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Michael Kulikowski

calendars and ferialia.2^ These short notices explain the consistent formulaic language
of consularia and calendars, and the consistency of content: accessions, births, deaths,
aduentus, anniversaries, largesses, and victories, in fact anything that the imperial gov-
ernment proclaimed publicly for one-time or annual commemoration. More signifi-
cantly in the present context, they also explain the consistent availability of day-dates
to the compilers of consularia, something that bears on any consideration of Malalas’
sources.24 25
The precise method by which imperial information was disseminated to the prov-
inces has never been clarified because the evidence is lacking, but its efficiency and
stability over centuries is guaranteed by the consistency with which compilers of con-
sularia record information over time and space. Probably, we can assume a parallel
to the dissemination of imperial laws, with regular lines of contact from the court to
the provincial officia and then regularized local patterns of announcement and public
posting.26 Here, however, we must raise a caveat, just because laws and imperial an-
nouncements were efficiently produced and disseminated, one need not posit official
archiving of such texts either at point of production or point of receipt. Still less need
we assume reliable storage or ‘indexing’ after their dissemination, and there is in fact
positive evidence against it: as early as the correspondence of Pliny and Trajan, the
emperor was noting the absence of many older documents from the records available
to him (Plinius, Epistulae X, 65-66). No doubt a great deal of material was saved, by
the court and by individual provincial officia, but the mobility of the court and comi-
tatus from the time of Marcus Aurelius onwards makes it hard to conceptualize a
viable means of systematic retention of documents of any sort over time. A method of
regional storage is primafacie easier to conceive, but falls back on our deficit of positive
evidence.
Such evidence as we have on this point is mainly inferential, and arises from con-
sidering the way the compilers of the Codex Theodosianus will have had to operate.
All scholars agree that the compilers needed to consult documentary archives to col-
lect general laws that they then edited into the compilation that we have today. What
those archives looked like and where they were located is a matter of much greater
controversy. There are maximalist advocates who imagine a robust system of central
imperial archiving. 27 Others place the emphasis squarely on haphazard, unofficial and
private archiving by individual office-holders, such as we find all the time in the papyri
evidence from Egypt, e.g. the Abinnaeus Archive.28 Others strike a middle ground
on the question, noting that to whatever degree central archives were important, they

24 Compilers could of course supplement this material from local knowledge, but it is surprising how in-
frequently they do so.
25 Burgess/Kulikowski (2013), pp. 35-57,173-187.
26 Matthews (2000), pp. 168-199, 280-286.
27 Sirks (1993); Sirks (2007).
28 Jones (1974), pp. 375-395· Bell et al. (1962) contains the palmary example of how a single minor official
could generate a unique archive of correspondence, legal and commercial material.