Malalas in the Archives

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element is covered (how much this is an artefact of the extant Oxford epitome, rather
than of what Malalas actually wrote, is impossible to say).10 The growing scholarly
sensitivity to the challenges of‘living texts’, which is to say texts whose non-canonical
status allows for interactive reworking in the process of reproduction, has complicated
the picture considerably.11
A lot of the content in Malalas is strikingly medieval, part of the mutation of
ancient literary genres from their relatively well-defined forms.12 In particular, one is
struck by elements that might best be described as ‘folkloric’: the behaviour of histori-
cal actors is explained with a type of anecdotal approach that is not found in Classical
or Classicizing histories. To take just one example, one may look to Malalas, Chrono-
graphia XIV 3-5, where he explains how Theodosius II came to marry Eudocia. This is
filled with references to the emotions of the main characters - Pulcheria, Theodosius,
Eudocia and her brothers - lawsuits, accidents and swift reversals of fortune. In all
this, it is fundamentally removed from Classical modes of historical explanation. Its
style of explanation by anecdote, foible, personal character’ (much of it ben trovato or
pastiche) did exist in antiquity, but Classical genres confined it to two restricted spaces:
biography (particularly the scandalous kind found in Marius Maximus and the late
and minor lives of the Historia Augusta, but even in the relatively sober Suetonius) and
romance. While exemplary stories are found in histories, they tend to be included for
illustrative, comparative or argumentative purposes, not by way of explaining events
or the motivations of historical actors.13 Indeed, the closest parallels to this folkloric
element in Malalas can be found in Heliodorus, Xenophon of Ephesus and Apuleius.
It is a style of thought and description that prevails in their romances, but not in works
that were regarded as properly historical. Stylistically, this is the reverse of a Classi-
cizing ‘rhetoric of the scene’ (the phenomenon of historical set-pieces closer to ekph-
rasis than to continuous narrative, and characteristic of Dexippus or Ammianus, for
instance).14 By contrast, Malalas’ anecdotal scenes are pure character-driven narrative,
in which the anecdotes float free of any explanatory context larger than the personal.
Be that as it may, Malalas’ folkloric scene-setting and the novelistic anecdote be-
come a commonplace of early medieval historiography in both Latin - e.g., Fredegar
and Agnellus of Ravenna, for instance - and for the whole of post-Justinianic Greek
10 It is interesting that there is virtually no consensus on the degree to which the most complete manu-
script witness, the Bodleian’s Oxoniensis Barrocianus 182, reflects the text Malalas originally wrote. The
contributions in Jeffreys/Croke/Scott (1990), Beaucamp/Agusta-Boularot/Bernardi/Cabouret/Caire
(2004), Agusta-Boularot/Beaucamp/Bernardi/Caire (2006), and Meier/Radtki/Schulz (2016b) all ac-
cept that the single continuous text of Malalas we possess is both fragmentary (missing book one) and
abridged passim, but the extent of the abridgement and the manner by which it came about remain very
open.
11 Meier/Radtki/Schulz (2016a), pp. 15,18; Greatrex (2016); Jeffreys (2016), and indeed most of the essays
in Meier/Radtki/Schulz (2016b), are strikingly aware of the complications of studying ‘living texts’, as
a phenomenon of the medieval and early modern worlds in particular.
12 To say this is not to accept Hunger’s (1978), pp. 319-325 characterization of Malalas’work as Triviallit-
eratur.
13 See, on Ammianus Marcellinus, Wittchow (2001).
14 On this, see Martinez Pizarro (1989).