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Roger Scott

baptism and conversion of Ztathios, King of the Laz (XVII 9), followed immediately
by the balancing account of the Hun Zilgibi’s defection to the Persians (XVII 10).
Both accounts must surely have come from an official notice with the amount of de-
tail provided on Ztathios, including his clothing, even down to his footwear, studded
with pearls, and the portrait of Justin embroidered on his tunic, so surely imperial
advertisement; and likewise for Zilgibi there is the apparent direct quoting from the
exchange of letters between Roman and Persian sovereigns. Yet though the source is
surely imperial, the careful arrangement of the two stories in the chronicle to balance
one another must be the deliberate work of the chronicler. So the first point is that
Malalas is more than merely a compiler of scraps of information. Here there is clearly
deliberate arrangement of material. But in this case the arrangement would also very
much suit the imperial office. It showed the emperor as the eventual winner in both
stories. Since we have been suggesting that Malalas may not have done his chronicling
of the previous book until the 530s (at least after 532), we wonder when he could have
put these two stories together. In this case there is an immediacy and detail about the
accounts that suggests they were written up close to the actual events, and hence early
in the 520s. So that does leave me pondering whether Malalas not merely made use of
imperial advertisement but was also possibly an author of it, and that his writing up
and being the author of such official material was what provided the motivation and
opportunity to get him going on writing his Chronographia.
That of course remains speculation but it would also make sense of other material
in this book, so much of which is devoted to Justin’s benefactions on cities that suf-
fered from the anger of God with floods, fire or earthquake, with the last third of the
book devoted to the horrendous earthquake of 526 in Antioch and so much of this
linked to the will of God. Most of these notices again are likely to have come from the
imperial office, though some passages in the description of the Antioch earthquake,
as Laura Carrara has now demonstrated, must have been based on a formal high-style
rhetorical account, in all likelihood Procopius of Gaza’s lost monody.19 But the will of
God is also emphasized in the actual appointment of Justin as emperor, after Aman-
tius had given money to Justin to distribute to the army so that it would make Theocri-
tus emperor. Justin did distribute it but the army and people by the will of God made
Justin emperor. The stress on the will of God remains an unusual characteristic of the
book and is scarcely present elsewhere. So perhaps this was just a feature of Malalas’
first attempts at chronicling, possibly under imperial pressure, and that he got rid of
this later, and that he actually began his own chronicling of “the things that came to
my hearing” with book XVII and Justin, and only tackled the second half of book XVI
on Anastasius rather later, after compiling his first fifteen and a half books from ear-
lier chronicles, when he discovered, perhaps belatedly and to his embarrassment and
chagrin, that Eustathius of Epiphania, had stopped in 503 and so had left him with
a gap of fifteen years (503-518) to fill in before Justin’s reign and Book XVII began.
That to me would explain his unusual and unexpected emphasis on the fact that at his

19 See Laura Carrara’s contribution in this volume.