John Malalas in the Excerpta Constantimana de Insidiis (El)


easy to be corrected in -mallos, on the basis of the following surnames. S has emb alios
which does not make any sense and in 6th century is, in all probability, a vox nihili;
because the exchange of beta and my is a typical error in minuscule handwriting, de
Boor corrected in emmallos, referring to O.
Moreover, S has an “and” (καί), which can be easily lost or added in any manuscript
tradition.
Emmallos is transliterated both in Jeffreys’ and in Meier’s translations,38 leaving
open the possibility for it to be a technical term.
As the simple μαΛΛός is widely used referring to hair, in 1952 Maricq proposed to
read the compound as a “terme technique qui designe une categoric des pantomimes”,
i.e. the bewigged ones.39 But wigs were obvious for them like disguises for actors,
because pantomimes had to perform various roles. In 1954, an anonymous reviewer
(maybe Robert) proposed to read the “emmalloi and little” dancers like “les jeunes pre-
miers”, i.e. the selected young actors.40 Doubtless, they were already famous enough
to have a name for the stage, but in my opinion, notwithstanding the sharp contrast
between the old famous dancers and the new “little” ones, we cannot take the adjective
generically for “young”, because Malalas uses always μικρός as “child”, at best “kid”,
no more than adolescent.41 However the editor decides to print this text, with or wit-
hout the καί, the usus scribendi has to be respected.
Erich Trapp has supported the idea that emmallos means “with long hair”, quoting
the compound entrichos (έν + θρΐξ, hair), with the same derivation and meaning.42
This leads to the conclusion that our passage can be translated “gave to the four fac-
tions four long-haired and little dancers”.
In this case, they can be assumed to have had never cut hair, rather than wigs43.
As any long file has an appendix, I would like to suggest a possible, “technical” or
metaphorical, extension of the meaning.
The exchange between wool and hair also happens for other Greek words, such as
dum erant; quos largitionibus abunde donates, liberos esse jussit. Prasinis vero Autocyonem quondam
Alexandrinum dedit Emmalum, Caramallum vocatum: Venetis vero Chrysomallum dedit Rhodum
quondam, et ipsum Alexandrinum: Russatis vero Helladium quondam Emisenum: Albatis denique
Margaritam quern vocant, Catzamyn dedit quondam, Cyzicenum.”
37 όρχήστας έμβάΛΛους S.
38 Jeffreys (trad.), Malalas, p. 214 (see above); Meier (trad.), Weltchronik, p. 398: “das hier im Text stehende
Wort emmallous = ‘wollig’ ist ungeklärt”.
39 He was interested in conjecturing emmallos at least three times to emendate a lead tablet (curse against
a pantomime of the Blues, Fiq [Syria], III c.): Maricq, “Notes”, 364-368.
40 Bulletin Epigraphique, 99-100. For a parallel in modern languages, one can think of the Italian meta-
phor “di primo pelo”, i. e. “of short experience”.
41 Except for usual denomination of emperors, like Constantine/Theodosius/Valentinian II (“the little”,
i.e. junior), Malalas defines mikroi Polydorus, son of Priamus; Ganimedes; the sons of Paris and Helena;
some untimely dead, as Seleucus, son of Antiochus; Caesarion, the son of Cleopatras and Julius Caesar;
Leo II, son of Zeno; Placidia, when she met the Goths; etc.
42 Many thanks to Erich Trapp for this useful suggestion and to Christian Gastgeber for sharing the
discussion. See also Dimitrakou, s.v. έμμαΛΛος.
43 I wish to thank Sever J. Voicu for this hypothesis.