no

R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

at least twice and became an important source of Roman history for many late Roman
and Byzantine historians, including Malalas, while the Kaisergeschichte may have been
translated into Greek as well. Thus, the tendency of history in late antiquity was for
conciseness, not the voluminous encyclopedic accounts that characterize Hellenistic
and early imperial histories.
A closer parallel to Malalas’history than the Hellenistic universal histories is Oro-
sius’ Septem libri historiarum contra paganos, written about one hundred years earlier.
Like Malalas, Orosius prefaces his breviarium-$ty\e. history of Rome with an account
of the Old Testament and the Greek past, though he interweaves the three in a much
more chronologically skillful manner than does his Greek counterpart. The history of
John of Antioch, probably written soon after the reign of Anastasius, is another im-
portant parallel, insofar as his work likewise seems to have been a universal history, but
one of a much reduced size in comparison with those mentioned earlier. It was written
in a much higher literary register than was Malalas’work, and if we can judge from the
level of detail in the surviving fragments it may have been somewhat longer as well;
nevertheless, it must have been very much the same sort of work. Other similar works
would appear to be those of Eustathius of Epiphaneia, who covered a period from
Creation down to 502, and perhaps Domninus, who is otherwise unknown outside
of Malalas. The disappearance of such works has been the biggest stumbling block to
recognizing the true roots of Malalas’work.
All told, then, Malalas’work is not a chronicle but rather a type of breviarium, and
when we think about his antecedents we should be thinking about Diodorus, Diony-
sius, Eutropius, and Orosius, rather than chronicles like the Parian Marble or Eusebius
of Caesarea. In many ways, Malalas is very similar to the somewhat later genre that
we have called a “universal breviarium” that is a history that covers the history of the
world down to roughly the time of writing in a greatly reduced narrative form. A few
examples of this genre are George the Monk’s Χρονική ίστορίσ (ca. 842); Symeon the
Logothete (959); Cedrenus’ Σύνοψις ιστοριών, which ends in 1057 but was written
in the twelfth century; Zonaras”EmTO|Liq ιστοριών (in8); and the Σύνοψις χρονική
(i20i), which is usually attributed to Theodore Scutariotes, though without good evi-
dence to connect him with it.40 There are some differences among these works - Zo-
naras, for instance, is both longer and more traditionally narrative than are the serial
biographies characteristic of most of the others - but all are still breviaria·. they cover
almost 6,500 years of history by their authors’ reckoning, something no Greek or Ro-
man classicizing narrative history could ever encompass. The main difference between
Malalas and these later breviaria is that they devote much more space to the events of
the Old and New Testaments and ecclesiastical history than he does; they are more
clearly influenced by Christian chronography; and his is still fundamentally a work of
narrative history, while each of the others, with such rare exceptions as Zonaras, is a
collection of short independent biographies.

40 See ODB, pp. 1912-13.