Secular Writings

When we think of Kassia, we often picture the ninth-century Byzantine abbess at her writing desk, shaping hymns that still resonate in Orthodox liturgies. Yet beyond her celebrated troparia and canons, Kassia also wrote something less known but equally radical: a collection of 261 short, secular verses modeled on ancient Greek epigrams and aphorisms. 

First edited by Krumbacher in 1897, these gnomic verses or maxims reveal another dimension of her artistry, one that transforms the tools of rhetoric into instruments of meditation. They move away from the solemn, public voice of liturgy and into the intimate terrain of reflection, ethics, and daily life. They are not confessions or narratives, but fragments of thinking—dense with rhythm and resonance. Taken together, they form a mosaic of ideas about friendship, gratitude, envy, wisdom, and moral strength.Their brevity and formal precision allowed them to circulate easily—through memory, recitation, and oral teaching—carrying moral and theological insight into the rhythms of daily life. For Kassia, the poetic line was not merely a container of doctrine but a living form of thought: something that could be repeated, inhabited, and reinterpreted across contexts.

Kassia’s secular writings thus belong to a longer, often discontinuous genealogy of women who have composed through writing as well as through sound. From Hildegard von Bingen’s visionary notations and poetic illuminations to Francesca Caccini’s theatrical songs and Fanny Hensel’s musical diaries, we see a recurring interlacing of music and text, composition and reflection, form and thought. Reading Kassia through this lineage allows us to imagine a history of women composers not only as a history of musical production but as one of writing—of inscription, reflection, and transmission. Her gnomic verses stand at the threshold of this tradition, offering one of the earliest testaments to a woman who composed her world in both sound and language, and whose voice continues to reverberate across the centuries as both poet and thinker in rhythm.

In contemporary feminist musicology and sound studies, Kassia’s dual authorship resonates as more than a historical curiosity; it becomes a critical point of return for thinking about voice, authorship, and embodiment. Her writing exposes the porous boundaries between the written and the sung, the reflective and the performative, the solitary and the communal. Scholars such as Susan McClary (1991, 1993), Suzanne Cusick (1994, 2006), and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2015, 2019) have shown how women’s musical practices often challenge the inherited hierarchies between text and sound, intellect and affect, contemplation and creation. Kassia’s work anticipates these tensions: her verses are not simply texts to be read but rhythmic utterances that call to be heard and inhabited. They inscribe a form of thinking-in-sound—a poetics of resonance—that reclaims composition as an embodied, epistemic act. In retrieving her gnomic verses today, we are not only revisiting a Byzantine abbess’s literary craft but reactivating a feminist lineage that hears writing itself as a mode of composition, and composition as a mode of thought.