The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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the previous centuries had had little influence on him. Christian historiography
tended to treat human history in a binary fashion, as the history of the Old Testament
on the one hand and of the Roman empire on the other, with a short account of the
Persians, Macedonians, and Ptolemies to link the two. By contrast, Malalas’ work is
fundamentally an account of Roman history - Books 6,7, and 9-18 - prefaced with a
short history of the Greek world in Books 1-2, 4-6 and 8. Malalas’ only real conces-
sions to Christian historiography are that he begins his narrative with Creation and
that he then, in order to provide the expected chronology for the work, grafts bits of
Old Testament history into his existing narrative in Books 1-2 and especially 3. It is
clear from his surprisingly cursory treatment of the Old Testament that his influences
lie more in secular and pagan historiography than in Christian.
Our search for Malalas’roots must therefore begin with Greek universal histories,
which first appear in the Hellenistic period with Ephorus (whose work is lost), and
with Hellenistic chronicles, like the Parian Marble and the works of Eratosthenes,
Apollodorus, and Castor of Rhodes at which we looked above.37 The biggest difference
between universal histories and Malalas, of course, is their bulk: Ephorus, for instance,
ended up with thirty books and Diodorus Siculus with forty. Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus is also a close parallel since his history encompasses only twenty books and like
Malalas he focuses on Rome, though Dionysius’books are much longer than Malalas’,
and Malalas does incorporate pre-Roman history. Malalas probably did not know
any of these authors directly, but the traditions their works established were no doubt
preserved and repeated throughout the Hellenistic, Roman, and late Roman periods.
In spite of the massive works written by Greek and Hellenistic historians like
Ephorus (thirty books) or Posidonius (fifty-two), the general trend in historical writ-
ing during the empire was towards breviaria and epitomes.38 Livy was reduced from
140 books down to short epitomes and periochae that can look for all the world like
chronicles, and other works like those of Velleius Paterculus and Florus reduced Ro-
man history to a small and manageable bulk. Greek historians must have been doing
the same thing, although no such histories survive, and no doubt chronicles filled
much of this need for history in reduced form: we know of a number of examples
of such chronicles from the second and third centuries culminating with Eusebius’
Chronici canones, and fragments of some from the second and third centuries still
survive, even on papyrus.39 The fourth century saw a veritable explosion of epitome
histories of Rome in Latin from the authors of the Kaisergeschichte and Epitome de cae-
saribus, to Aurelius Victor, Festus, and Eutropius. Eutropius was translated into Greek
37 For pre-Christian Greek chronicles, see Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 80-91.
38 It was pointed out at the conference that the word breviarium has more than one meaning, depending
on the context. Those with more of a religious background than a historiographical one will immedia-
tely think of breviaries, which are quite a different kind of text. The historiographical meaning emplo-
yed here goes back at least to Eutropius in the middle of the fourth century and is the standard modern
term used by scholars when describing these works in Latin, so there is clearly warrant for its use in an
historiographical context like this.
39 For these see Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 89-91,121, 283-4,313-16,343-9·