Page 11 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

PREFACE

This study sprang from several coincidences. I chanced to read Hydatius,
Priscus, and Senarius’ Epitaph (tucked away in the indexes of Mommsen’s
edition of Cassiodorus) at much the same time, and was struck not only
by the importance of ‘diplomacy’ to all three texts, but also by the fact
that while diplomatic communication was a prominent feature in mod-
ern literature on the Byzantine East, it was not much evident in studies
of the early medieval West. At much the same time, we were all wak-
ened each morning by radio news of the ‘shuttle diplomacy’ preceding
the Gulf War of January–February 1991. These tense events suggested
parallels with the repeated embassies in Hydatius, and with Senarius’
boast of visiting eastern and western capitals twice within one year; more
significantly, they focused the mind on the interconnectedness of com-
munication and warfare. Some time later I began to research ‘diplomacy
in the West’, but soon became convinced that the fragmentary nature
of the sources precluded any meaningful ‘diplomatic history’ of the pe-
riod, if the purpose of such a history was to gain insight into what our
sources call the arcana and secreta of the imperial and royal courts. The
most expansive sources tend to describe the policy intentions of the cen-
tres of power at best superficially and very rarely with any real claim to
insider knowledge; what they are interested in is the importance of em-
bassies to the careers of envoys themselves, or to their local communities.
Fergus Millar’s elucidating articles on the ‘internal diplomacy’ of Roman
imperial administration, however, struck me as providing the proper con-
text for understanding ‘diplomatic’ activity in the period of the empire’s
break-up: not as a primitive forebear of European international statecraft,
but as the continued practice of communications between different lev-
els of authority in the classical world. This study, then, focusses on the
activity, not the issues, of ‘diplomacy’. The nature of the sources also
dictated the methodology used in the main chapters, which foregrounds
the interaction of sources, their genre, and their historical setting.
I owe many thanks to instructors and friends. Not unusually, this book
descends from a doctoral dissertation, presented in 1994 at the Centre
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