Malalas’ Sources for the Contemporary Books

225

If we now return to what Malalas does include in the latter half of Book XVI once
he really begins chronicling the period of his own lifetime,18 we need to draw attention
to those stories that have been mentioned earlier, particularly those relating to Proclus.
They certainly cannot be true for the actual famous Proclus, head of the Academy at
Athens, since he had died more than twenty years earlier in about 485. Yet assuredly
it is he who is meant. So they are just stories but very readable ones, particularly the
whole account of Vitalian’s rebellion which gets subsumed into Proclus’invention and
provision of a sort of Greek fire with an exciting narrative of its dramatic success, even
including some first person conversation. It makes a good story for which the use of
Proclus’ Greek fire is the vital part. But it is also somewhat dubious since the Greek
fire is simply not mentioned at all in the more sober accounts by Evagrius and John
of Antioch, nor yet in Marinus’ Vita Prodi, and they all surely would have mentioned
the Greek fire had they had any knowledge of it at all. Our numbering system reduces
all this to a single chapter (XVI 16) but it does take up four pages in Thurn’s edition
and five pages in Dindorf’s. In terms of narrative, it is the main item of the reign. But
given the emphasis on the role of Proclus, which must be entirely fictitious, and the
improbability of the Greek fire, the story must only have been created quite some time
after the events, when Proclus’ real dates and activities had long been forgotten, to
which we shall return.
Much of the rest of the narrative records various achievements of Anastasius, in-
cluding a packed paragraph of some remarkable reforms (XVI14), the unique evidence
for the creation of ^indices (XVI 12) and their significance for local government, and
a single paragraph on the Trisagion affair (XVI 19). Then finally there is the story of
Anastasius’ and Aman tins’ dreams (XVI 20). Again, these can only have been invented
much later, sometime after Nika, and are possibly linked to propaganda connected to
it, since they refer to fourteen years being taken from Anastasius’ life (so add fourteen
to his death date of 518 to get 532, the year of Nika), and so were possibly Justinianic
propaganda. That would also seem to imply that Malalas only began his own chron-
icling of Book XVI sometime after 532, possibly quite some time later, in which case
the gap in his chronology between 503 or 507 and 512 is even easier to understand.
3. Book XVII, Justin 1
Book XVII on Justin I shows the same characteristic of creative narrative. Given the
interest in narrative, we can be reasonably confident that, as with the lively stories in
the latter part of book XVI, the material is most unlikely to have come from any City
chronicle or archive, and here I suspect imperial intervention. An early item is the
18 Although it lies outside the scope of this paper, it is noteworthy that in his opening paragraph (z. e. in
XVI11) Malalas refers to Chalcedonian dyophysite bishops as Nestorian three times in as many lines.
That statement has been observed often enough, but it has not been previously realized that this may
well be his opening personal statement as a chronicler, which perhaps gives it rather more clout (Mala-
las had mentioned Nestorians once before with two references at Book XV 6).