The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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Perhaps the key fact from our point of view is that, between Malalas in the sixth
century and the Σύνοψις χρονική in the thirteenth, none of the works under dis-
cussion can be considered a chronicle, even though they are regularly so described
by Byzantinists. They do not list events in chronological order within an annalistic
framework, each passing year stated according to a basic chronological system. The
basic unit of the chronicle, as we saw, is the individual chronological entry (or annal’)
describing an event. In contrast, the basic unit of the late ancient and Byzantine bre-
viaria is the life or reign, and there is no requirement for chronological order within
that unit. Nor are the breviaria overly interested in chronology beyond the obligatory
accounting of the years from Creation, which was nothing more than the standard
dating system of the time, just like our modern AD system. Again, Malalas clearly
resembles other breviaria here as well: his understanding of chronology is marginal
and confused, and he often perpetrates huge chronological mistakes in his narrative.
From the perspective of the ancient historian, Malalas did not write a chronicle
or anything the ancient world would have recognized as such. He wrote a long bre-
viarium that drew on chronicle sources in a very few places, while largely failing to
handle chronological complexity with any skill. That said, the final question we need
to address is the pressing issue of “so what”? We have often found medievalists or
Byzantinists who cannot see why the question of what to call a particular text should
exercise us so greatly - when titles are time-honored and traditional, sanctioned by a
century or more of usage, why should anyone fuss about their accuracy? In answer we
might again cite Angold and Whitby’s confusion over why Malalas did not arrange
his text like a chronicle - a problem neither they nor anyone else has tried to explain,
even though they persist in calling his text a chronicle regardless. It seems to us that
Byzantinists have found it possible to avoid rigorous attention to nomenclature for
two main reasons. First, not many real chronicles survive in Greek after Eusebius,
and Byzantinists rarely have any need to look at Jerome’s translation of the Chronici
canones or the fragments of earlier surviving chronicles, so the contradiction is never
obvious, except when the two are juxtaposed, as by Angold and Whitby. The other
reason is that the Byzantines themselves were pretty sloppy with titles and descrip-
tions of historical texts. As a result, there was no ready-made generic template, and
so things started with a kind of free-for-all, where anything could be anything. We
have counted at least thirty different words and phrases that the Byzantines used to
describe and entitle works of history - almost as if they were competing to avoid using
the same name twice. Equally, though, we can find Byzantine authors happy to use the
single word “chronicle” to mean nothing more than “history (histoire, storia, Geschichte)
and use it describe the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Cas-
sius Dio, Malalas, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Appian, Diodorus Siculus,
Zosimus, John of Antioch, Procopius, Menander Protector, and Theophylact.41 That
makes it clear that Byzantine writers and readers had lost any real sense of genre or

41 See Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 285-6.