In this first volume in a new series of translations and editions of late ancient Latin chronicles, Richard W. Burgess and Michael Kulikowski take the reader on a journey through the history of the chronicle from the third millennium b.c. until the twelfth century a.d. and from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Latin West. This journey in six chapters is concluded with eight useful appendices in which the authors explain the origins of the terms chronica and ‘annals’ (and why this term cannot apply to chronicles), (re-)publish excerpts from chronicles, consularia and chronographs from the ancient world, and discuss the now lost chronicles of Cassius Longinus and Thallus and Livy's use of Ab urbe condita dates.

This ground-breaking study represents a final response to persistent yet erroneous claims that the Latin chronicle was of medieval, Christian or Western European origin. By highlighting the existence of chronicles in ancient Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome, the authors demonstrate that such claims cannot be maintained. In addition, B. and K. dispel the confusion that has arisen regarding the history, nature and characteristics of the chronicle, mainly because of the terminology not only used by ancient and medieval authors but also by modern historians of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As the authors point out, it is not universality that makes a chronicle, but its form. A chronicle consists of brief entries (though in the Middle Ages these entries could be longer narratives, copied from narrative sources), arranged chronologically. An additional crucial characteristic of the chronicle is its paratactic nature: the ancient chronicler does not specify any connection between the events which he records (there is no conséquence, only consécution of these entries).

This volume focuses on the two main genres of Latin chronographical writing, the consularia and the chronicle. Consularia, the only native form of Latin chronography, are ‘lists of consuls with very short historical entries appended’ (12), which evolved from fasti, or calendars, and consular fasti, unadorned lists of consuls, and whose purpose was to speak ‘publicly of an individual's connection to and support for Rome and her emperor’ (172). Surviving in manuscript and epigraphic form, the genre saw a massive decline in the Latin West from the fifth century onwards, undoubtedly mainly because of the rise in popularity of the chronicle, though ironically late ancient Latin chronicles are our main sources of information about the contents of these consularia.

The Latin chronicle's rise in popularity in Late Antiquity was due to Jerome's Latin translation, adaptation and continuation (c. a.d. 379–80) of an anonymous Antiochene Greek continuation (c. a.d. 350) of the Chronici canones of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. a.d. 340). In turn, Jerome was continued by various authors, most notably Hydatius and Prosper of Aquitaine, whose continuations were often themselves continued. This process of continuation of Latin chronicles ended with John of Biclar who continued until a.d. 589 the chronicle of Victor of Tunnuna, which was in itself a continuation of Prosper until a.d. 565. The seventh century saw a significant transformation of the chronicle genre in the Latin West as well as in the Byzantine East into what B. and K. call the chronicle epitome or breviary. Though the authors of such breviaries still saw themselves as rooted in the ancient tradition, the results of their literary production were rather different from the ancient chronicle: chronicle epitomes are heavily abbreviated in their earliest period and become only somewhat more extensive as they near the authors’ own lifetimes.

The final chapter of this monograph carefully catalogues the production of Latin breviaries from the seventh century onwards, on the Iberian peninsula as well as in England and Ireland (as late as the seventeenth century). The chapter finishes with a detailed investigation of the so-called ‘Frankish annals’, in which B. and K. show that the majority of these Carolingian texts in fact more closely resemble the ancient method of chronicle writing than the more recent Latin breviaries. Though they admit that some of these Carolingian chronicles may indeed have developed from annotated Easter Tables, the authors of this volume convincingly argue that they must be seen as the continuation of a century-old tradition of Latin chronicle tradition that goes back to Jerome's translation of Eusebius. At the same time, the authors also pay attention to the presence of a similar tradition in the Byzantine East, which already existed in the sixth century (for example, Malalas) but emerged more clearly after the Chronicon Paschale (a.d. 630s) and the Chronographia of Theophanes the Confessor (d. a.d. 818).

Speaking from the perspective of someone who works with Syriac and Greek chronicles on a daily basis, I believe this monograph will become the standard work on the chronicle genre. Its diachronic, multicultural and multilingual approach, cataloguing and analysing a large number of known chronicles from the ancient and medieval world, makes this volume an invaluable resource for any ancient or medieval historian, not only those working with Latin sources.