The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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tradition of Near Eastern chronicling was probably felt in Greece by the middle of the
fifth century BC.
In that century, local or civic histories called horoi first appeared in Ionia, though
because none survives save in small fragments and attestations, we cannot be sure
whether the horoi were chronicles in our definition of the word. The first true chronicle
attested in Greek may have been Hellanicus of Lesbos’ Priestesses of Hera at Argos:
organized, at least in part, by the years of the priestess at Argos, this recorded events
that took place in each year, not just in Argos, but across the Greek world. The exiled
Athenian polymath, Demetrius of Phaleron, composed what was more certainly a
chronicle around the turn of the fourth to the third century BC, but little of it survives.
The first extant Greek chronicle is epigraphic, the famous Parian Marble of 264/263
BC, which presents Greek history under lemmata assigned to specific years, beginning
with Cecrops in the year we would call 1581-1580 BC. The precise correspondence
between information found on the Parian Marble and later in textually transmitted
chronicles shows that a single chronicling tradition is at work and must therefore have
been developing for many generations before the Parian Marble was engraved.14
An important and long-lasting innovation to the chronicle genre came in the
third-century BC, when Eratosthenes, head of the Alexandrian Library, developed
the first deeply researched universal chronology of the Greek past. As we saw above,
he called his work the Chronographiae and began with the Trojan War, which he placed
in our 1184 BC. As his chronological framework, he used the four-year cycle of Olym-
piads starting with the first games of 776 BC. Eratosthenes’ chief successor was Apol-
lodorus, whose chronicle ran as far as 146 BC in its original edition, using Athenian
archons rather than Olympiads as its main chronological framework. The combination
of these two inspirational works was important: prose versions of Apollodorus, but
using the Olympiad chronology of Eratosthenes, became the standard chronographi-
cal works of the late Hellenistic period, right down to the third century AD. As such,
they were a decisive influence on Roman chronography.15 Indeed, the earliest Latin
chronicles were little more than Latinized versions of Apollodorus. In the first century
BC, Cornelius Nepos and T. Pomponius Atticus both wrote chronicles in imitation
of Apollodorus. Nepos’ work was a universal chronicle in three books, while Atticus’
Liber annalis was a chronicle of Roman history alone. These works revolutionized
Romans’understanding of their own past, because Nepos and Atticus made it possible
to establish chronological connections across differing systems of historical reckoning
and gave one the ability to see history uno in conspectu - at a single glance’ - as Cicero
put it.16 Enormous histories like Livy’s Ab urbe condita - ini4o books - were literary
products that, whatever their many merits, made it very difficult to distinguish relative
chronologies or find the dates of specific events. They were to be read, not to be used.
As with Eratosthenes and his successors in the Greek world, what Atticus’ chronicle
14 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 80-84.
15 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 84-91.
16 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 91-96.