ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to review some aspects of John Malalas' handling of myth and of the classical past. It draws largely on the work of Elizabeth Jeffreys and Cyril Mango, and considers briefly the overall arangement of his material. Various scholars have discussed how Malalas and other Byzantine world chroniclers have dehellenised the past in their versions both of rationalised myth and of real events. Malalas treats the Olympian gods in a rationalised, perhaps euhemensed, way as historical figures in the distant past, where, however, they have nothing to do with Greece. Malalas' use of chastity in the long distant past as the yardstick for separating the civilised from the barbarous provides a curious parallel to Justinian's invention of dubious historical parallels to support his provincial reforms, just as Malalas' representation of contemporary events also appears to be derived from imperial propaganda.
