The Historiographical Position of John Malalas 103
spread from Cynegius’ resting place in Spain to every corner of the western empire.
Another group of consularia also developed in the West, and was given the collective
name of Consularia Italica by Mommsen. No extensive uncontaminated version of this
multifarious text survives, just half a folium of the Consularia Marsibergensia. All the
other evidence for the Consularia Italica tradition survives in consularia, chronicles or
compendia of the sixth century, and their texts seem to suggest that compilation began
in the late fourth century. One strand of this tradition is visible as early as 452 in the
Gallic Chronicle of that year; another version can be found in Alexandria after the 460s;
and yet another was used by Cassiodorus in 518. But the most popular version seems
to have run down to 493 and is attested by the majority of the extant witnesses: the
Consularia Vindobonensia and the closely related Excerpta Sangallensia, the Consularia
Hafniensia, the second part of the Anonymus Valesianus, the Liber pontificalis of Agnel-
lus of Ravenna, the Paschale Gampanum, the Gallic Chronicle of yn, and the chronicle
of Marcellinus comes, among many others. After 493, evidence for continuous annual
compilation of these consularia ceases, and we must infer that the common version
drawn on by our disparate sources broke off in that year. The last of the various contin-
uations of the Consularia Italica was completed around 575.23
The breaking off of the Consularia Italica in 493 is perhaps no coincidence, for
the coherence of the Roman empire was breaking up at just the same time. For that
reason, the consularia genre as a whole, so popular throughout the fourth and fifth
centuries, had no future, both because information they reported was no longer dis-
seminated centrally as it had been before, and undoubtedly because the consulship
itself disappeared after 541. Most important of all, however, was the ever increasing
significance of the chronicle as a mode of writing about the past. Many fifth-cen-
tury authors opted for the more expressive genre of the chronicle, abandoning the
highly restrictive telegraphing of information that consularia required, but retaining
its consular dating system, more easily handled than regnal years and more generally
comprehensible than (now extinct) Olympiads or any alternative dating system. As
chronicles continued to flourish, having taken over one of the consularia’s chief attrac-
tions, they simply absorbed the consularia genre into themselves, a process accelerated
and consummated by the end of consular dating on the one hand and the break-up of
imperial dissemination of information on the other.
Chronicles did, after all, continue to flourish. The impact of Jerome’s translation
was immediate, and within about fifty years enough time had passed for others in Gaul,
Spain, Italy, and Constantinople to think about continuing it down to their own time:
Prosper in 433 and two continuations to 445 and 455; the author of the Gallic Chronicle
of 452·, Hydatius in 468/469; the author of the Gallic Chronicle of yir, and Marcellinus
comes in 518, who continued it to 534. By the sixth century enough time had passed
that Jerome’s continuators themselves inspired a third generation of Latin chronicles:
Cassiodorus wrote an epitome and continuation of Livy, Jerome, and Prosper in 519

23 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 177-84.