The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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tiary warrant. We are therefore forced to ask, using an inverted version of the English
expression, If it doesn’t walk like a chronicle or quack like a chronicle, how can it still
be a chronicle?
To further reinforce this conclusion, let us survey the broader field of Byzantine
historiography to determine which of the works more familiar to the readers of this
volume belong to the ancient genre of chronicle. Apart from actual continuations
or reworkings of Eusebius, such as that of Diodorus of Tarsus or the Antiochene
continuation of 350 (neither of which is still extant, though the latter can be partly
reconstructed),28 we have a few references to chronological works from the immedi-
ately post-Eusebian period, particularly those of the well-known Annianus and Pan-
odorus.29 But the accounts we have of these works, especially from Syncellus, make it
sound as though they were more like annotated chronographs, rather than chronicles
like that of Eusebius. An annotated chronograph is a historical work that analyses
and discusses chronological matters in detail while laying out a chronological account
of the past.30 The best surviving example of this type of text is the work of Syncellus,
and we can also see a similar structure and content in the fragments of Julius Afri-
canus’ Chronographiae and the first volume of Eusebius’ chronicle, the Chronographia.
The main difference between Africanus and Eusebius on the one hand and Syncellus
on the other is that the former present their history in the form of regnal-year lists,
while Syncellus, writing long after the appearance of the influential Chronici canones of
Eusebius, includes many excerpts from that work as well. Nevertheless, none of these
works presents an annalistic account of history, and there is no evidence that Annianus
or Panodorus did either.
Our first evidence for chronicles after Eusebius comes from consularia, a native
Latin tradition that saw a renaissance in the fourth and fifth centuries, but was already
in deep decline in the sixth, as we saw above.31 (These consularia, which as we shall see
are sources for a number of later Greek texts, are identical to the sources that Brian
Croke and others call “city chronicles,” and while that identification is correct, it is
important to note that these were not centrally compiled or official texts but rather
privately-compiled and subliterary works.32) From the late ancient Greek context, we
have the Consularia Berolinensia, Consularia Scaligeriana (better known as the Excerpta
Latina Barbari or the Barbaras Scaligert), and the Consularia Golenischevensia (better
known as the Golenischev papyrus or the Alexandrian World Chronicle). Although
the first of these three works dates to the fifth century and the latter two to the second
quarter of the sixth, they are for the most part simply updated and augmented trans-
lations of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century Latin consularia produced in Alexandria.
28 For the continuators of Eusebius, see Burgess, Studies, pp. 113-14, esp. n. 7.
29 For these two writers, see Burgess, Studies, p. 113 n. 3.
30 For annotated chronographs’, see Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 61,117.
31 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 35-57, 60,156-87.
32 See Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 360-1, with 35-57 and 133-72. Consularia will be the sub-
ject of volume two of Mosaics of Time.