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Elizabeth Jeffreys

end;5 nor is it necessarily due to faults in intervening manuscripts, though at least one
demonstrable lacuna in Book 12 in the Baroccianus must result from a defective ex-
emplar.6 What is more, yet other witnesses from outside the Greek-speaking world -
using Latin, Syriac, Slavonic and ultimately Ethiopic - offer similar evidence. Rather
more than thirty years ago, I found myself immersed in many matters to do with the
text of John Malalas. One of these was the question of its transmission, which led to
a chapter in the collection of studies published in 1990.7 Lurking behind the question
of the chronicle’s transmission, but addressed only by implication in that chapter and
indeed in the volume of studies as a whole, was another question: how does one set
about editing a text of this nature? What I would like to offer today, in the company
of so many of those currently offering new insights into Malalas’ text and context, are
some musings produced on looking again at an area which once preoccupied me.
First, is the situation in which Malalas’ text has come down to us unusual? No,
not really. If one thinks in terms of survival through a single manuscript it is not dif-
ficult to find parallels: Zosimus, Theophanes Continuatus, and Leo the Deacon, for
example, all survive in unique manuscripts,8 while the sole manuscript of Bryennios’
ΎΛη ιστορίας is now lost so that a modern editor can only rely on the editioprinceps
from 1661 of the Jesuit Pierre Poussines, otherwise known as Petrus Possinus. One is
left pondering the vagaries of fate, historical accident and bottle-necks of transmis-
sion, and contrasting this with, for example, the amazing situation of Manasses’ Syn-
opsis chronike where there are around one hundred surviving witnesses, while Odysseus
Lampsides, the text’s most recent editor, has suggested that the chain of transmission
arguably demonstrates the existence of at least 600 more.9
Nor is it unusual to find texts intermingled, offering a mix of overlapping material
originating from a variety of sources with much in common but many differences. I
think, for example, of the confusion of alternative names found in the manuscripts for
versions of the tenth-century Logothete chronicle, names such as Leo Grammaticus
and Theodoros Melitenos, now satisfactorily sorted out with the core-material at-
tributed to one named author, Symeon Magister and Logothete, and securely available
in Staffan Wahlgren’s edition in the Corpus Fontium.10 This is another case where the
conventional term “chronicle” is a misnomer. From the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
tury there are the intermeshing texts that contain material connected with the Synopsis
chronike attributed to Theodoros Skoutariotes; here at least three manuscripts can be
5 Malalas, Chronographia, ed. Thurn, p. n*.
6 Malalas, Chronographia, ed. Thurn, pp. 225-27, at XII 24.
7 Jeffreys, “Malalas in Greek”.
8 Zosimus, in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 156; Leo the Deacon, in Paris, Biblio-
theque nationale de France, Par. gr. 1712; Theophanes Continuatus, in Vatican City, Biblioteca Aposto-
lica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 167. See also Snipes, “Chronographia of Michael Psellos and textual tradition and
transmission”.
9 Manasses, Synopsis chronike, ed. Lampsides, p. xlv.
10 Symeon, Chronicon, ed. Wahlgren; an English translation by Wahlgren is forthcoming from the series
Translated Texts for Byzantinists.