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R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

and they wrote within generic restrictions despite having only a limited and confusing
vocabulary of genre.
We should start with a seeming contradiction - the title under which Malalas’
historical work is conventionally known - that can stand for our overall perspective as
ancient historians coming to a (relatively late) text: the introduction to the now stan-
dard English translation of Malalas by Jeffreys, Jeffreys, and Scott. Under the rubric
of “Genre”, we are told that Malalas wrote a chronicle, or a work that was originally
called a χρονογραφία - and to the best of our knowledge, this seems to encapsulate
the consensus view of the past one hundred years of scholarship.1 That consensus view
immediately raises questions, however, because the conventional title ascribed to Ma-
lalas’work - whatever its age or currency - is problematic on two counts. First, there is
no manuscript evidence for it. Manuscript P calls the work an Εγκύκλιον, whatever
that is supposed to mean (it is odd enough that some take it simply as the first line
of, or the heading to, the preface);2 manuscript A calls it an Εκλογή των χρονικών,
perhaps best rendered as A Collection of Excerpts from Chronicles’, though as we
shall see that description applies only to chapter eighteen; B calls it an Έκθεσις ή
περί χρόνων καί κτίσεως κόσμου, An Exposition concerning Chronology and the
Creation of the World’; and the Slavonic translation likewise calls it the equivalent of
έκθεσις.3 In other words, the work is not called Χρονογραφία in the manuscripts.
That conventional name derives instead from John of Damascus, who cited the work
using this word in the eighth century.4 But there is nothing to prove that he used
this word with knowledge of the work’s authentic title, rather than as a mere generic
description. After all, the excerptors of De uirtutibus et uitiis and De insidiis call what
Malalas wrote a χρονική, ιστορία, χρονική ιστορία, and ιστορία χρονική από
Άδάμ, and attribute it to John Malelas (sic), John of Antioch, and John the monk (De
uirtutibus et uitiis, vol. i, pp. 2.29-30,157.1,163.20,164.1; De insidiis, p. 58.22,151.2,176.18,
206.5). That4S to say, there is no evidence that any of these was a technical term, drawn
from the title or heading of the original work; rather the words are very general and
describe the sort of work that we would call “history” (or histoire, storia, or Geschichte)
at the loosest, least technical end of that word’s wide semantic field.5
A second point, and one that is at least as problematic, is the fact that χρονογραφία
is not the Greek word that designates a work that modern scholars would recognize
as a chronicle. Χρονογραφία has two basic meanings in Greek, and these remai-
ned stable from the late Hellenistic period to the fifteenth century. The root meaning
of the word denotes a “chronological count/reckoning/calculation,” and thus it can
1 Jeffreys/Jeffreys/Scott, The Chronicle, p. xxi. In the companion volume Brian Croke ventures to suggest
that it was originally called χρονική ιστορία (Jeffreys/Croke/Scott, Studies, p. 27), but on this see
below.
2 Jeffreys/Croke/Scott, Studies, p. 168. Croke believes it is a title (p. 27).
3 Thurn, Chronographia, p. 3.
4 Orationes de imaginibus 3.68: Έκ τής χρονογραφίας Ίωάννου Αντιόχειας τού καί Μαλάλα.
5 See Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, p. 284-5, f°r a selection of other words and phrases that came
to describe histories, chronicles, and other historical works in the Byzantine Empire.