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Pauline Allen

historians regarded themselves as the continuators of Eusebius.7 Language is a dis-
tinguishing mark: compare Malalas’ Greek with that of Evagrius, for example.8 The
chronicle was meant to be more accessible to contemporary people of all walks of life,
which is why Dumville refers to it as a “living text”.9
It goes without saying that it is notoriously difficult to differentiate between literary
genres in late antiquity, or in any other era for that matter. The genre of epistolography,
for example, is fraught: When is a work a letter, a treatise, a polemical work, an edict, or
other? To help distinguish between Byzantine chronicles and historical works Roger
Scott has given us some guidelines: i. Byzantine chronicles tend to repeat material
from earlier chronicles;10 2. on the other hand, historians take the opposite approach
of justifying their work as a necessary correction of their predecessors’ wrong inter-
pretation;11 3. three significant facets of the Byzantine chronicle are size, plagiarism
and stories; it is the approach to plagiarism that helps distinguish chronicles from
histories.12 While these are good rules of thumb, we can see immediately that they are
not infallible: for example, the Chronicle of Marcellinus, a contemporary of Malalas,
is quite short (some 52 pages in Mommsen’s text), while the Church History of Evagrius
contains material copied from Malalas and Procopius, as well as various stories.
i. Malalas and religion
The so-called ‘monophysitism’ of Malalas has been the subject of much dispute at least
since the late nineteenth century.13 Nowadays scholars are more inclined to point to
the chronicler’s apathy to or disinterest in doctrinal disputes, even with regard to the
polarisation effected by the Council of Chalcedon, which went through critical phases
in Malalas’ own lifetime and resulted in the establishment of the Syrian anti-Chalce-
donian church14 (something that we might have expected to arouse the interest of an
Antiochene historian).
For Book XIII on the reigns of Constantine and Julian, Annick Martin argues
that Malalas had a view of himself as promoting a Christian idea of imperial power.15
We observe after the chronicler’s treatment of that period his indifference to church
7 Once again the comments of Croke (2001), p. 214 suggest that the idea of continuing a predecessor’s
work was peculiar to the chroniclers.
8 On Malalas’ Greek see James (1990), p. 225: “it could be said that few texts are likely to lose so little in
translation as Malalas’ chronicle”. On the language of Evagrius, see Caires (1982); Whitby (2000), pp.
lv-lix.
9 Dumville (2002), p. 21.
10 Scott (2012), p. 32.
11 Scott (2012), p. 33. See also Scott (1981), pp. 63-64.
12 Scott (2012), pp. 40,46.
13 See the summary of the debates in Croke (1990), pp. 14-16 and Alpi (2006), p. 227. The topic was also
discussed by Volker Drecoll at the 2014 Malalas symposium, see now Drecoll (2oi6).Treadgold (2007),
p. 236 describes Malalas as a “moderate Monophysite”.
14 On this separation see Menze (2008).
15 Martin (2004).