Malalas in the Archives

213

in the imperial capital, when he was getting imperial announcements in real time and
maximum quantity, he lacked a chronographic structure into which to deposit his ma-
terial. He has not worked out his own chronographic framework, nor is he simply bor-
rowing someone else’s. His organizational capacity is a hopeful striving toward an ‘in
that same year’ and the conceptual framework never ceases to be the breviarium-$ty\e.
imperial reign. In Constantinople as in Antioch, he recorded the material that came to
his attention in the normal course of things, and strove to get it in the right order, but
neither he nor we can scale up to a larger framework of chronology with any certitude
or any safety. That the evidence for Malalas’ research, in putative archives or elsewhere,
is so nugatory is itself a historical fact of some importance. He is not, as once thought,
an incompetent, monkish declination from a glorious classical past. But he does, quite
accidentally, bear witness to the post-Classical dissolution of generic boundaries, and
the essential lack of interest in chronographic precision among the writers of the sixth
and later centuries, in Greek East as much as Latin West.
Bibliography
Sources
Malalas, Chronographia = loannis Malalae Chronographia recensuit loannes Thurn (CFHB 35),
Berolini/Novi Eboraci 2000.
Plinius, Epistulae = C. Plini Caecili Secundi. Epistularum libri novem. Epistularum adTraianum
Liber. Panegyricus. Recensuit Mauritius Schuster. Editionem tertiam curavit Rudolphus Hans-
lik, Lipsiae 1958.
Literature
Agusta-Boularot (2006) = Agusta-Boularot, S., Malalas epigraphiste? Nature et fonction des ci-
tations epigraphiques dans la Chronique, in: Agusta-Boularot, S./Beaucamp, J./Bernardi, A.-
M./Caire, E. (eds.), Recherches sur la chronique de Jean Malalas II (Centre de recherche
d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 24), Paris 2006, pp. 97-135.
Agusta-Boularot/Beaucamp/Bernardi/Caire (2006) = Agusta-Boularot, S./Beaucamp, J./Ber-
nardi, A.-M./Caire, E. (eds.), Recherches sur la chronique de Jean Malalas II (Centre de re-
cherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 24), Paris 2006.
Barnes (1981) = Barnes,T.D., Constantine and Eusebius Cambridge Mass./London 1981.
Beaucamp/Agusta-Boularot/Bernardi/Cabouret/Caire (2004) = Beaucamp, J./Agusta-Boularot,
S./Bernardi, A.-M./Cabouret, B./Caire, E. (eds.), Recherches sur la chronique de Jean Mala-
las I (Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 15), Paris 2004.
Bell et al. (1962) = Bell, H.I. et al. (eds.) The Abinnaeus Archive: Papers of a Roman Officer in the
Reign of Constantius II, Oxford 1962.
Bernardi/Caire (2016) = Bernardi A.-M./Caire, E., John Malalas: from computation to narration,
in: Meier, M./Radtki, Ch./Schulz, F. (eds.), Die Weltchronik des Johannes Malalas. Autor -
Werk - Überlieferung (Malalas Studien 1), Stuttgart 2016, pp. 119-136.
Bleckmann (1992) = Bleckmann, B., Die Reichskrise des III. Jahrhunderts in der spätantiken und
byzantinischen Geschichtsschreibung. Untersuchungen zu den nachdionischen Quellen der