The manuscript transmissionof Malalas’ chronicle reconsidered

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to matters of punctuation and orthography: should an author’s frequent inconsisten-
cies be preserved or should the printer impose a ‘house style’?47 In Byzantine Studies,
arguably, this has translated into the current debate over the extent to which Byzantine
scribal practices in orthography and punctuation should be respected, the situation
complicated by the dearth of autograph copies.48
So what relevance do these musings have to the manuscript transmission of
Malalas’ text? I have pointed out that there are many witnesses in several languages;
that the wording is not consistent; that there appear to have been at least two editions
but quite probably more. This adds up to a considerable editorial headache, to which
Thurn’s edition of 2000 does not offer an entirely satisfactory solution. Particularly
problematic, of course, is the retro-translation of phrasing found in the Slavonic trans-
lation,49 for which the justification is the stemmatic position Thurn gives to this trans-
lation. Amidst this multi-lingual confusion there was a certain logic to the Australian
venture which put everything into the same modern language!
Let me finally and briefly consider the matter of the sources that can be perceived
in Malalas’ text. A notorious issue. There are the many citations embedded in the nar-
rative, with their variable degrees of credibility; there are the four underlying sources
perceived by Bourier in 1899 in the first fourteen books;50 there are the layers discerned
by the Australian team, such as the chronological framework from Adam, the consul
lists, the earthquake lists and several others.51 Warren Treadgold’s recent attempt to
solve this muddle has thrown the whole mess up into the air and pushed the compo-
sition back onto Eustathius of Epiphaneia, whose text is conveniently barely extant,
and then onto John of Antioch, also a problematic figure though with considerably
more evidence for the content of his work,52 and now rather better understood.53 There
is another name that can be hurled into the mix: Hesychios of Miletus, also conve-
niently barely extant, but who seems to have shared Malalas’ idiosyncratic dates for
Christ’s life on earth and the coming of the seventh millennium, as well as his focus
on the founding of cities.54 But then this passage may not belong to the Hesychios the
historian.
I would like to suggest that the text that is attached to the name of John Malalas
provides us with a developed case of the fluidity of textual ownership. It was only when
I was in the last stages of preparing this paper that, with my own brand of belatedness,
I came across Peter von Nuffelen’s paper in Byzantion for 2012 in which he discusses
47 For a classic statement of the issues, see Greg, “Rationale” and Eggert, “Textual product”.
48 See the contributions to Giannouli/Schiffer (eds.), From Manuscripts to Book, also the opposing stances
in Reinsch, “What should an editor do?” and Byden, “Imprimatur?”.
49 Sorlin, “Les fragments slaves”.
50 Bourier, Über die Quellen.
51 Jeffreys, “Chronological structures”, pp. 112-30,143-49,155-60.
52 For Eustathius’ conjectured role in the content of Malalas’ work, see Treadgold, Early Byzantine Histo-
rians, pp. 235-56; see also Treadgold, “Byzantine world histories”.
53 As demonstrated by the papers by Roberto and Mariev in this volume.
54 Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, pp. 270-78.