The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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who treats any text that someone, somewhere, has called (or might be tempted to call)
a “chronicle”; and that it is not enough to assume a technical content on the basis of
preconceived notions within a given historical subfield. The need for this attention to
definition became clear to us in the course of writing a general history of the chronicle
genre from Near Eastern antiquity to the high Middle Ages, itself a prolegomenon
to a new edition and commentary on ancient Latin chronicling traditions. We de-
termined that such an overview was needed after realizing that many long-standing
beliefs about late antique chronicles did not correspond to the observable evidence.
Thus the Latin chronicle tradition began neither in the Easter tables of late antiquity,
nor in the teleological chronography of Greek Christians, but was instead part of a
continuous tradition reaching back to the Babylonian Near East. Recognizing this
continuity required us to then define what exactly we understood to be continuous in
the chronicle tradition. By examining the consistent features of chronicles, we were
able to arrive at a working definition of the chronicle genre, and its various related
genres and subgenres - a working definition that seems to us to correspond to the
generic boundaries observed in practice by the ancient world. We would like to stress
that these are working definitions and that we do not regard them as prescriptive. On
the contrary, what we seek is to encourage other scholars who are working on a text
that - someone, somewhere - might call a chronicle, to define their terms, to explain
what it is that does or does not make a chronicle a chronicle, and if that explanation
does not match our working definitions, to present explicit alternatives to them. We
would like argument to replace assumption, presentation to replace presumption.
In order to arrive at our working definition we looked at the works that were ac-
tually referred to as “chronicles” by Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman authors. The
name was first applied by Apollodorus to his brief chronological history, in the later
second century BC, and there are references in Latin to similarly titled Greek works.
Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’ Chronici canones, and the fifth- and sixth-century
continuations of Jerome, are the first extant examples of works to which the title of
chronicle was applied by the ancients themselves. The style and form of these late
antique chronicles have analogues in other extant sources - epigraphic, papyrological,
and literary - between the third century BC and sixth century AD. Form and style
demonstrate a consistent, diagnostic typology of the chronicle genre that is visible not
just in Late Antiquity, but also in much earlier texts - and in much later ones, in a
period when generic consistency was less precise.11
The basic characteristics we consider are as follows. Time is central to any text
that might be called a chronicle (χρόνος, ‘time’, is right there in the word itself), but
since all historical texts are necessarily about time, that is not enough to constitute a
definition in itself. Instead, what distinguishes the chronicle is the primacy of time
over event: chronicles are more concerned with logging the passage of past time than
with logging past events. That is not say that events are unimportant to chroniclers, but

ii Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 1-62.