are able to establish that he lived in sixth-century Constantinople, and that the Constantinopolitans cherished his songs and his talent. He seems to have created a workshop for writing hymns, for a number of transmitted hymns bear his name even though the modern editors think other poets wrote them. Already by the year 641, the city venerated him as a saint on his feast day, October 1.⁶ Much later, that same day would turn into a minor Marian feast, the celebration of the Virgin’s Protecting Veil (skepē). The standard icon for the feast merges the two: Romanos stands right underneath the Virgin in Blachernae (Figure 3). She protects with her veil, and he performs his songs.

Figure 2. Byzantine tempera icon of the Nativity of Christ (eighth/ninth cent.) from Sinai. Published through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Mount Sinai.

Figure 3. Russian tempera icon of the Virgin’s protecting veil (Pokrov) with Romanos (Novgorod school, sixteenth cent.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org.

Before the poet died in Constantinople sometime around 560 he had composed at least sixty long liturgical hymns called kontakia—and probably many more.⁷ The epithet Melodist (Gr. Melōdos) indicates that he was not only a poet but also a singer in church, who performed his own hymns. The incident with the scroll—when Romanos received the charism from his muse—has made him an example of those who take their wisdom from the Virgin, and yet it also indicates that she made him a performer.⁸ She turned a man without a voice into a vocalized singer. The moment he had eaten her scroll, he burst out in song and performed a hymn. He received a voice. Through his hand, in turn, Mary was not merely spoken of but came most explicitly to be speaking herself, in dialogues and monologues. Through the performance of his hymns, she raised her voice and was heard in the great churches and streets of the imperial city. As we shall see in this book, Romanos envisaged the Mother of God to be the voice of her people. According to the legend, contrariwise, Romanos gave her a voice and spoke for her, he who had received his voice from her hand. The story of the scroll attests to the lasting imprint that hearing Mary’s words through his words left on the imagination of the Christians in Constantinople—so much so that posterity could not distinguish their voices.

The first poetic words that Romanos uttered, according to the legend, were the Virgin today gives birth. This may be taken to mean that through her intervention, she gave birth to her own voice in a man’s body. From this Marian beginning evolved a remarkable career in song, yielding vivid verbal displays that filled churches with imaginary dramatics. Through Romanos, Mary staged herself. If, in other words, we would like to understand how the Virgin Mary is imagined in this period, we have to turn to Romanos the Melodist. We shall never be able to read the scroll that he digested, but the present book studies the texts it produced. Can they give us a hint about why later generations came to regard Romanos and the Virgin as inseparable? How could his songs generate the legendary scroll?

THE RISE OF THE KONTAKION

From a literary perspective, the sixth century was a prolific period. Such outstanding figures as the historian Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 490–562), the poet Paul the Silentiary (d. ca. 580), and the poet and historian Agathias Scholasticus (ca. 532–80) all benefited from the favorable air of relative meritocracy under the sixth-century emperors, as did Romanos. He wrote dramatic poetry, and his songs epitomize an ecclesiastical attempt to appropriate more advanced poetic expressions for liturgical use.

The fourth and fifth centuries had seen wandering but highly influential poets, especially from Byzantine Egypt. Cyrus of Panopolis (d. 457) was one of them. He was also the one who allegedly built the Marian church in ta Kyrou to which Romanos was connected.⁹ Poets were becoming an important intellectual group, and the period has been described in terms of poetic revival.¹⁰ This resurgence gradually shaped the ecclesiastical discourse. By Romanos’s time, both the religious and the secular worlds of the empire prized poetry. Public and private readings amounted to popular events that were not presented only for the privileged few. When the Latin poet Arator (sixth century) performed his metric paraphrase of the Acts of the Apostles for the pope in Rome in the year 544, some of the clergy begged him to do it again for the whole city. The open event drew a large audience and went on for four days.¹¹ People in Constantinople, too, appreciated epic and encomiastic poetry, and authors were able to seek the patronage of the aristocracy, or even of the emperor himself.¹²

The same period experienced striking poetic innovation in religious circles in the eastern part of the empire. Synagogues, churches, and schools fostered the peculiarly simultaneous rise of a particular form of religious poetry. Various Eastern Mediterranean communities all started to retell their sacred stories in longer stanzaic and metrical hymns. The piyyut emerged among Jews, while the madrasha appeared in Syriac-speaking Christian circles. The Greek counterpart is commonly known as kontakion.¹³ In addition to having a general metrical structure, these genres share such important compositional features as a refrain, which stitched the dramatic or epic content together, and an acrostic, which strung the stanzas into a long chain. How the three genres relate to one another historically is an unsettled question, but it has been suggested that the kontakion depends on the madrasha.¹⁴ Even a fourth genre, which would rise to prominence in Constantinople from the seventh century, evolved in Jerusalem during the same period; this Greek canticle hymn is known as kanon. Its shape and use were, however, somewhat different.¹⁵

Most of Romanos’s works belong to the former Greek genre, the kontakion, which was unique to Constantinople and its rite. He was neither the first nor the only kontakion writer, but posterity has regarded him as the master of the genre.¹⁶ The Melodist’s hand fashioned the kontakion into a dramatic form, exploiting its narrative potential to a degree that must have made the songs stand out—and indeed still makes them stand out—as singularities in the realm of liturgical verse. He engaged Christian stories more or less well known, and his songs excited by the use of drama and suspense, appealing to the listeners’ sensory imagination and animated curiosity. Playfulness alternates with wit; thrill is achieved next to awe. The narrative of the hymns yearns to titillate its audience. The psychological depth of the characters makes them attractive. Lending a voice to previously voiceless persons and speechless scenes, Romanos provokes the fancy of the assembly. Erotic and sexual allusions undermine congregational sleepiness. The hymnographer gives an ecclesiastical reply to the general desire for more exciting poetry. With the kontakion, the Christian prose heritage of biblical stories and hagiography comes to life in a poetic configuration.

Other poets had transmitted new—often Christian—stories in the form or language of the classical world. Arator did this in Rome, and Empress Eudocia (ca. 401–60) did it in the Greek East, with her Homeric centos and her poem on the Martyrdom of St. Cyprian. In the same century, Nonnus of Panopolis wrote a hexameter paraphrase of the Gospel of John. The authors of kontakia, on the other hand, chose a new genre that did not emanate scents of ancient culture or traditional elites; instead they communicated in an accessible language and employed refrains that encouraged popular participation. The audience did not have to be learned to understand.

The sixth-century Melodist tells us nothing of who his benefactors were, and we do not know in what literary circles he moved.¹⁷ We can merely surmise that he, as the highly skilled and utterly sophisticated poet that he was, must have interacted with other authors and literati.

The Form of the Kontakion

A prelude (called koukoulion in Greek and often described as a prooimion) opens the kontakion. This first introductory stanza is normally shorter than the other stanzas and deviates metrically from them. In the Patmos kontakarion, the most complete collection of Romanos kontakia, the preludes as well as the refrains are written in the more readable uncial style, while the rest of the stanzas are in a more cursive minuscule; hence the preludes stand out graphically (see Figure 4).¹⁸ Many kontakia appear with different preludes in different manuscripts, so the prelude seems to have been a flexible part of the composition. Since it does not contribute to the acrostic, and since its metrical structure differs from the other stanzas, writers and rewriters could achieve prelude variation without changing the rest of the hymn. The shared refrain is the formal feature that links the prelude to the other stanzas. In general, the content of a prelude relates fairly loosely to the narrative of the hymn—in the form of a prayer, a setting of the scene, or an interpretation of the festal theme.

Figure 4. Romanos’s On the Nativity I from the Patmos kontakarion (P 212 f. 121r). Photo: Ioannes Melianos, Library of the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian.

After the prelude, the main body of the kontakion follows. It consists of metrically identical stanzas (oikoi). The word metrical, however, is not entirely accurate if by meter we mean a pattern of feet consisting of long and short syllables. The Koine Greek of the sixth century had abandoned the pitch accents of classical Greek for a stress accent more similar to that of modern English or modern Greek. Since the kontakion poets did not attempt to write in an atticizing style, they did not have to conform to the feet-based meters of classical poetry. Instead, a kontakion stanza consists of a set of kola. In the manuscripts, kola are usually separated by a dot or another kind of punctuation. Together, all the kola in one stanza make up a complex pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. This complex pattern is repeated identically in every stanza, so that all the stanzas of a given kontakion share the same rhythmical pattern.

Those kontakia counted as genuine by the Oxford critical edition comprise between eleven and forty stanzas. A stanza usually consists of approximately ten lines, although one should be aware that the grouping of two or three kola into lines or verses is a product of the critical editors.¹⁹ The last line(s) of the stanza constitutes the refrain. The melodist must have chanted the kontakia to a fairly simple and syllabic melody, but the sixth-century melodies have not been transmitted to us, so we do not know exactly how Romanos sang his songs.²⁰

One will not encounter the term kontakion in late ancient sources, for it was not in use until the ninth century.²¹ When the poet names his works he uses terms like hymn (humnos), praise/story (ainos), song/ode (ōdē), psalm (psalmos), word/song/tale (epos or epē), poem (poiēma)—and once even entreaty (deēsis) and prayer (proseuchē). Applying a variety of terms for very similar texts, Romanos obviously does not intend them as genre labels in a strict sense, but he indicates that his stories were sung and performed. The rubrics of the manuscripts often say adomenon or psallomenon, signaling that the kontakia were sung.²² The readers were in other words listeners, who, through the refrains, became coperformers.²³

The Kontakion and Church Services

Poets composed their kontakia for special occasions, and, although there are notable exceptions, most of the kontakia we have can be tied to the festal calendar of the church. Before Christianity gained a hegemonic position in the empire, civic festivals had featured festal oratory and hymnody to be performed as a part of the celebrations. With the new role of the Christian religion, ecclesiastical hymns and homilies filled a similar function. Rhetorical speeches and hymns would achieve a new content, yet the practice of celebrating popular public festivals did not change. Neither did Christians cease to compose elegant texts for their festal occasions.²⁴ Kontakia came to play a role as festal poetry for the new Christian festivals.

Modern commentators often call the kontakia sermons, but this designation is not entirely accurate, at least not if we think of sermons as preachers’ attempts to give an exegetical exposition of the lection in church during Sunday service. Kontakia contained homiletic elements, just as many Byzantine homilies included poetic and hymnal elements, yet the genres were performed differently. Homilies might constitute a part of the Divine Liturgy, and a bishop or a presbyter preached it with clerical authority. Kontakia, on the other hand, were not normally performed during the liturgy and not by the higher clergy; as a rule, male singers sang them during nocturnal services. As noted earlier, Romanos himself was a deacon according to tradition.²⁵ Furthermore, the writers of kontakia fixed the text through the use of metrical patterns, refrains, and acrostics. While preachers could be open to performative improvisation, the singers of kontakia were stuck with their prewritten text.

That a soloist would sing rather than read the kontakion stanzas is clear from several verses; for instance in Romanos’s kontakion On the Resurrection VI, the singer concludes with a paraphrase of Our Father and a reflection on his own work as a performer:

Hallowed be your name always

through my mouth and my lips,

through my voice and my song [ᾠδῇ]. (XXIX 24.8–10)

The voice is song.

The ritual life of the city in this period belonged to what modern liturgists call the Constantinopolitan rite; its distinct office is described as the sung office (asmatikē akolouthia).²⁶ Despite its name, the late ancient rite that developed in the metropolis left room for a relatively small hymnographic repertoire.

It is still unclear how closely the kontakion was connected to a specific service. Our earliest evidence points to nightly vigils, and so do later liturgical manuscripts, yet these popular vigils were probably not entirely fixed events in this early period. As far as we can tell, they might feature responsorial or antiphonal psalmody as well as readings from Scripture and saints’ lives, and even processions. People would gather to prepare and await the coming feast or to commemorate a certain event. Romanos performed his hymns during such services, as a flexible part of the vigil.²⁷ Kontakion performance outside church walls cannot be ruled out, either; its form makes it applicable in many contexts.

Since no liturgical manuals of sixth-century Constantinople have survived, we do not know the exact location of the kontakion in the rite, then, but the performer seems to have sung the hymns from the ambo, as the later story of Romanos’s inspiration suggests. The ambo was literally the central focal point in a Byzantine church. Apart from the altar area in the east, the ambo made up the most important liturgical stage, and this liturgical platform can inform our interpretation of the kontakia. The ambo consisted of an elevated marble platform on columns and was located in the middle of the nave.²⁸ One should not equate the ambo with a modern pulpit for preaching, for it did not serve as the main venue for sermons.

The sixth-century poet Paul the Silentiary gives us a verbose and creative description of the ambo in the renovated Hagia Sophia of 562. He says: As an island rises amidst the waves of the sea, adorned with cornfields, and vineyards, and blossoming meadows, and wooded heights, while the travellers who sail by are gladdened by it and are soothed of the anxieties and exertions of the sea; so in the midst of the boundless temple rises upright the tower-like ambo of stone adorned with its meadows of marble, wrought with the beauty of the craftsman’s art.²⁹ In Hagia Sophia this highly visual spot was where the patriarch crowned the new emperor. During regular services, clergy would mount the stairs of the same podium to read from the Scriptures, as would singers to intone the hymns. The ambo functioned as a focal point of several ecclesiastical rituals. At least in bigger churches like Hagia Sophia a choir stood underneath the ambo. Paul describes it in this way: Underneath the stone there is, as it were, another chamber, wherein the sacred song is raised by fair children, heralds of wisdom. What is roof for those below is a floor for those above; the latter is like a spreading plain, made level for the feet of mortals, while the underside has been cut out and hollowed by the mason so that it rises from the sacred capitals, curving over with artful adornment, like the bent back of the hard-shelled tortoise or the oxhide shield which the agile warrior holds over his helmet when he leaps in the Pyrrhic dance.³⁰ By likening the choir to the performers of the so-called pyrrhic dance—an ancient war drama that by the second century had become a mythological performance³¹—the poet suggests a theatrical connection for this liturgical stage. I shall return to the theater theme below; for now note simply that the motif surfaces in the Silentiary’s text.

Paul wrote one poem to describe the whole church, and another only to describe the ambo. This fact attests to the importance of the liturgical platform. Its significance for the interpretation of the kontakia lies first and foremost in the performative setting that it created: The words would echo from a place of authority in the congregation’s midst. Hence it makes sense to read all the scenes in the hymns as emanating from a slightly elevated spot in the middle of the crowd.

While the song echoed from the ambo, the congregation intoned the refrain; in the larger churches, the choir under the ambo probably took the lead.³² The congregation’s vocal involvement in the performance must have contributed to their cognitive participation, as the refrain resounded in their ears even after they had left the nightly gathering. The refrains made listeners into singers.

The night is a potent time and has different symbolic values than daytime. A century before Romanos’s writings, Sozomen relates how the Virgin Mary provided healing during nocturnal incubation at the Church of Anastasia. The seventh-century Miracles of St. Artemios refers to the nightly singing of Romanos’s hymns at an incubation site.³³ The dark hours hide