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R.W. Burgess, Michael Kulikowski

proper nomenclature, which means that no description or title used by any Byzantine
author can be relied upon to tell us anything useful for the hermeneutics of Byzantine
historiography - or be used to guide our own analyses of genre. To put it differently,
we cannot imagine anyone calling Procopius a chronicle simply because certain Byz-
antine writers did, so the reverse ought logically to be true as well.
That is, the way we classify a text does in fact matter. We find ourselves in a po-
sition where everything that is not a classicizing narrative history like Thucydides or
Procopius can be described by Byzantinists as a “world chronicle”. That sows confusion
and does not help us to understand Byzantine historiography or its development. At
very best it perpetuates the old nineteenth-century division between proper’ history,
composed by careful and educated researchers for rich and educated readers, and not
proper’ history, cobbled together by and for ignorant monks. We need to break with
this imprecision and appreciate the many genres of Byzantine history that existed and
understand how each developed and influenced, and was influenced by, other genres.
We can begin that task here by discarding much of what we believe we know about
Byzantine historiographical genres and instead study Malalas solely in terms of his
content and form, in relation to what came after of course, but particularly in relation
to what came before: the sort of the histories that Malalas himself would have read and
used as sources. Only then can we really begin to understand what it was that he really
wrote, which in the context of ancient genre is clearly a breviarium and not a chronicle.
Appendix
Byzantine Historical Genres
We would argue that the development of Byzantine historiography would make more
sense if histories were divided into the following categories rather than simply into
classicizing narrative histories and chronicles (i.e. everything else). It should be noted
that one can quickly find works that do not fit neatly into these rather strict categories,
such as the Chronicon paschale, Chronicle 14 of the Kleinchroniken, Theophanes, and
Ps-Cyril’s Χρονογραφίκόν σύντομον (see below). Such is the eclectic nature of By-
zantine historiography and so one cannot be overly proscriptive. The genres we suggest
tend to be black and white, but the works themselves are usually some shade of grey.
These categories are primarily designed to cover secular history, but the two major
genres of classicizing history and breviarium are obviously suitable for analysing eccle-
siastical history as well, Eusebius being taken as the template for the former.
The following is based on the list presented in Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of
Time, pp. 59-62.
i. Classicizing narrative histories. These are histories written in the traditional clas-
sicizing form. Such works include Zosimus, Procopius, Agathias, Menander Pro-
tector, and Theophylact Simocatta. These works were written by authors who saw
themselves writing in the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides.