At a time when Christianity was becoming the dominant religion in the Byzantine Roman Empire, Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485–565) was a composer of songs for festivals and rituals in late antique Constantinople. Most of his songs include dramatic dialogues or monologues woven with imagery from ordinary life, and his name became inseparably tied to the kontakion, a genre of dramatic hymn. Later Byzantine religious poets enthusiastically praised his creative virtuosity and a legend claimed that Romanos’s inspiration came directly from the Virgin Mary herself.