Malalas in the Archives

Michael Kulikovoski

Abstract This article begins by looking at aspects of Malalas’ text that blur the genre boundaries
established in antiquity. It suggests that a ‘folkloric’ approach to historical causation is a medi-
eval feature that begins to appear in both Greek and Latin literature in the sixth century, and
that Malalas is a prime example of this move away from Classical explanation. The piece goes on
to consider the role of research in Malalas’ text, particularly the possibility that he did his own
research and compilation in some sort of Stadtarchiv, whether in Antioch or Constantinople.
While that possibility cannot be excluded altogether, the article suggests that the documentary
evidence in Malalas can best be explained by his casual collection of materials posted in forum
or agora, or that came across his desk when he was clerking for the comes Orientis.

i. Introduction
The so-called Chronographia of John Malalas is extant solely in an epitomized ver-
sion of the sixth-century original, the main manuscript witness of which is lacunose,
its defects needing to be supplied from fragmentary witnesses, quotations in other
writers, and late translations.1 Despite its conventional title and its prominent role in
discussions of‘Byzantine World Chronicles’, Malalas himself was not primarily inter-
ested in the chronographic framework of its historical content.2 His work was actually
a breviarium, in the Roman sense of the word, which is to say an abbreviated history
(which has no connection to the Christian word ‘breviary’).3 In this case, the brevia-
rium runs from the creation of the world to Malalas’ sixth-century present, but the
author expands and contracts time within that range without much regard to the rel-
ative ‘importance’ of any period, still less to the relative availability of evidence - that
is, even where he is demonstrably drawing his framework from the Chronici Canones
of Eusebius of Caesarea (though one that he certainly consulted in a reworked Anti-

1 Jeffreys (1990b); Franklin (1990); Witakowski (1990); Sorlin (2004); Debie (2004); Meier/Radtki/
Schulz (2016a), esp. pp. 16-17; Jeffreys (2016).
2 Importantly, this is recognized even by those who are happy to accept that ‘Byzantine World Chroni-
cles’ are a single and definable genre: see, for example, Bernardi/Caire (2016).
3 Burgess/Kulikowski (2013), pp. 61-62,223-224; Burgess/Kulikowski (2016).