Reading to Create. In the Workshop of the Byzantine Chroniclers

To undertake the task of writing universal history, the Byzantine chronicler necessarily becomes reader of a variety of texts, such as documents and historical sources, literary works, religious and sapiential writings. The chronicler’s reading is not a passive one: as previous texts are read in order to draw from them material to create the author’s own version of human history, the source material is selected, cut and modified according to the reader-author’s needs, as well as to the issues of his own times. In the new works thus composed, however, the source texts often remain recognizable – as can be seen in cases where the chronicle sources have come down to us: this fact allows us to study the methods and the rationale guiding the reading, selection and modification of sources, up to their re-composition in new (con)texts. The paper aims to examine a particular example of this reading activity, namely the case in which chroniclers are “readers of chronicles”: that is, when they draw on works of the same chronicle genre to compose (mostly) the earliest phases of human history. The relationship between George Kedrenos’ Synopsis Historion (11th century) and John Malalas’ chronicle (6th century) will be explored, with a special focus on the sections of the two works concerning Greek antiquities. The comparison between the later chronicle and its source will highlight, first, the dynamics of the “creative reading” carried out by its author. The analysis will also show how, through such reading manner, a cultural heritage (consisting not only of texts but also of worldview and historical perspective) is received and transmitted, in a chain of reading and creation that flows from Late Antiquity throughout the Byzantine millennium.