John Malalas and the Origins of the Allegorical and Novelistic Traditions of the Trojan War in Byzantium

Abstract

In the sixth century, the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas composed a history of the world from the Biblical story of creation to the author’s own day. The largest narrative unit within this Chronicle was a retelling of the Trojan War. For the most part, Malalas narrated his account within the generic constraints of traditional Byzantine historiography. He also, however, adopted styles from other more literary genres: the allegory and the novel. He thus introduced into the Byzantine tradition of the Trojan War new modes of narration which would be more fully developed by subsequent authors. With Malalas as his source, the twelfth-century grammarian John Tzetzes, for instance, wrote his Allegories of the Iliad, which rendered the story entirely as allegory, while Tzetzes’ contemporary Constantine Manasses and the later anonymous author of The Byzantine Iliad narrated the Trojan War as a novel or medieval romance. Comparing the later works to their sources and examining the contexts in which they were produced demonstrates how the mutability of genre and aesthetics made the Trojan War a subject that could be continuously reshaped to suit the ideology of the times.