The sixth-century chronicler John Malalas refers three times to an author called Bouttios. In one case, this reference finds a parallel in the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea (325), which mentions a certain Bruttius as a source for the persecution of Flavia Domitilla under Domitian. In this monograph, Benjamin Garstad argues that Bouttios was an Antiochene Christian writing in the middle of the fourth century, presumably in response to Julian the Apostate (361–63). His work, of unknown genre, was largely fiction and was used by the sixth-century Greek original of the so-called Excerpta Latina Barbari (c. 800). John Malalas accessed it via a possibly sixth-century historian called Domninus. Building on parallels in content, Garstad prints 35 fragments, drawn mainly from these two citing authorities. This reconstruction contrasts with those of FRHist 98 and FHistLA 21 (L. Van Hoof and P. Van Nuffelen, The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (Cambridge 2020)). They call this author Bruttius, list three short fragments and question the authenticity of the references to Bouttios in John Malalas, except for the one that derives from the chronicle of Eusebius. A century ago, Felix Jacoby (Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 2A (Berlin 1926), vii) warned against expansive collections of fragments and scholars’ confidence in their abilities to reconstruct historians based on perceived thematic connections between passages in citing authorities: ‘Diese Sicherheit wird meist überschätzt’ (‘This certainty is often overestimated’).
The present book illustrates Jacoby’s wisdom. Garstad’s dating of Bouttios to the middle of the fourth century faces the problem that Bruttius is attested throughout the entire tradition of Eusebius’ Chronicle (Greek, Armenian, Latin and Syriac), which renders it inevitable that he was in the now-lost original. Hence, Bruttius predates Eusebius. As a way out, Garstad suggests (55) that Bruttius’ name was inserted in an interpolated version of Eusebius’ chronicle. Of doubtful existence anyway, such an interpolated version was suggested only for the Greek and Armenian traditions, and was dated to c. 412 (A.A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition (Lewisburg 1979), 77–78). As the name of Bruttius is already in Jerome’s translation in 380, even on Mosshammer’s hypothesis it was in the original Eusebius. Further, the Syriac witness (Chronicle of 724) has been shown by Richard Burgess (Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography (Stuttgart 1999)) to depend on a continuation of Eusebius up to 350, thus dating its reference to Bruttius before the supposed date of Garstad’s Bouttios. This is problematic for Garstad’s fragment collection, as frs 33–35 describe events of 330 (and thus postdating the publication of Eusebius’ Chronicle). One of these relates to a Tyche sacrifice, whereas a central argument of the book is that all accounts of such sacrifices in Malalas derive from Bouttios.
Regarding the name Bouttios, the Eusebius tradition attests that his name contained an r (Brettios and Bruttius), which has dropped out only in John Malalas. Garstad’s privileging of John Malalas for the name (118–37) reflects insufficient attention to the complexities of the Malalas tradition. We only possess an abridged Greek original and the text regularly garbles names (for example, Herodotus instead of Herodorus). Malalas attributes information to sources from which it cannot have been drawn (for instance, Flavius Josephus, Irenaeus) and many source references are second-hand and distorted (see E. Jeffreys, ‘Malalas’ Sources’, in E. Jeffreys (ed.), Studies in Malalas (Melbourne 1990), 167–216). Garstad prefers to understand Malalas as an accurate reporter of Bouttios’ text, for example, when refusing (161) to believe that the reference to Christians exiled to the Pontus under Domitian (Joh. Mal. 10.48) is a misunderstanding of Pontia, the place of exile for Domitilla as given by the entire parallel tradition.
Based on thematic connections in Malalas, Garstad’s collection of fragments skirts the issue that we cannot decide if these narrative links are due to Bouttios, Domninus or Malalas. His fragments sometimes leave out the source references given by Malalas to sources other than Bouttios, crucially, in two instances, references to Eusebius of Caesarea (frs 10 and 14). For fr. 12 (Malalas 7.17) and fr. 17 (Excerpta latina barbari 1.8.4), there is evidence that they derive from a later expansion of Eusebius, as attested in the seventh-century Armenian chronicle attributed to Philo of Tirak (§296: A. Hakobyan, Philon Tirakac‘i, žamanakagrut‘iwn Ē daru, in Matenagirk‘ Hayoc‘ 5 (Yerevan 2005), 903–69). This conflicts with Garstad’s view of Bouttios as separate from the Eusebius tradition and the author of a more prolix text. Readers interested in contexts for passages of John Malalas may draw profit from this book, which otherwise demonstrates the wisdom of the founding father of the modern study of fragmentary Greek historians.
