John Malalas as a source for John of Antioch’s Historia Chronike

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Rome and then after Constantine on Constantinople as “the new Rome”. Despite his
origin, Antioch is not the centre of his narrative as it was for Malalas. John of Antioch
wrote in Constantinople for a local audience. Some of his fragments even show that his
audience was well acquainted with the topography of the imperial palace. On the other
hand, it is possible to discern a strong difference between John of Antioch and John
Malalas as regards the description and the political interpretation of Roman history.
John of Antioch’s departure from Malalas:
the history of the Roman Republic
Until the Fall of Troy, John Malalas is the most important source for John of Antioch’s
universal chronicle. Subsequently, it should be stressed, there is discernible a clear
and telling difference between the two historians, which informs us of the historio-
graphical identity and interests of John of Antioch. It is precisely in his handling the
history of Rome that John of Antioch reveals his originality as regards his model John
Malalas. Sp. Lambros’ lucky discovery of Book IV of the Consuls, which survives intact
in the Codex Athous 4932 = Iviron 812, allows us to understand how John of Antioch
handles Roman history from the origins through to the death of Julius Caesar. As is
well known, Malalas is not particularly interested in the history of the Roman Repub-
lic. In his chronicle, he leaps almost directly from the period of the kings to the death
of Caesar.
Indeed his version is the archetype for other late antique and Byzantine universal
chronicles. Only a handful of items from the long Republican period are mentioned.16
After having recounted the events of the kings of Rome in a book on the ancient
monarchy, John of Antioch differs from his model Malalas in his account of the his-
tory of the Roman Republic. The Codex Athous preserves the end of the Book III of the
Consuls (145 Roberto = 98,1 Mariev), the whole of Book IV of the Consuls (146 Roberto
= 98, 2 Mariev), and the first section of Book V of the Consuls (147 Roberto = 98, 25
Mariev). From these we can deduce that John of Antioch, unlike Malalas, organized
the republican history in five books and that they were mainly devoted to Roman
history. At the end of every book there was a brief summary of the principal events
of Hellenistic and Near Eastern history. Thus the history of the Roman Republic was
one of the main focuses for John of Antioch. It is an interest that we do not find in
John Malalas. Rather, it is an interest which John of Antioch shares in part with his
predecessor Peter the Patrician and, later in the twelfth century, with John Zonaras.17
16 For Malalas’ interpretation of the past, see Jeffreys, “The Attitudes”, pp. 227-28; Johannes Malalas, Die
Weltchronik, pp. 15-16.
17 His accounts are so valuable that these fragments of Republican history were later used by the excerptor
of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. From the excerpta Constantiniana, the anonymous author of the Suda
Lexicon draws generously, and he also takes bits of John of Antioch’s text to create exemplar lemmata for
the institutions of the Roman Republic: Zecchini, “La storia romana”, pp. 76—77. Even Maximus Pla-
nudes, at the end of the thirteenth century, uses excerpts from the Historia Chronike for the section on
Republic in his summary of Roman history.