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Roger Scott

This they both duly did, with Malalas eventually extending his chronicle to cover all of
Justinian’s reign. For the earlier period he derived his material from a range of chron-
icles until these ran out with the end of Eustathius’ unfinished history in 503, leaving
Malalas to struggle to cover the intervening fifteen years until Justin’s reign began,
using for this and later material “the things that came to my hearing”.
5. Appendix
It is clear enough that Malalas made good use of good stories in the contemporary
books where he could, but he also was selective. Malalas omits for instance three of
the surviving unlikely stories that Marcian put out to show that God had chosen him
early as Theodosius’ successor, stories that are retained in Procopius, Evagrius and
Theophanes who all very likely found them in Eustathius. These are the two protective
eagle stories (one in Procopius at Bellum Vandalicum I 4, 5-11, and both in Theoph-
anes, Chronographia AM 5943, pp. 103, 27-105,19 de Boor), and the story of Marcian
winning a place in the army by replacing a soldier providentially called Augustus (in
Evagrius Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica II 1). In contrast Malalas keeps just the
story of Theodosius’visit to Ephesos to consult St John about his successor and being
advised it would be Marcian (XIV 2/Thurn; XIV 26 Jeffreys/Jeffreys/Scott), which is
much less colourful than the other three but which, for a sixth-century audience, was
possibly rather more believable.
Various incredible stories about fifth-century emperors are either revived or first
appear in the late eleventh-century Cedrenus, such as an awful story of Zeno being
buried alive by his wife Ariadne, starving to death and so eating his own arms and
boots in his desperate hunger (Georgius Cedrenus, Historiarum compendium 388,21-36
Tartaglia). It seems quite likely that Cedrenus, who read rather more widely than his
predecessors as chroniclers, found the story in Eustathius whose history, seemingly
unavailable for several hundred years, appears to have been rediscovered in the elev-
enth or twelfth century as it is listed in the Patmos library catalogue of 1200.34 That
would explain why such stories first appear in Cedrenus. If that is so, then it is the
reserved and sensible Malalas who has rejected the absurd and sensationalist stories
that he would have found in the overcredulous Eustathius but which were accepted by
such reputable historians as Procopius and Evagrius. This would amount to virtually
a complete inversion of Treadgold’s unsubstantiated claim that Eustathius “was one
of the most learned and sophisticated historians Byzantium ever produced”35 whom a
fraudulent and incompetent Malalas copied but also, to avoid his plagiarism being de-
tected, replaced Eustathius’elegant Greek with his own “incorrect Greek (...) lacking
any kind of care or grace”.36 Instead it is rather more likely that Eustathius was also
34 Maas (1938); Diehl (1892), p. 520.
35 Treadgold (2007b), p. 715.
36 Treadgold (2007a), p. 246.