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Michael Kulikowski

consularia source. But some of the specifically Antiochene material, chiefly that con-
cerned with natural disasters and imperial largesses, looks very much like the sort
of thing habitually recorded in consularia; it has in fact been attributed to an An-
tiochene Stadtchronik since the beginnings of Malalan Quellenforschung.^ But while
the juxtaposition of imperial material, prodigies, and natural disasters is the stock in
trade of consularia, its appearance in Malalas is no guarantee that he had consulted
an Antiochene consularia text himself. The most telling point is the lack of month-
and-day dates for almost all of this material, which are one of the key indicators of a
consularia lurking in the background. The absence of month-and-day dates for this
material throughout Malalas, and its organization by reign, in fact suggests the oppo-
site of consularia or Stadtchronik - it suggests that Malalas was using a breviarium or a
local history (perhaps that of Domninus, as often suggested) that was also arranged by
reign and lacked the full chronological apparatus common to consularia and chroni-
cles. Whether Malalas’intermediate source (c.^., Domninus) copied this material from
consularia or compiled it himself from extant imperial notices cannot be known. One
way or another, the original source of the information will have had month-and-day
dates that were excised at some point in order to fit a history or breviarium that did not
need the same level of precision. The only question must be whether Malalas sheared
off month-and-day dates from a consularia or other source that possessed them and
that he was using for his unique pre-Justinianic and Antiochene material, or whether
the month-and-day dates were already missing from whatever source he relied on.
That bears on our overall picture of Malalas’ working method, and the answer to the
question lies in his praxis in Book XVIII.
Book XVIII is the only place in Malalas where month or month-and-day dates
appear with any frequency. That marks a clear contrast with the only other books con-
temporary or nearly contemporary with Malalas’lifetime, Books XVII (on the reign of
Justin I) and XVI (on Anastasius). In both those books, month-and-day dates apply to
singular and specifically Antiochene events that require nothing more than local resi-
dency for the author to have known (viz., the accession of Severus to the patriarchate of
Antioch: ChronographiaYN\ n; the great fire and earthquake of Antioch under Justin:
Chronographia XVII16).34 35 In other words, there is no reason to posit an intermediary
source for the dating of either event, but equally no need to posit archival research
for Books XVI or XVII. In format and genre, they conform perfectly to the normal
usages of a breviarium. Before Book XV, dating by reign is normative; we do not even
have variations on “also in this year” - it is, again, the breviarium format perfected by
Eutropius. Book XVIII, however, points a contrast. In it, precise dates are everywhere,
and a near-constant awareness of annual synchronisms for what happened in which
year. That means that behind most of the imperial and much of the ecclesiastical ma-
terial in Book XVIII there lies material disseminated officially from the imperial court
34 See Jeffreys (1990a), pp. 200-214, with references to the older literature.
35 On this quake and its description in Malalas’ Chronicle see now Laura Carrara’s contribution in this
volume.