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R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

in the mode of consularia; an unknown chronicler continued Marcellinus down to at
least 548; Victor ofTunnuna in 567 and Marius of Avenches in 581 continued Prosper,
and in 590 John of Biclar continued Victor in turn. John is the last chronicler in the
long tradition that merged the Classical and Hellenistic chronicles of antiquity, with
historical apologetics of the Hellenistic world, and with the Latin tradition of anno-
tated fasti and consularia.24 After 600, works inspired by that tradition continued to
be written in both Greek and Latin, but they were different in one key respect - event
and content was now more important than the chronological framework. Thus Isidore
and Bede wrote not pure chronicles, but chronicle epitomes, in which existing chroni-
cles (and other kinds of histories and non-historical texts) were epitomized down into
an annotated list of patriarchs, kings, and emperors, and the annual framework was
abandoned.25 Similar changes can be detected in Greek texts, as we will see when we
return to Malalas below.
What, then, constitutes a chronicle as a distinctive genre? The genre of historical
writing whose characteristics we have just sketched is fairly simple and highly consis-
tent across the two thousand years we have just covered: one or more complementary
systems of annually noted chronological reckoning; a privileging of the chronological
framework over its content; and the conveyance of event and content in a relatively
short space, which itself imposes a telegraphic, paratactic style - everything that allows
the past to be grasped uno a conspectu. This is a working definition, the rules of which
were understood and deployed by the ancients themselves, consistently, over two mil-
lennia. It is in light of this definition that we can now return to the question of what
type of historical work Malalas wrote - and it will be clear that what Malalas wrote
does not belong to the genre of chronicle as sketched out here.
Let us set out why that should be. The confusion between what a chronicle is and
what Malalas’ history is always said to be can be seen most clearly in the article on
Byzantine historiography in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. After accu-
rately describing and naming all the important late Roman Latin chronicles, Angold
and Whitby move on to Byzantine chronicles, starting with Malalas. Here they are
forced to admit that even though Malalas wrote a chronicle, “unusually for a chronicle
he did not construct an annual frame for his narrative.”26 27 Such an annual frame is,
of course, the major defining feature of the chronicle genre. And if we compare the
form and content of the surviving Assyrian, Babylonian, Hellenistic Greek, Latin, and
Syriac chronicles that have just been described to Malalas, we can see that he has no
similarities with them apart from the fact that his text is relatively brief and he starts
“at the beginning.”2? Those are not meaningful similarities, but are part of the nature
of writing about the past in a late Roman and Christian world, and we have already
seen that the title of Chronographia conventionally assigned to the text has no eviden-
24 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 184-87.
25 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 189-208.
26 Angold/Whitby, “Historiography”, p. 840.
27 See the comments of Mango/Scott, Theophanes, p. liii.