Malalas in the Archives 211
in the normal manner. It looks like consularia content. Traditionally, going back to
Holder-Egger, historians’ have regarded this as evidence for Malalas’ own translation
from the officium of the comes Orientis to a post in Constantinople where he used the
Stadtchronik or acta Constantinopolitanaff A move to Constantinople seems certain,
but is also for us an irrelevance. It is the content, which is consistently like that dissem-
inated by imperial officia and still more the style (the terse formulae of consularia) that
concerns us. Regardless of when or whether Malalas had moved to Constantinople,
he had clearly changed either his proximate source, or his own mode of compilation
by the time he got to Book XVIII. In it, he was channeling material that had orig-
inated at court and followed the approved imperial line. That fact is hypothetically
compatible with several scenarios: his own real-time compilation of imperial notices
in one metropolis or another, original research in a Stadtarchiv if such a thing could
be shown to have existed, or the wholesale copying of someone else’s research. De-
spite the greater frequency of dated events, the vocabulary and style with which they
are presented is neither more nor less formulaic than it was for the small number of
dated events in Books XVI, XVII and earlier. Again, this is compatible with multiple
hypotheses: month-and-day dates are always good a priori evidence for a consularia
source, to be sure, but if Malalas was now in the imperial capital, absolutely everything
produced for public consumption by the court bureaus was available to him in more or
less real time, with no danger of accidental or deliberate pre-selection.
To choose between those possibilities we need to consider Malalas’ chronographic
framework. Consularia were clearly available to contemporaries, but it does not ap-
pear that Malalas ever consulted one or even knew the genre existed, because even in
the contemporary and Constantinopolitan Book XVIII, the chronology is a disaster.
There is no framing structure on which to anchor absolute chronologies or corre-
late the dating systems available to Malalas. The chronographic apparatus is simply
missing. We have more month-and-day dates than anywhere else, but Malalas does
not {cannot) calibrate these to a larger chronographic apparatus, which is the basic
function of consularia and every other subgenre of the ancient chronicle. Indeed, if we
try to correlate the repeated ‘in that same year’ entries in Book XVIII to our modern
anno domini dating, or to a hypothetical consular/post-consular dating, we end up
with structural nonsense. If we were to rip the dateable material out of Malalas’ text
and put it into a chronographic frame, we would no longer be looking at Malalas, but
a retro-construction of our own. For Malalas, in Book XVIII as much as elsewhere,
precise month and month-and-day dates are epiphenomena of a historical past that
could stray into his text but carried no epistemological values into it. Dates do not
give the past meaning for him, as they do for compilers of consularia. As for Eutropius
and Victor, for Malalas time is structured in chunks, and these chunks correspond to
reigns. That an imperial reign has a chronographic structure is something of which he
is aware - more so when living cheek-by-jowl with imperial power in Constantinople

36 See Holder-Egger (1877), p. 88, and cf. also Freund (1882), p. 48.