2l8

Roger Scott

contemporary books. To avoid regurgitating their fundamental material, I have tried
here to find a way of teasing out more from Malalas’ own statements about his sources,
which may help give a better indication of how Malalas went about chronicling the
period of his own lifetime. I cannot establish my conclusions beyond doubt but they
do, I trust, make sense of Malalas’ own statements and help explain his handling of
material.
To achieve this I need to make use of my own work from rather earlier than Jef-
freys and Croke but on a much smaller scale. I had pointed to an almost formulaic
way of expressing statements about the emperors’ legal pronouncements that was also
used in official documents, and argued from this that much of Malalas’ information
for the contemporary books most probably came from official notices. It thus reflected
the information that the emperor wanted to be distributed, so that a significant part
of Malalas’ sources for the contemporary books consisted of material actually already
publicized by the imperial office. Malalas probably had access to such information as a
reasonably senior bureaucrat in Antioch, though it is also clear that such material was
sometimes posted in churches and other public places,5 while Malalas’ position also
gave him access to those sent on diplomatic missions, especially to Persia, since they
used Antioch as a reporting base.6
The points I want to make from this are that much of this material was distributed
both by official notices and by spreading good stories, which presumably were spread
by word of mouth. But I also emphasize (a) that good stories could also be official sto-
ries (I think of the Eulalios story at Book XVIII 23); (b) that these could be to combat
hostile propaganda or else actually be that hostile propaganda (such as Procopius’
Anecdotal (c) these stories often simply modified or twisted opposing stories to turn
them on their head; (d) that this was not confined to the sixth century but these stories
provided traditional fare for Byzantine chronicles for many centuries. So we have the
story of Theodosius’ apple, seemingly invented to combat Monophysite propaganda
against Pulcheria in the fifth century,7 or Michael III in the ninth century where his
own propaganda could be virtually inverted by just removing his phrase that his ac-
tions were “in imitation of Christ” and adding a few hostile adjectives and adverbs.8
But once such stories have been chronicled, they tend to be retained in chronicle after
chronicle, so it is reasonable to assume that Malalas will have simply followed other
chroniclers in making use of stories that circulated in society, whether in favour of or
hostile to the regime, both by repeating old stories and making use of new ones.
To begin with my conclusion, my suggestion is that Malalas, possibly under some
pressure from Justin and/or Justinian, began his chronicle with Book XVII, exploiting
official notices as much as he could (though also exploiting a literary account of a ma-
5 Scott (1981); Scott (1985).
6 Scott (1992).
7 Scott (2010); Schulz (2016).
8 I owe the example of Michael III to the late Patricia Karlin-Hayter and have used it on several occa-
sions, first in Scott (1985), p. 100.