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Michael Kulikowski

than he had been in Antioch - but that awareness is not enough to make him care
about that structure, or even stay alert to it.
That is the decisive point. Malalas was not borrowing from a consularia, because it
would have been impossible for him to erase the traces of a consularia source as thor-
oughly as he does in Book XVIII. Nor was he trying to compile consularia on his own
account. It would of course be rather strange if he had tried to do so in Book XVIII, at
the very end of a production in which chronographic frame was entirely irrelevant to
him, but even had he somehow had that change of heart, we would be able to detect
any attempt at the creation of a chronographic framework, even if a failed one.
It is not there. The move from Antioch to Constantinople had given Malalas more
access to more and better information. But it had neither awakened a hitherto unsus-
pected interest in chronology, nor introduced him to the genre of consularia which a
contemporary like Marcellinus could use so competently. That is to say, Malalas was
continuing to jot down imperial announcements as he found them, and he was now
finding a great many more than he had previously done. There is, in other words, no
evidence that he even knew the genre of consularia. In Antioch, he had used a source
or sources - probably Domninus - behind which lay Antiochene consularia recording
natural disasters and imperial beneficence, but Malalas’ source had already stripped the
consularia’s dating system away before it got to him. Nothing changed with the move
to the metropole: Malalas remained a breviarist then as before.
4. Conclusions
This conclusion has larger implications for Malalas’ method of composition. Let us
assume (for a moment, and counterfactually) that there was such a thing as an Anti-
ochene Stadtarchiv and also (for a moment, and quite certainly) that there were ad hoc
archives of various imperial officia. Malalas did not use them. He did use official but
ephemeral reports from various military officers fighting on the Persian frontier dur-
ing the years when he was in the employ of the comes Orientisd? Those reports would
have come across his desk or come to his attention without their having been archived.
We know about them only because he recorded them, and there is no reason to think
anyone else would have bothered preserving them, for any purpose, had he not chosen
to do so. That is, where Malalas was definitely using official reports, there is still no
need to posit an official repository of them.
But Malalas’ lack of interest in chronographic precision is of greater consequence.
The contents of Book XVIII make it clear that the imperial dissemination of signif-
icant announcements was still functioning smoothly in Justinianic Constantinople,
because the precision of some of the material can only have come from such a source.
Someone - someone like Marcellinus Comes, say - could have organized that material
into consularia. Malalas could not, did not, and did not use a source that could. Even

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