3°

William Adler

tribute to long-deceased kings, culture heroes, and warriors, they began to venerate
them as heavenly deities, performing festivals in their honor, and enrolling their names
in the priestly books.14 Civilization on the eve of Abraham’s religious reforms was thus
caught up in a contradiction: materially and culturally advanced, but captive to the
collective delusion that men and women who “were mortal and suffered like them-
selves” (θνητούς καί ομοιοπαθείς) deserved to be recognized as gods.15
Malalas refers to this delusion as the “doctrine of Hellenism” (δόγματος τού
έΛΛηνκτμού).'6 At the heart of his account of its origins and development lies a
theory of religion usually credited to Euhemerus of Messene, a Greek mythographer
of the 4th and early 3rd centuries BC. Although his Sacred History survives only in scat-
tered fragments, the one feature of the work earning the attention of later writers was
Euhemerus’insight into the true meaning of the myths. The terrestrial gods of Homer
and Hesiod were actually ancient kings, warriors, inventors, and other high-achievers.
Only later, and in recognition of their benefactions to humanity, were the honors of
divinity conferred upon Zeus and his fellow Olympians.17 Euhemerus was not the first
author to have postulated a historicizing explanation of the all-too-human behavior of
the gods of Greek myth. And his work might very well have gone unnoticed had it not
been for the appropriation of his theory by Hellenistic universal chroniclers and his-
torians, most notably Diodorus Siculus.18 Christian apologists and polemicists readily
embraced the theory as well, discovering in it an explanation of the origins of polythe-
ism endorsed by the Greeks themselves.19 What especially commended euhemeristic
historiography to Christian universal chroniclers was that it pointed the way back to
a period in the remote past that might otherwise have to be relinquished to the poets.
2. Malalas and Christian Euhemerism
Among Byzantine chronicles, Malalas’ account of pre-Abrahamic history arguably
represents the most extensive application of Euhemerus’ interpretive method.20 An-
cient history is now fundamentally the story of culture. Nor is it enough simply to
credit a nation or people with the discovery of writing, the calendar, or some other
constituent of culture. To fully apprehend how so many men and women of the past
came to be mistaken for gods required of him a complete inventory of all the sages and
inventors responsible for these discoveries. The result is a storyline crowded with the
names of inventors, warriors, philosophers, and kings, one right after the other, and ex-
14 Malalas, Chronographia II18 (pp. 38,17-39,30 Thurn).
15 Malalas, Chronographia II18 (p. 39, 21 Thurn).
16 Malalas, Chronographia II18 (p. 38, 8-9 Thurn). See further below section 3.
17 On euhemeristic historiography, see most recently Winiarczyk (2013), pp. 123-160; Hawes (2014),
pp. 25-28; 35-36; 107-109.
18 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca VI1-9. On Diodorus’ Euhemerism, see Sachs (1990), pp. 68-72.
19 Winiarczyk (2013), pp. 49-59.
20 For previous studies of Malalas and Euhemerism, see Jeffreys (1990a), pp. 62-63; Hörling (1980); Rein-
ert (1981).