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R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

it demonstrates that there is nothing about the various names assigned to Malalas’
work that specifies the genre in which he worked or that helps us to distinguish what
he wrote from any other type of history A different approach is needed. Rather than
working from putative titles or descriptions of his work, or worse from the tralatitious
“certainties” of modern scholarship, we should come to Malalas from the question of
genre.
When discussing genre, we must consider two basic points. The first is that in the
ancient world genre was determined by content and form, not title. Poets did not write
about epic battles in hendecasyllables or elegiac verse, nor did they write love poetry in
dactylic hexameters, unless there was a clear (and usually humorous) rationale for do-
ing so. While genre boundaries undoubtedly loosened in the Hellenistic period and in
Late Antiquity, even then Jewish and Christian poets who wished to cast the Old and
New Testaments into a more fitting form used tragic and epic metres, not elegiacs or
lesser Asclepiads.The second point about genre is that it develops on the basis of avail-
able past models, without knowledge of future developments. What that means is that
we need to judge Malalas in terms of what went before, not what came after. Malalas
was not writing in the eighth century or the twelfth, and to judge his work in terms of
later centuries’ historical genres (whether their titles, their descriptions, or their con-
tents) can only give a false impression. That is to say, we must look to the Hellenistic,
imperial, and late antique periods when trying to classify what type of work Malalas
did, or did not, write. After all, when we consider the great divide between Late An-
tiquity and the Byzantine period that looms at the end of the seventh century, Malalas
sits clearly on the earlier side of the break: despite his non-Attic language and style,
he remains a distinctly late antique author. To define Malalas’ work by reference to
anything written after the sixth century is therefore a distortion of historical method.
Even once that point is granted, the question of defining the chronicle genre is vastly
complicated by the wide range of different types of texts to which the word “chronicle”
has been applied. These vary not just across disciplines and specialties, but even scholars
working in the same specialist field will use the word “chronicle” to designate works
between which very few generic similarities are visible. Imprecise and encompassing
nomenclature is not in itself the problem here. The word “novel” in English can include
everything from Harry Potter, to crime thrillers, from creative non-fiction to chick-
lit, historical romance to unreadable experiment. It can do that, and cause no trouble,
because no one expects the word to have technical content. But definition does start to
matter wherever there is an expectation of technical content, as there is with the word
“chronicle.” Scholars use the word expecting it to describe a specific genre, although
even within specialisms, there is little agreement about what a chronicle actually is.
In our own studies on the genre, we argue not that any one definition of “chron-
icle” be accepted as correct or exclusive, but rather that there is a real need to pursue
questions of definition; that the question of definition must be addressed by anyone
άλλων χρονογράφων (line 820), with reference to a word that does not appear in the Chronici cano-
nes (κονγιάριον = congiarium).