THE HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF THE LATIN CHRONICLE TRADITION

From the perspective of an ancient historian, medievalists' struggles to define the chronicle genre and particularly to construe it in terms of medieval novelty are difficult to understand. As this article argues, the chronicle is a very old genre, in fact the oldest historical genre, with roots in the Ancient Near East. We trace the genre from those Near Eastern roots to their Greek and Latin successors and then to their eventual combination with the tradition of Hellenistic apologetic chronography in the work of Julius Africanus and Eusebius. In the Latin West, a native Roman tradition, that of lightlyannotated consular fasti known as consularia, was hybridized with chronicles on a Greek model and became the dominant form in late antiquity, indeed the only chronicle form transmitted directly to the Middle Ages. This late ancient chronicle, we conclude, is the model for all medieval development of the genre.