io6 R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski
From a similar context comes the work of Marcellinus comes, a Latin chronicler of
the second quarter of the sixth century writing in Constantinople.33 He too used con-
sularia, from both east and west, as sources, at least one of which he shared with the
Chronicon paschale (viz., the Descriptio consulum, discussed below). In spite of living in
Constantinople, however, Marcellinus was solely influenced and inspired by Jerome’s
translation and continuation of Eusebius’ Chronici canones and Latin consularia, and
not by Greek chronicles.
Malalas is similar in date, of course, and there can be no doubt that a variety
of sixth-century Constantinopolitan chronicles and consularia were cannibalized to
produce the final book of his text. That said, the fact that Malalas’ Book 18 was com-
piled from chronicles, does not make it a chronicle itself. His method of compilation
shows that he paid very little attention to the chronological apparatus of his sources:
although his narrative does appear superficially to be somewhat chronicle-like, the
actual chronology and structure of Book 18 are frankly a mess. This sloppiness proves
that it cannot ever have been intended to mirror the formal structure of any chronicle
or consularia that its author had ever seen. It is just a selection of what the author
thought were particularly interesting notices from these types of works: Malalas is a
witness to late antique chronicling traditions, but he is not a part of them.
Similar evidence for sixth-century chronicles is provided by the Chronicon paschale,
which was composed around 630. It was constructed around a Greek translation of
the Descriptio consulum, Latin consularia that were originally compiled in Gaul in the
middle of the 340s but were later continued annually in Latin in Constantinople down
to the 390s, as we saw above. The Consularia Berolinensia that we mentioned earlier is
a partial witness to this same translated Latin text. The Chronicon paschale takes this
annotated consular list between 509 BC and AD 383 and expands it with a wide variety
of different sources, many of them neither chronicles nor consularia. The sources of
the Chronicon are often narrative in structure (indeed, the text is an important witness
to that of Malalas) and the author can depart from the annual chronicle structure for
many pages at a time. Thus the Chronicon paschale is a truly eclectic work that incor-
porates and combines many different sorts of texts, while still fundamentally relying
on the annual chronographic structure so basic to the chronicle genre. Because of that,
the Chronicon remains essentially a chronicle itself, and its text shows that chronicles
and consularia were still being compiled in the Greek world during the early seventh
century. Furthermore, it bears witness to other sixth-century chronicles that it used as
sources.
Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between the Chronicon paschale and the next
surviving or attested chronicle, the Χρονογραφία of Theophanes, written almost
two hundred years later in 814. As we noted above, Theophanes wrote a true chro-
nicle, though like the Chronicon paschale, it is much more eclectic than its more rigidly
shaped predecessors, especially in terms of the lengthy material it adds from non-

33 See Croke, Count Marcellinus and Croke, The Chronicle.