The Virgin in Song - Thomas Arentzen Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion

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the darkness that seeped from everyday worries.

       Drama and Dialogue

      The origin of Greek drama lies within the religious or cultic sphere, and the prevalence of dialogue in Romanos’s most celebrated kontakia may lead us to actually perceive them as dramas.105 Stage performances in late antiquity relied heavily on music and choir song, while kontakia were sung performances that often included narrative drama. The kontakia were probably neither staged nor enacted by masked impersonators, but in the margins of On Mary at the Cross in the Patmos kontakarion, the scribe has indicated which lines are Christ’s and which ones are Mary’s (see Figures 5 and 6). Although we do not know the rationale behind this, it does suggest a performative awareness of the dialogue’s dramatic potential. Perhaps different cantors sang the different characters’ parts in some performances.

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      Dialogues create a dramatic effect and allow characters to come to life; in late ancient handbooks, the common technique of characterization through speech imitation is called ethopoiia. John Chrysostom’s teacher, the famous rhetorician Libanius, includes 27 ethopoiia exercises in his Progymnasmata. The assignments teach the students to imagine, for instance, “what words would Chiron say when he hears that Achilles is living in the girls’ quarters?” or “what words would a prostitute say upon gaining self-control [σωφρονήσασα]?”106 Romanos was probably trained the same way, and, as a matter of fact, his hymn On the Harlot is partly made up of a prostitute’s monologue as she gains self-control over her passions. Dialogues also ensure that the storytelling is carried out neither in slow motion nor in “fast forward,” giving the story the sense of real-time verisimilitude that a dramatic play can convey.107

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      Romanos himself was well aware of the dramatic aspects of his compositions; the kontakia bring quite a bit of dramatic vocabulary into play. In On the Holy Virgin, he talks about the divine dwelling place in heaven as opposed to the cave in the earth—or the cave in Mary. The words he uses, however, allude to the theater:

      —So, Mary, sing hymns for Christ

      ……………………….

      who inhabits the firmament as a tent/stage [σκηνήν] on high,

      and is laid in a cave/off-stage [σϖηλαίῳ] below. (XXXVII 13.1, 4–5)

      In On the Woman with an Issue of Blood, Christ speaks about revealing the “dramatic plot” (to dramatourgēma) to his disciples,108 and On the Victory of the Cross refers to the “dramatic events” (dramata) of the Crucifixion.109 It is true that the word drama had a wide range of meanings in Romanos’s lifetime and could simply denote what was fictional,110 but such connotations would not really make sense in the given context. It is more likely that he intends to speak about the dramatic action of the Crucifixion than the fictional plot of the same event. In On the Man Possessed with Devils Romanos’s conscious allusions to the theatrical world become apparent. The very practice of singing ritual hymns is a blow to the demons, he asserts. How? He answers:

      When we make a comedy [κωμῳδοῦμεν] of [the demons’] fall, we cheer;

      truly the Devil wails when we display the pompous “triumph” [θρίαμβον] of the demons

      and make a tragedy [τραγῳδῶμεν] of it in our assemblies. (XI 2.5–7)

      As Christ’s servants, who love always

      to endure and sing to his glory,

      who has now pilloried [ϖομϖεύσαντες] the devil … (XI 25.1–3)

      Romanos does not suggest that the congregation staged tragedies and comedies in church, but he plays with the theatricality of what they are doing. By the sixth century, “tragedy” could actually refer to torture, and “comedy” could imply ridiculing.111 Romanos furthermore exploits the diverse semantic field of thriambos. This word for triumph or triumphal processions was initially connected to Dionysus and festal processions to his honor; by the sixth century, it had taken on the meaning of mock displays or ridiculing processions.112 The ironic “triumph” comes to imply derision and defeat. One meaning of the verb pompeuō is to mock publicly, as in a procession through the streets. Some centuries earlier, execution of criminals had been a part of mythological performances in the Roman Empire.113 We do not know if the same was true of Justinian’s period, but Procopius describes how certain convicts “had their privates removed and were paraded [ἐϖόμϖευον] through the streets.”114 Romanos seems to have this sort of ritual maltreatment in mind for the devil. Through ritual activities the liturgical participants inhabit the mythic space and play out the roles of the mythic drama. To sing a hymn is to scorn the devil. The poet does not launch his songs as a one-way communication, but as dramatic interaction, in which the audience takes part in the action of the public displays of ridicule.

      Public performances thrilled Byzantines, and cultic life proceeded through city streets, between houses of worship, baths, and amusement spaces. The imperial couple Theodora and Justinian themselves embodied the marriage between power and performance. In such a climate, liturgy and drama could not but overlap and intermingle. Romanos situated the characters of the Christian drama in his own world. Between rituals and religious mass media, the Virgin Mary came to occupy a central position in the civic imaginary of the sixth century. A liturgified city integrated her into its rites, making her available and accessible for a wide audience, in texts merging popular imagination with ecclesiastical teaching.

      THE VIRGIN IN THE CITY

      This book is about ways to imagine the Virgin Mary in sixth-century Constantinople. In recent decades, scholarship has tried to map the remnants of a late ancient Mariology. Yet key texts like the Protevangelium and the Akathistos, for instance, are notoriously hard to date, they are impossible to place in space, and no one has been able to give even a plausible suggestion as to who the authors were. With Romanos, on the other hand, we are able to sketch not only a vague early Christian Mary but a geographically and temporally specific Virgin. From these songs the contours of a sixth-century Constantinopolitan Mary may emerge.

      But what frame of reference did Constantinopolitans have for understanding a virgin’s and a mother’s life? If we want to appreciate how she is cast in relation to contemporary women, we need to ask who they were.115 Before turning to the Mother of God herself I shall dwell on the life of ordinary women in the city and sketch a general overview of what society expected of a girl as she progressed from her childhood to her adult years.

       Women’s Life in the City

      Late ancient society was a gendered society. The paternally headed household made up its cornerstone, and female life was in principle assigned to its domestic sphere. Girls would normally not get any education except for the homeschooling that well-off parents might offer them. Young girls would pass quite quickly from the state of childish innocence to an age where they would either get married or enter a convent. Already before a girl was in her teens, she could be taken as a wife. Procopius describes the perfect bride as someone “blessed with a nurture sheltered from the public eye, a woman who had not been unpracticed in modesty, and had dwelt with chastity, who was not only surpassingly beautiful but also still a maiden.”116

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