ST ROMANOS THE MELODIST - 1 OCTOBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER

Saints celebrated on the 1st of October

Prayer to the Angels and the Saints

Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.

In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.

Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.

Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.

ST ROMANOS THE MELODIST 

Surnamed ho melodos and ho theorrhetor, poet of the sixth century. The only authority for the life and date of this greatest of Greek hymn-writers is the account in the Menaion for October; his feast is October 1.

According to this account he was by birth a Syrian, served as deacon in the church at Berytus, and came to Constantinople in the reign of Anastasios. It was in the Church of the Most Holy Theotokos that he received the charisma of sacred poetry. 

"After a religious retreat at Blachernae he returned to his church, and one night in his sleep saw a vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, who gave him a volume of paper, saying, 'Take the paper and eat it'." The saint, in his dream, opened his mouth and swallowed the paper. It was Christmas Day, and immediately he awakened and marvelled and glorified God. Then, mounting the ambo, he began the strains of his parthenos semeron ton hyperousion tiktei.

He wrote also about one thousand kontakia for other feasts before he died.

Beyond this passage, there are only two mentions of Romanos’s name, one in the eighth-century poet St Germanos, and once in Suidas, who calls him "Romanos the melode". None of the Byzantine writers on hymnology allude to him: his fame was practically extinguished by the newer school of hymn-writers which flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries. 

Krumbacher has made it fairly certain, by a number of critical arguments, that the emperor named in the Menaion as reigning when Romanos came to the capital is Anastasius I (A.D. 491-518), not Anastasius II (A.D. 713-16); Pitra and Stevenson are of the same opinion. Probably, then, he lived through the reign of Justinian (A.D. 527-65), who was himself a hymn-writer; this would make him contemporary with two other Byzantine melodes, Anastasios and Kyriakos. 

"In poetic talent, fire of inspiration, depth of feeling, and elevation of language, he far surpasses all the other melodes. The literary history of the future will perhaps acclaim Romanos for the greatest ecclesiastical poet of all ages", says Krumbacher, and all the other critics of Byzantine poetry subscribe to this enthusiastic praise. 

Some have called him the Christian Pindar. Down till the twelfth century his Christmas hymn was performed by a double choir (from S. Sophia and the Holy Apostles) at the imperial banquet on that feast day. Of most of the others only a few strophes survive. 

The long hymns (kontakia) consist of twenty-five strophes (troparia), usually of twenty-one verses each, with a refrain. Besides the Christmas hymn we may cite the following titles to exemplify Saint Romanos’s choice of subjects: "Canticum Paschale", "de Crucis Triumpho", "de Iuda Proditore", "de Petri Negatione", "de Virgine iuxta crucem". Dramatic and pathetic dialogue plays a great part in the structure. The simple sincerity of tone sometimes puts the reader in mind of the Latin medieval hymns, or the earliest Italian religious verse. 

(From Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913)