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Michael Kulikowski

ochene recension),4 he will happily leave out available material in what appears to be
his main source in order to add material from elsewhere.5 Malalas stands at the end of
a long tradition of ancient historiography. However, by reason of his sheer bulk even in
the extant epitome, he is also the earliest of what Byzantinists traditionally call ‘world
chronicles’.6 In that role, he is an important stage in the development of Byzantine
historiography: one needs to understand Malalas in order to understand the breviaria
of the Middle Byzantine period right through Zonaras and Cedrenus.7 That said, in
order to understand Malalas, we must read him in the generic context from which his
work emerged, rather than retrojecting interpretations drawn from later Byzantine
history.8 The present contribution does not pursue that question of genre or Malalas’
historiographical utility any further. Instead, it considers some aspects of the sources
and generic models available to Malalas, the problems they raise, and the working
methods they reveal.
2. Malalas in Context
Along with Jordanes, Procopius, Agathias, Menander, and Theophylact, Malalas stands
poised on the borderline between antiquity and the Middle Ages, but because he does
not aim at Classicizing history or Atticizing style, his liminality seems somehow more
obvious. He belongs chronologically to the ancient world, living before the historical
and literary chiasmus of the later seventh century, yet much of what we find in his
pages is unprecedented in earlier Greek sources that are still extant.9 While his uni-
versal aspirations at first seem to place him in the tradition of Greek universal history
along the lines of the Bibliotheca of Diodorus Siculus, the extent of the abridgement
is new: it is in keeping with a medieval trend (both Greek and Latin) towards a uni-
versalism stripped of detail and characterized by the brevity with which any particular
4 That there was an Antiochene continuation of the Chronici Canones is proved in Burgess (1999), pp. 113-
276; that reworkings of the Chronici Canones may lie behind many sixth-century ‘chronicles’is a baseline
assumption of the generally persuasive contribution by Bernardi/Caire (2016).
5 Bernardi/Caire (2016).
6 See n. 1. The secondary literature on this (putative) genre is huge, and perhaps larger than the readily
available primary source research merits: see especially Croke (1990a); Croke (1990b); Croke (2001),
pp. 145-169; Scott (1990); Treadgold (2007), pp. 235-246.
7 Despite its not inconsiderable flaws and dogmatism, Hunger (1978), pp. 243-441 remains the indispens-
able introduction; with special reference to chronicle as genre, see Burgess/Kulikowski (2013), pp. 221-
236.
8 That was the main analytical point of Burgess/Kulikowski (2016). As noted in Meier/Radtki/Schulz
(2016a), p. 17, this approach was “kontrovers diskutiert” at the first Malalas colloquium in Tübingen,
which is as it should be.
9 The early seventh century is a major breaking point in historiographical traditions in both East and
West. What caused this chiasmus is to some extent moot - Gregory of Tours produced the last Latin
text that was even aspirationally antique in conception (whatever its shortcomings), as Theophylact
Simocatta did in the East; the last Latin chronicle in recognizably antique form was that of John of
Biclar in Spain, as the Chronicon Paschale was in Greek.