The Aramaic Poems

In terms of their performative setting, we know little about the Aramaic poems preserved in the Cairo Genizah aside from what the poems themselves reveal.Footnote ⁷ While Aramaic laments vary in form, the two presented here are straightforward, even stark, in their simplicity, and regardless of performative setting, aspects of their audiences’ daily, lived reality can be gleaned from careful examination.Footnote ⁸ Ultimately, these works are defined more by form and pattern than content. Too long to be lyrical, too static to be dramatic, these poems challenge modern scholars to discern what makes them “good” or at least engaging.

The poem that opens “I shall go forth weeping” (’Ana’ azel ve’evkeh) displays a clear and fairly typical structure for Jewish poems of this period.Footnote ⁹ The poem is brief, consisting of eleven stanzas. Each stanza opens with the word “over” (‘al), which introduces a rhyming couplet; in turn, each stich of the couplet embeds a letter from an alphabetical acrostic that runs from alef to tav; and following each couplet comes the refrain from Lam 3:48, which the congregation would likely have recited. The stanzas are simple, terse, and repetitive. In terms of content, each stanza laments a component of Israelite society destroyed by the (unnamed) enemy; the scale of loss ranges from the national (the exile of the people and the destruction of the temple) to the intimate (the murder of children and the burning of books). The poem lacks any obvious narration: it has no beginning or end, and no detectable motion forward, outward, up, or down. While the acrostic indicates its formal completeness, its content suggests it is merely an excerpt from an extended lament.

Viewed from most perspectives, this poem is competently executed but unexceptional: it as not the best poetry, but neither is it bad. The form is clear but not clever: it is sufficiently ornate to be interesting but not dazzling in its artistic intricacy. The content is dramatic but a bit disorganized: rather than going somewhere, it seems to tread water. Despite these deficits, it is possible to conceive of ways in which performance might have significantly enlivened the experience of this poem, and this awareness of oratorical artistry from antiquity might, in turn, enrich our understanding of it. The written word is the genesis, not the terminus, of this poem's life.

While the images that constitute the narrative of the poem seem haphazard—the poet moves from the nation, to babies, to the temple, to prisoners, back to babies, then to elders, etc.—the various elements can be regarded as components of a mosaic. As in a mosaic, in which a picture emerges gradually as a whole from many small tesserae, here discrete images come together in a vivid whole, akin to the technique ancient orators knew as ekphrasis.Footnote ¹⁰ Each stanza illustrates the sense of loss through a small, concrete episode of destruction. The poem's imagery depicts archetypal horrors: babes are strangled, books are burned, elders are driven into exile. A unitary picture emerges from the composite, suggesting a technique resembling enargeia or evidentia (literally “vividness” in Greek and Latin respectively). Through these visuals, the poet creates a sense of a mourner lost in the moment, taking in a fresh scene of tragic loss. The audiences constitute witnesses to these losses, but through the refrain they become more than witnesses: they become active participants. They themselves become mourners.

The immediacy of these images, narrated in the first person but also experienced in the first person through the refrain, suggests the second rhetorical element of this poem, ethopoiia, the imaginative act of speaking from the perspective of a character from the classical canon. Ancient rhetorical handbooks suggest topics for such exercises: Andromache grieving Hector, Achilles mourning Patroclus, Niobe bewailing her children.Footnote ¹¹ The imaginative scenarios favored by rhetoricians for this kind of practice are those that evoke strong emotion, and the subject of grieving is particularly common. In ethopoiia, the speaker speaks in the first person, reflecting a character's feelings “in the moment,” which means that ethopoiia in a liturgical context is more complicated than in simple oratory: in its liturgical setting, given the likelihood that the community joined the poet in the recitation of the refrain, we can understand the effect of this rhetorical device as that of involving the audience in the act of lament. The poet presents his audience with a persona, functionally the narrator and the audience together, immersed in the vividness of the past, uttering as one the phrase from Lamentations “My eye, my eye flows with tears.” The listeners speak with the speaker; they “do” ethopoiia themselves. A verse redolent with biblical flavors becomes the voice of a communal character. The stanzas create a context for the audience in which to understand their own lines, which they then speak in character, in the refrain.

Considering this poem from the perspective of ethopoiia and performance brings to the fore issues of performative interpretation. In keeping with mainstream aggadic interpretations of the Lamentations verse that serves as the refrain, this poem is written in the divine voice, itself a conceptually bold move, and it is worth pausing for a moment to contemplate the embodied nature of that voice. Many of the laments cited in the progymnasmata as suitable topics for ethopoiia are uttered by women—Niobe mourning her children is a particularly popular and appropriate parallel—and long-standing tradition in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean worlds associates mourning, and particularly public grieving, with women. Aggadic sources, expanding imagery already present in the Hebrew Bible, are rich with images of the divine presence (the Shekhinah) depicted as mourning Israel and lamenting over the temple, even as she accompanies Israel into exile.Footnote ¹² It is possible that this passage, too, should be heard in the maternal voice of the Shekhinah or even Zion. Grammatically, of course, such a reading is not required, as the first person is unmarked for gender, and the fact that the speaker of the verse in Lamentations is masculine may even militate against it. Even should a male voice be assumed, however, that would provide a striking and somewhat unusual image of masculine grief.Footnote ¹³ Ultimately, while we can read and imagine the verse in various performative configurations, performance itself cannot be a gender-neutral experience. While the speaker of the work would have without a doubt been male, male actors and orators in antiquity learned to perform in both masculine and feminine personae. Whoever declaimed this work would have had to understand how he, or the poet, heard the voice.

As crucial as the voice of the performer, who would have declaimed the various stanzas of the poem, no doubt was, the refrain complicates our analysis. The refrain of this poem, which is likewise in the divine voice, may well have been recited by a (presumably male) chorus or perhaps the (mixed-gender) community. It is important to recall that a single “script” could have been performed in different ways in different communities, depending on size, wealth, and liturgical norms, among other factors. A male chorus would have reinforced the masculine nature of the voice, while a communal response, particularly if we assume male and female attendees, would have blurred or rendered ambiguous the gender associations. Through the force of this rhetoric, the community not only would have witnessed events as if through God's eyes, they themselves would have spoken with the divine voice. Heavenly and terrestrial perspectives would thus have merged. Human voices, singular and collective, articulated divine grief over the destruction of Jerusalem.

The use of the refrain brings to the fore a final point of consideration from the world of ancient performance. In addition to the intellectual exercise of imagining the experience of grief, we must envision its physical performance, for mourning in the ancient world was accompanied by stereotypical gestures, postures, and body language.Footnote ¹⁴ The performer bringing this piece to life could easily have made use of these gestures, and while such physical posturing is not required here (as it may be in other instances noted below), it is worth cultivating an appreciation of the physicality of performance. While to a modern audience such posturing might seem artificial,Footnote ¹⁵ to an audience in antiquity we can assume such physical elements would have augmented the emotional power of the text itself and reflected the oratorical skill of the declaimer(s).

The second Aramaic poem considered here is the lament “Sing for Us” (Shiru lanu).Footnote ¹⁶ Like the previous poem, its form is simple: twelve stanzas consisting of rhyming couplets that embed an alphabetical acrostic.Footnote ¹⁷ This work also has a refrain, but instead of a single verse repeated eleven times, two verses from Psalm 137 alternate. The narrative conceit of this work is more complex than that of the previous poem, and as a consequence issues of presentation are more complicated, as well: rather than a lament performed from a single character's perspective, here we find an antiphonal structure that, rooted in and amplifying the imagery and language of Psalm 137, recreates a back and forth between the exiled Israelites and their Babylonian captors.

The dialogical structure of this poem immediately suggests certain elements of its performance. As it is written, the poem must have been performed in two voices in order to be comprehended, whether articulated by a single speaker adopting two distinctive postures and tones or, more elaborately, two separate “actors” or even an actor and a chorus or two choruses. The poem itself lacks any explicit narration to indicate changes in speaker. The script on the page is, on its own, insufficient, and listeners do not have the cognitive luxury of review that readers possess. Rhetorically, this piece may echo both the ancient Mesopotamian literary form of the dispute poem and the claim-counterclaim rhetoric attested in the progymnasmata of late antiquity.Footnote ¹⁸ In these oratorical exercises we find prompts for debates (back-and-forth deliberative speeches) between Ajax and Odysseus and among the Trojan women.Footnote ¹⁹ These debates, which appear in works Ruth Webb describes as “rhetorical epics,”Footnote ²⁰ often begin with scenes derived from mythology—a role played by “classic” images from the biblical canon for the Jews. That is, a staging of Israelites by the shores of the rivers of Babylon functioned as a “mythological” scene for the Jews in the same way that the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid did for their non-Jewish counterparts.

Beyond this suggestion of staging, we can see that the poet has created two personae, using the technique of ethopoiia: he expansively imagines the dialogue between captives and captors. The Babylonians frequently make use of questions, which at first seem merely naïve but upon reiteration become almost cruelly unfeeling: “Why [are you] so sad? Why [are you] sitting in darkness?” (stanza 3); “Why do you weep? Why are you sighing and sobbing?” (stanza 7); and, if we translate colloquially, “Relax! How can you suffer so? Oh, you are so morose!” (stanza 11). The callousness of the Babylonians is rooted in and underscored by the biblical refrain: “Sing for us [one of the songs of Zion]!” The Israelite exiles, for their part, express their sense of loss and longing through their equally stubborn reiteration of Ps 137:4. The exiles are nonconfrontational and oriented almost totally inward, as minimally engaged with their tormenting captors as possible; their speech functions almost as an intra-Israelite dialogue. Although prodded into words by the Babylonians, the Israelites seem to talk primarily to each other and, by extension, to the audience that is composed of their descendants. In doing so, they explain their situation to themselves rather than to their captors.

The conversation, however, is not static; it appeals in particular to an array of senses and conveys a subtle kind of physicality: the parties call to each other to hear, see, act, feel, and taste. The sense of grief and loss becomes multidimensional. But even more powerfully, the emphasis in the poem on mourning and grieving suggests that here, too, the body language of the performers may have been significant in shaping any dynamic between the two voices, i.e., in crafting the interpretation. What was the posture of “Israel,” compared to the “Babylonians”? Were the hand gestures indicators of despair, grief, or anger? How did the intonation of the refrains change, if at all, during the course of the poem? In short, for as much as there is “on the page” here, there are layers of elements to the performativity of these works that we can only conjecture.

Overall, these two Aramaic laments exemplify a kind of minimalist performance aesthetic. Their language is simple and accessible, the forms clear and straightforward. The richness of these works would depend on intangibles, including the skill of the orator/performer and his use of gesture and voice to create emotional depth.

The Hebrew Poems

Where the Aramaic poems are episodic “snapshots,” detailed in their imagery but sparing in action, the two Hebrew works examined here illustrate the dynamic narrative potential of performed piyyutim (synagogue poems). Both of these works were composed by Eleazar berabbi Qallir, a prolific liturgical poet of the late sixth / early seventh centuries, from Galilee, whose style defies any kind of stereotyping.Footnote ²¹ The first poem, “When Her Quota (of Grief) is Filled” (’Az bimel’ot sefeq), depicts an encounter between personified Zion and the prophet Jeremiah; the second, an excerpt from a lengthy piyyut written for the Ninth of Av, describes the tremendous battle between Behemoth and Leviathan in the world to come. In contrast to the two Aramaic laments, which are visually rich but offer little sense of narrative, these works display a flair for dramatic creativity.

Qallir's lament (qinah), which opens “When her quota is filled,” is roughly twice the length of the Aramaic poems.Footnote ²² Each stanza consists of four rhyming stichs, and while it shares with the Aramaic works the structuring feature of an alphabetical acrostic, here each letter governs two stichs. On the other hand, this poem lacks any kind of refrain, chorus, or other patterned repetition. Its performative impact, then, derives from its broad narrative arc as much as from its more pointilistic details, from its boldness more than its subtlety.

The poet orchestrates the action with a clear sense of theatricality: the initial stanza sets the stage, but the rest of the poem is presented as a conversation among three characters (Jeremiah, Zion, and God), which makes it distinctive from the dispute or dialogue poems that are more common. Significantly, however, the text of the poem never indicates changes in speaker. This lack of verbal cues suggests that the speaker must have indicated the change of character by means of voice, posture, or gesture. Indeed, we can imagine that viewers, far from being passive listeners, would have gained a great deal of insight into the action based on the physical performance even if they did not comprehend every word of the text, although the language of the poem is quite simple and straightforward, especially for Qallir.

As with the Aramaic poems, it is useful to consider these poems from the perspective of classical rhetoric. To some extent, the persona of Zion (an example of prosopoiia, personification, rather than ethopoiia) recalls the mournful speaker of the first Aramaic piyyut, in which the first-person speaker laments the destruction of city and populace. While that poem is a soliloquy embellished by audience participation, this work relies entirely on dialogue. The figures speak and respond to each other. As a result, it seems likely that the performer(s) must have in some fashion embodied their roles and supplied gestures to underscore and make more visible their emotions, actions, and intents. As the various characters engage and persuade each other, they engage and persuade the audience, as well.

Qallir's choice of techniques is not haphazard. Through the use of a riddle, for example, he effects anagnorisis, the experience of sudden realization.Footnote ²³ In the opening scenario, Jeremiah confronts a woman both beautiful and disfigured, a scene that suggests although it does not demand some form of physical representation. Startled by her appearance, the prophet asks her: “Are you the most demonic of demons, or a human being?” The woman answers his question with a riddle, defining herself as the possession of “three and seventy-one, / twelve, sixty, and one.”

It is not clear who speaks the answer:Footnote ²⁴ does Lady Zion immediately solve her own riddle or does Jeremiah deduce the answer on his own? This ambiguity can only be resolved by the mode of performance. In either case, the exchange creates a kind of intellectual engagement of the listeners right away. Only after the riddle is resolved does the audience know who both of the main characters are.

At the same time, this poem does not appeal exclusively to the intellect. The depiction of Lady Zion as a vulnerable woman, a kind of princess in disguise, full of remorse and longing, has strong emotional appeal, particularly as she seeks Jeremiah's help in securing mercy for herself and her children (i.e., those who listen to the performance) from her divine lover: “Pray . . . / On behalf of the storm-tossed, flogged, and afflicted one; / Someday God will respond . . . / And . . . save my children” (stanza 8).

God's dramatic response—unmarked in the text—shocks listeners with its sense of raw powerlessness but then turns into an impassioned call to action. God, the listeners realize, needs the prophet to act; Jeremiah has turned to God, but God turns to humanity. The poem's emotionality recalls the rhetorical technique of phantasia (appeals to the mind's eye), according to the rhetorical treatise of Longinus, and should result in emotional effects or even ekplexis (a striking impact upon the audience).Footnote ²⁵Phantasia thus resembles enargeia but has a specifically emotional (and thus persuasive) appeal.Footnote ²⁶

This poem's vividness recalls that of the Aramaic “I Shall Go Forth Weeping,” which similarly constructs a composite of images. Here, the imagery of loss and destruction is more compact, but the descriptive vocabulary is vivid and energetic. The characters roar like lions, weep, growl, shout, and exhort; descriptors include “beaten,” “dragged,” “storm-tossed, flogged and afflicted.” The destruction of Jerusalem is compared to “desert wolves [who] have ravaged the sheep.” The primary metaphors are parental rather than regal: Zion is a mother bereft, and God compares himself to a father who has banished his son. This energetic pathos, combined with the rapid dialogue, suggests an energetic staging, rich with gestures and strong body language as a way not only of underscoring but actually embodying the drama of the events narrated and drawing all the listeners, both those imagined within the poem and those actually among the audience, into the scene. Performance not only takes place upon a stage; it creates one. And in the liturgical setting, the listeners are part of the production, much as judge and jury are part of the court and not separate from it.

Where the action in this work takes place almost exclusively through dialogue, the second of Qallir's poems included here is almost entirely narration. This poem is actually the conclusion of a much longer piyyut, one of the five magisterial qerovot Qallir composed for the fast of Av.Footnote ²⁷ This poem depicts a climactic end-of-days battle between two mythological figures whose Jewish roots lie in the final chapters of the book of Job: Behemoth (the primordial land animal) versus Leviathan (the primeval sea monster). Ziz (the monstrous bird) makes a cameo appearance and completes the triad of land, sea, and sky.Footnote ²⁸ At the conclusion of the piyyut, God himself joins the fray and directly slaughters both Jobian monsters, serving them as meat and fish courses at the banquet of the righteous.

This piyyut, a rich embellishment of traditions shared with other rabbinic sources, stands out as one of the most dramatic narrative compositions in the history of early piyyutim. No conventional devices govern its form: it lacks regularized stanzas, refrains, and acrostics, which results in a freeness of form that is typical of its genre (silluq). Nor is it an exercise in ethopoiia: the poet does not immerse himself in the perspective of a particular character but rather describes the combat with great vividness and vigor (enargeia). Finally, there is declamation but no dialogue or chorus, pathos but little appeal to the emotions otherwise. Rather, in this poem, Qallir displays the dramatic potential of narrative despite the absence of dialogue.

The most outstanding feature of this piyyut is its abundant sensory detail; it practically leaps from the page with its appeals not only to the mind's eye but its nose, ears, skin, and tongue as well.Footnote ²⁹ In short, it offers a remarkable example of ekphrasis, of vividness. When the wounded Behemoth sets paradise aflame, we smell the incense; when he snorts, we feel his breath; when Leviathan breathes, we see the waters steam; and when God serves the banquet, we taste the many flavors of Ziz.

The poet begins drawing his verbal picture by imagining for his listeners the stage upon which the action takes place: the gates of Eden open and the listeners enter along with the righteous. At once, the righteous ones who constitute both the audience in the conceit and the literal audience hear the sound of God pacing in the garden, just as Adam and Eve do in Gen 3:8, only now the movement is a welcoming bustle, not an ominous game of hide-and-seek. The divine ringmaster presents the three creatures (Ziz, Behemoth, and Leviathan) to those assembled and welcomes them to the entertainment. The congregation in effect becomes part of the audience of the mother of all gladiatorial games.

There are no explicit references to gesture in this poem, but it is impossible to read this work without imagining ways the narrator may have physically, through body and voice, called attention to the appearance and behavior of the characters, interpreting through his embodiment the images suggested by the poetic text. Each creature is introduced in a way that is reminiscent of how prize-fighters are introduced: see how strong Behemoth is, how sharp Leviathan's fins, how broad the wings of Ziz! The narrator appeals directly to his listeners: “Notice [hinneh na] [Behemoth’s] mighty loins!” (line 32). Much of the battle itself is an indistinct, slightly chaotic clash of pronouns—“This one attacks that! The one assaults the other!”—a style of presentation that suggests some nonverbal form of clarification. The narrator's body language may also have helped define the creatures’ personalities, so deftly delineated: Behemoth a gentle giant who shelters smaller animals beneath his tail; Leviathan a fierce beast who terrifies, tramples, cooks, and eats the other sea creatures. The vividness and vigor of the imagery demand bodily engagement. The poet, through the performance of the speaker, conveys a sense of these mythic beasts’ mass and splendor, their rage and pain, their courage and their death.

Qallir's listeners, like the righteous in the time to come, have front-row seats to precisely the kind of entertainment the pious would have avoided in the present. Through words, postures, gestures, and all the other tools of poetic illusion making, the poet conjures for his listeners a contest far better than any they could have seen in an earthly amphitheater or hippodrome. Through the power of his words, the poet offers his listeners a foretaste of the rewards that await them in the future. The world of late antiquity was a world that loved spectacle. This poem is true to this spirit: it is spectacular.

The Greek Poems

These initial four poems, two in Aramaic and two in Hebrew, suggest some of the ways in which Jewish poets from late antiquity shared techniques with ancient orators and actors. Such techniques were hardly limited to Jewish poetry, however; rather, performative theory and rhetorical analysis provide a way of conducting comparative hymnographic work that extends to the Christian tradition. Two kontakia (chanted poetic sermons) by Romanos illustrate the potential of this approach, which emphasizes the shared rhetorical culture connecting poetry in three languages and two religious traditions. Romanos, the greatest of the early Byzantine hymnographers, provides a fitting complement to the contemporary Jewish poet Qallir as well as the anonymous Aramaic poets. While Romanos's compositions reflect significantly different content in terms of their themes, motifs, exegetical foci, and liturgical contexts, an appreciation of the techniques for engaging an audience provides a way of creating a conversation across the boundaries that otherwise separate such works from each other. In particular, attentiveness to techniques these works hold in common, such as ethopoiia, enargeia, exhortation, and dialogue, will enable the construction of a framework for articulating how poets of various backgrounds working for diverse settings created works that were engaging and compelling.

The two Romanos hymns, both of which are typical kontakia in terms of their form, depict key moments in the story of Jesus's crucifixion: his dialogue with his mother, Mary, while he is on the cross (an embellishment and conflation of John 19:25 and Luke 23:27–32); and his descent to and triumphant return from hell (an episode detailed in Acts Pil., part 2). As a consequence of their narrative focus on New Testament stories, these poems do not tempt modern readers to engage in the difficult and generally misleading task of deciphering exegetical relationships and directions of transmission between Jewish and Christian sources; instead, the very dissimilarities of the works enable a focus on common techniques of rhetoric, performance, and theatricality.Footnote ³⁰ A rhetorical focus highlights the larger cultural-aesthetic connections among these genres, bringing to the fore similarities common to these otherwise quite different works composed for distinctive audiences.

From a functional standpoint, the Greek kontakia and Jewish poems share essential objectives or practical consequences in common, which help to determine the rhetorical techniques employed. As Derek Krueger writes, with regard to Christian liturgy in antiquity:

In a similar vein, Georgia Frank notes:

Both Jewish and Christian poets were attempting similar feats: to make real, in a physical and not simply intellectual way, the experience of sacred history. In order to do so, these poets employed similar techniques, chosen for their appeal and their effectiveness.

The first poem to examine in this context is the kontakion “Mary at the Cross,” which recreates Mary's conversation with Jesus as he processes through Jerusalem bearing the cross upon which he will be crucified.Footnote ³³ In her discussion of this poem, Margaret Alexiou notes what is a larger point in the present essay: the idea that poets were not isolated from the literary conventions of their day but rather fully aware of and able to make use of the techniques from the culture in which they lived. A vivid poem, an engaging poem “works” regardless of confession. “Mary at the Cross” is one of Romanos's finest hymns, and it offers an excellent example of how the techniques discussed above in the Jewish context appear, as well, in Christian Byzantine hymnography.Footnote ³⁴

The poet begins his work, not atypically, with a summons to all who are present to join Mary in praising Jesus and concludes with communal praise of Jesus's sacrifice. The mother lamenting her Son's suffering recalls the mournful speaker of the Aramaic poem “I Shall Go Forth Weeping” and the figure of Lady Zion in the first Qallir work, as well as the role of women as mourners more generally, but of course the details of this scene are specific to the Christian context. The rest of the work consists of a dialogue between mother and Son.

The rhetorical feature most evident in this poem is the ethopoiia, the drawing of Mary and Jesus as characters and the poet's ability to present the same scenario from the perspective of each. Romanos thus crafts for his listeners the pathos of Mary's position not in abstraction but through dramatic and emotional confrontation with her suffering Son. Throughout the work, she calls Jesus “my Son,” underscoring her personal claim on the universal Savior; Jesus reciprocates, calling Mary “my mother” even as he responds to her emotional arguments in lofty philosophical tones. This dialogue, which is fascinating in its own right for the insight it offers into theology and gender construction, among other elements, is not static but dynamic. The speakers engage with each other, respond to each other, make claims on each other, and move each other. Mary questions, interrogates, and protests, asserting “I will say what I feel! . . . I am afraid and, anxious to see you, I weep and cry out” (strophe 11).Footnote ³⁵ Jesus responds to her and reasons with her; he attempts to transform her distress into hope, her sobs into shouts of joy, to reorient her from the present to the future, from the apparent to the real. And yet, as the poem concludes, Mary still struggles against her emotions—“I am overcome, oh my Son, I am overcome by love”Footnote ³⁶—while Jesus tells her, “Mother, do not weep / be not disturbed” (strophe 16). Mary's anguished cry, “My Son and my God”—the refrain that concludes every strophe—is never wholly softened by Jesus's coolly logical rhetoric.Footnote ³⁷

The dialogue out of which this poem is constructed contains hints of the gestures and appeals to the senses that may have enriched the performance. Exhortation (a register of speech for which a library of gestures is known) often combines with imagistic, visual details in this work, as in strophe 7, where Mary says, “My Son, see how I wipe tears from my eyes!” In general, Romanos here emphasizes the aural: Jesus counters his mother's assertions that she will “cry out” and give voice to her grief with instructions to use her voice positively: to “proclaim” (strophe 4), to “shout out in joy” (strophe 6), to “cry out” (strophe 9), and to “shout out once more” (strophe 10). It is as if Mary is following the script of the mourning mother (the script in evidence in the Aramaic lament “I Shall Go Forth Weeping”), while Jesus tries to write for her a new script: her performance is of the old way, his of the new.

Where “Mary at the Cross” represents a struggle to reframe tragedy as triumph, the hymn “The Victory of the Cross” depicts triumph with deft touches of tragicomic humor. Formally, both of these are “conventional” kontakia; they share the same basic formal features and structures. Part of what makes Romanos such a remarkable poet is the room he finds within convention for inventiveness and creativity. Stable form need not mean static content.

The plot of “The Victory of the Cross” is straightforward, and the subject of this poem subtly complements that of Qallir's poem on Behemoth and Leviathan: where Qallir takes his listeners to heaven, so to speak, Romanos takes them to hell. In the first prologue, the poet sets the scene, leading his audience to visualize a stage built in the imagination: the flaming sword that blocked entry to Eden has been replaced by a cross adorned with “Death's sting” and “Hades's victory”; Jesus, directly addressed by the narrator as “you . . . my Savior,” beckons all to enter.Footnote ³⁸ As the narrator and Jesus move aside to permit the story to unfold, they join the congregation in watching the “show.” In the body of the poem, the first nine strophes recount the dialogue between scornful Belial (Satan, Sin) and gluttonous Hades (Death): Hades frets uneasily while Belial tries to cheer him up; indeed, Belial takes credit for the crucifixion. In the ninth strophe, Hades relays some bad news to Belial: the Good Thief has recognized the sovereignty of Christ; this precipitates a crisis for Belial in strophe 10, and he seeks refuge with Hades in strophe 11.Footnote ³⁹ The two malignant, despondent figures sing a duet in strophes 12 and 13, lamenting their loss of control over the realm of the dead, and the poem concludes with the two figures consoling each other in their defeat. In the final strophe the narrator resumes narration; he turns to Jesus in direct addresses, thanking him for restoring to humanity the possibility of paradise.

The characters of Belial and Hades are vividly drawn, outstanding examples of ethopoiia as conveyed by enargeia. As soon as he enters the scene, in strophe 1, Hades describes his physical discomfort in graphic terms: someone has driven a spike into his heart, pierced him with a lance, rent him in two. His innards burn and churn. In a particularly vivid and, literally, visceral image, Adam rises in his throat like bile. Belial, for his part, is portrayed in the second strophe with equally vivid descriptors: he slithers and hisses, and he rebukes Hades for all of his—both physical and verbal—bellyaching.Footnote ⁴⁰

As the dialogue continues, it becomes increasingly easy to imagine a lively physical staging of the work. In the third strophe, Hades urges Belial: “Stop! Open your eyes! Look! / The root of the tree [the cross] has pierced my soul / it has gone deep into my gut.” The appeal to Belial to “look” functions as an appeal to the listeners as well, and the dramatic image of a cruciform stake in Hades's belly suggests the use of a simple but effective prop or gesticulation. Several strophes later, Hades graphically narrates the drama unfolding up above in the human realm: “The earth is quaking, the sky is black / rocks are splitting, the temple veil is in shreds / those in the tombs are rising up and corpses shout” (strophe 7). In strophe 11, Belial “screams” and begs Hades to save him; in strophe 16 he says, “Wail! I shall echo your groans / let us weep as we behold the tree we planted.” The language of the poem itself is so rich with implied gestures and such over-the-top emotion that even on the page we can almost hear and see it.

In terms of staging, a number of the strophes contain unmarked changes of speaker, a feature that, as in the Aramaic lament “Sing for Us” and Qallir's piyyut “When Her Quota is Filled,” suggests that the performer, if the piece was performed by a single individual, indicated and developed character by some physical, embodied means. The dualistic qualities of this final portion of the kontakion challenge our ability to envision its performance by a soloist. The final stanza in which Hades and Belial speak (strophe 17) contains intricate dialogue, with each character apparently speaking to the other in alternation and then uttering their final lines in unison:

Certainly it is possible to read this all in a single voice, but the plural pronouns raise the possibility of performing the text as a duet, an aesthetically pleasing option if not a requirement.Footnote ⁴¹ Through the use of such performative techniques, the poet not only lets his listeners “eavesdrop” on the experience of two villains as their triumph turns to defeat; by doing so, he creates for his listeners the opposite of his characters’ experience: the characters celebrate a victory, the crucifixion, which is transformed into a defeat, while the congregation experiences a defeat, the crucifixion, which becomes a victory. Those who were powerful are brought low, and those who were at their mercy are exalted. The liturgical experience reinforces the theological truth.