John Malalas in the Excerpta Constantimana de Insidiis (El)

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taken from Procopius. For the same reason, Malalas was unlikely in ELG, which are
mutilated both at the beginning and, severely, at the end.
Excerpts from Malalas have been preserved, although not fully, both in collections
EV and in EI. I picked up the latter because it has 51 excerpts (though the volume is
mutilated at the beginning, starting with book V of Thurn’s edition), while in EV are
only 14, from the beginning (book I) to the end (book XVI 5 Thurn).
2. The manuscript S of El
Apparently, El and EL resemble each other: there was one single medieval witness,
lost in modern times, and the text survives as a copy dating from the 16th century.4 In
fact, the situation is different:
- first of all, the antigraphon is likely to have disappeared soon after being copied
(mid-i6th c.), and we have only one apographon (S);5
- secondly, Malalas’ text in El is written by John Mauromates, a renowned scribe and
a very different one from the “bad” Andreas Darmarios.
And yet, the collaboration among the scribes is essential to understand the ma-
nuscript tradition of the recentiores.
In ELG, I spotted a single quire that, by scribal mistake, comes from a different
branch than the other quires of the same manuscript. This is a paradox for a philolo-
gian: the stemma codicum splits in two stemmata, because of a trivial exchange of quires;
the consequences for the constitution of the text have to be investigated.6
In El, what can we learn about Malalas from the collaboration of the scribes?
Mauromates was one of those who worked for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza: his
hand is to be found in S along with Andronicus Nuccius, Nicholas Murmuris, Petros
Karnabakas, and an anonymous scribe.
The content of S, according to Mendoza’s Memorial,7 was formed from two inde-
pendent parts:

4 In both cases, they seem to have crossed the path of Juan Paez de Castro: he worked for Diego Hurtado
de Mendoza in Venice, around 1545/6, not far from the supposed date of S, then was at the service of
Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla (Cardinal of Burgos) and eventually the owner of EL in the 1560s.
5 For Diodorus and John of Antioch only, the El are preserved also in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale,
graecus 1666; John’s excerpts stop with the emperor Zenon. See de Boor, Praefatio EI, pp. XIII-XV;
Sotiroudis, Untersuchungen, pp. 174-178 (description of S).
6 Carolla, “Andrea Darmario” (forthcoming).
7 The list of Mendoza’s Library was published by Graux, Escurial, pp. 359-386, following the manuscript
London, British Library, Egerton 602. Other copies are Cambridge, University Library, Add. 565 and
Besan$on, Bibliotheque municipale, 1284: see Pascale, “Tradizione Temistio”, pp. 183-184; Ronchey,
“Tradizione manoscritta”, pp. 258-260; 269-271.