Malalas in the Archives

209

were certainly far from complete.29 Yet from one end of that spectrum to the other, all
agree that there were sometimes very large gaps in the archives, and that what was ar-
chived must have been organized so unsystematically as to have been very susceptible
to chance disruptions. That is, even if the imperial court retained copies of its edicts
and constitutions, they were preserved at variable stages of composition, in varying
formats intended for different addressees, and possibly with no fair master-copy ever
existing per se. That is why the compilers of the Code needed to consult documents in
fully eleven different locations, none of which was itself authoritative or complete.30
In just the same way, individuals might collect and preserve laws of interest to them-
selves, copying them down from the copy posted in the local forum or agora.31 That is
after all how Eusebius gathered his legal evidence. But in all of this we have no real
evidence that people habitually resorted to libraries or archives in the expectation that
the material for which they were looking would be preserved there.
The same background to compilation is proven by all extant consularia. The eclec-
tic selection of material in divergent consularia traditions demonstrates them to be
the work of private compilers; the uniformity of language and style shows them to all
be working from the same sources, namely the official announcements disseminated
by various branches of imperial government and discussed above. The only difficulty
is whether the imperial government, or its local cfficia, preserved or archived copies
of these announcements in an accessible or legible way - thus giving the compilers
of consularia a central clearing house from which they could select the elements they
wanted to use - or whether compilers relied mainly or entirely upon the ephemeral or
inscribed posting of notices in public places. In the same way that the question cannot
really be answered on the evidentiary grounds for the laws, so it must remain open for
the consularia. But that open question bears directly on Malalas, whose Book XVIII
contains material that is recognizably derived from the imperial information service
and the announcements it disseminated. What is in doubt is whether Malalas derived
this material from a consularia source, or from the announcements themselves, and
whether he was attempting to compile a consularia himself.
That consularia sources remained a vital vector for information in the Justinianic
period is made clear by Malalas’ rough contemporary Marcellinus Comes, whose use
of consularia sources was demonstrated beyond any doubt by Brian Croke.32 It is
unfortunate that in that demonstration he continues to insist on the existence of of-
ficial city chronicles, as if this were a genre attested anywhere but the imagination of
modern historians.33 But the fact that Marcellinus used consularia extensively does
not necessarily affect the question of whether Malalas did. For the non-contempo-
rary books, there is very little evidence for material that would certainly fit with a
29 Honore (1986); Matthews (2000), pp. 280-286; Schmidt-Hofner (2015).
30 Schmidt-Hofner (2008).
31 Note the discussion of Malalas and epigraphic texts in Agusta-Boularot (2006).
32 Croke (2001), pp. 170-195.
33 See also Croke (1990a) and Jeffreys (1990a), pp. 204-208. But see Burgess/Kulikowski (2013), pp. 133-172
for the essentially private nature of compilation.