The manuscript transmissionof Malalas’ chronicle reconsidered

145

random examples which I have had reason to look at recently: three late manuscripts
in Paris (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Par. gr. 1555A, 2600, and 854) were
published by Cramer in 1839.34 They contain texts pertaining to the Byzantine chron-
icle or world history tradition: they cover king lists, church history, imperial history,
mythical history No authorial names are attached. Modern scholarship attributes au-
thorship of the material they contain to Theodore Lector and Eustathius of Epipha-
neia in Par. gr. 1555A, Eusebius of Caesarea in Par. gr. 2600, and has identified passages
taken from Malalas and Eusebius in Par. gr. 854. But does authorship of the resulting
compendia lie with Theodore, Eustathius, Eusebius and Malalas or with each com-
pendium’s compiler, or his copyist? Medieval attitudes to authorship are under debate
at present. Several critics - Alistair Minnis,35 for example, and most recently Aidan
Conti36 - have drawn attention, in connection with medieval attitudes in the west to
authorship, to the formulation on book-making produced by the thirteenth-century
friar Bonaventure in the prologue to his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Four Books
of Sentences. According to Bonaventure, there are four ways of making a book, para-
phrased by Aidan Conti as: the scrip tor writes the words of others, adding nothing;
the compilator puts together passages that are not his own; the commentator writes the
words of others, but adds his own in order to clarify; the auctor writes both his own
words and those of others which are added only for the purposes of information.3?
These thirteenth-century thoughts arose out of the needs of the commentary tradi-
tion of scholastic theology, but they have struck me as relevant to the situations to be
observed in Byzantine historical writing. Where on this sliding scale would we put
the anonymous originator of Par. gr. 854 or Par. gr. Graecus 1555A or the Malalas of
the Tusculan Fragments, let alone of Baroccianus 182? Recent work on middle English
texts has begun to acknowledge the authorial role of compilers and scribes - to say
nothing of archivists and librarians - in shaping the meaning of a text. I confess that
I am not aware of any statements from the Byzantine scribal and intellectual tradition
as lucid and self-aware as those of Bonaventure in the Latin world.38
The manuscript transmission of a Byzantine text - indeed, of any ancient or me-
dieval text - produces a chain of witnesses to its phrasing. The examination of these
witnesses and their relationships is part of the process of establishing a critical edition
of that text - critical, of course, in that the witnesses’ words are criticised and scru-
tinised under various headings, chiefly for their grammatical and syntactical credibility
and for the degree to which the putative author can be held responsible for the text’s
phrasing.39 This examination and its decisions are predicated on the assumption that
there was one author and one authoritative text (authoritative in however many senses
34 Cramer, Anecdota Graeca.
35 Minnis, Medieval theory of authorship.
36 Conti, “Scribes, redactors”.
37 Bonaventure, “In primum librum sententiarum, quaestio iv”, ed. Peltier, paraphrased in Conti, “Scribes
as authors”, p. 271; discussed in Minnis, Medieval Theory, pp. 94-99.
38 However, note the discussion in Mullett, Theophylact, pp. 223-30.
39 For a brief overview of issues relevant to texts in Byzantine Greek, see Jeffreys, Μ., “Textual criticism”.