No Byzantine service can be celebrated from one book. The services' fixed frame lives in the Horologion, the book of hours; the weekly cycle of eight tones, resurrection hymns rotating through the weeks, lives in the Octoechos; the moving cycle around Pascha lives in the Triodion for Lent and the Pentecostarion for the paschal season; and the fixed calendar of the months lives in the Menaion. On any given day, several of these books contribute texts to the same Vespers or Matins, and the art of the Byzantine liturgy is their combination: hymns from the Octoechos and the Menaion interleave in prescribed ratios, and when a great feast falls on a Sunday the rules of precedence decide which book yields. Those rules are the business of the Typikon, without which the shelf of books is unusable.
The Menaion's texts descend from the great hymnographic tradition of Byzantium, with contributions attributed to John of Damascus, Cosmas of Maiuma, Joseph the Hymnographer and many others, expanded and edited over centuries in the monasteries of Palestine, Constantinople and Athos. Translated into Church Slavonic, the books equipped the Slavic churches; modern translations continue the process into English and other languages, usually beginning with the Festal Menaion and growing as communities can sustain more. The system looks forbidding, and is, but it delivers something singular: a daily worship whose texts almost never repeat, cycling through a poetic library assembled over a thousand years.