Page 139 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Chapter 4

THE SAINT AS ENVOY: FIFTH- AND
SIXTH-CENTURY LATIN BISHOPS’
LIVES

Through the intercession and merit of the priest, a king was restrained, an
army recalled, provinces spared from devastation.
Constantius, Vita Germani Autissiodorensis, 28
Besides Sidonius’ Panegyric on Avitus, the most extensive dramatisations
of embassies in late antique Latin literature occur in several hagiographic
Lives of bishops. Scenes of bishops undertaking legations to rulers on
behalf of their communities are well-known attestations of the increas-
ing involvement of the episcopacy in public functions, in turn a re-
flection of the annexation of the office of bishop by members of the
1
provincial aristocracy. Such tableaux also appear to give evidence of a
concomitant ebb of municipal and imperial authority, a vacuum filled
2
perforce by the church. This latter impression is misleading. Embassies
appear in late fifth- and early sixth-century hagiography precisely because
the undertaking of legations was a common but prestigious political oc-
currence in secular centres of power, carried out by non-ecclesiastics

1 On bishops and aristocracy: M. Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien: zur Kontinuit¨ at r¨ omischer
F¨ uhrungsschichten vom 4. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert (Beiheftder Francia 5; Munich, 1976); S. J. B.
Barnish, ‘Transformation and Survival in the Western Senatorial Aristocracy, c. ad 400–700’,
Papers of the British School in Rome 56 (1988), 138–40.
There is no single overview of late antique/early medieval hagiography pending the completion
of the multi-volume Hagiographies, ed. Guy Philipart, 2 vols. to date (Corpus Christianorum;
Turnhout, 1994, 1996), butvaluable surveys of recentwork include: P. Fouracre, ‘Merovingian
History and Merovingian Hagiography’, Past and Present 127 (1990), 3–38; Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Early
Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century’, Early Medieval Europe 1 (1992), 69–76;
Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 9–29; I. N. Wood, ‘The
Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West’, in E. Chrysos and I. Wood
(eds.), East and West: Modes of Communication (The Transformation of the Roman World 5; Leiden,
1999), 93–109. For literary analysis of the genre: F. Lotter, Severinus von Noricum: Legende und
historische Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart, 1976), 37–59; C. Stancliffe, St Martin and his Hagiographer: History
and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford, 1983), 86–102; W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im
lateinischen Mittelalter, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1986–91), esp. i, section iv, ‘Bischofsleben der Sp¨ atantike’,
193–266.
2
Cf. the cautions against exaggerating the degree of municipal secular authority held by bishops
prior to the mid-sixth century (for the West) in Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City,
esp. 143, 144, 154, 156–7.
113