Malalas in the Archives

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3. Malalas and the Archives
That, in turn, brings one back to the question of how Malalas located and deployed
his sources, and to the role of research in his history. The overwhelming interest of
Malalas for the question of potential archival research is his Antiochene context. Be-
tween the late third and the late sixth century, Antioch housed more overlapping
administrative authorities than any other city in the Roman East, including at various
times an imperial household, the officium of the provincial governor, of the comes Ori-
ents, and of the praetorian prefect, as well as the smaller officia of the various fiscal
bureaux.21 Because Malalas preserves so much unique Antiochene material, it may
be that he can contribute to the still controversial question of record-keeping in the
late ancient world, and particularly the degree to which the imperial government and
individual cities maintained archives, and the degree to which ancient historians and
chroniclers made use of any such archives as were available. This is a vexed question
on many levels. That historians of both Classicizing and ecclesiastical persuasion did
do research is not in doubt. The fragments of Olympiodorus and the extant books of
Ammianus both include material that demonstrably stems from autopsy and research.
Eusebius of Caesarea assiduously collected and directly transcribed every document
relevant to Christianity to which he had access, meaning every one that was posted
publicly in Caesarea.22 But in neither Classicizing nor ecclesiastical traditions is there
much evidence for archival research as such: of seeking out documentary, non-literary
sources apart from those that were already set up and on display in public places. That
is, neither Ammianus, nor Olympiodorus, nor Eusebius can demonstrate the use of
public archives in their deployment of documentary sources.
Now, the availability of archives and the existence of official documentary sources
are by no means one and the same question. The existence of an imperial information
service is richly attested by the contents of many late ancient authors. Terse, formulaic,
and linguistically stereotyped imperial announcements lie behind some chronicles and
all consularia of late antiquity, and such announcements were disseminated in the
West through the mid fifth century, in Italy until the reigns of Odoacer or Theodoric,
and in Constantinople until the reigns of Phocas or Heraclius. These announcements
were a tradition that went back to the reign of Augustus, with the imperial court
issuing notices of things it wanted to publicize, and the uniformity of these announce-
ment is what accounts for the highly stylized form of reportage that we get in consu-
laria.23 Compilers of contemporary consularia generally did not start from scratch, but
rather took an existing consularia as their foundation and thereafter relied upon the
single source available to them: the empire-wide dissemination of imperial events and
anniversaries in a short form intended for public posting and thus incorporation into

21 Downey (1961), pp. 317-559; Liebeschuetz (1972), pp. 101-132.
22 Jones (1974), pp. 257-262; Barnes (1981), pp. 126-147.
23 Burgess/Kulikowski (2013), pp. 46-48.