Page 140 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

including provincial magnates and palatine officials. Authors of episco-
pal biographies sought to appropriate for their subjects the social credit
attached to this function. The impression that bishops shouldered the bur-
den of municipal duties in undertaking embassies stems from the general
invisibility of non-ecclesiastic envoys in the sources. A series of Vitae
show the growth of a new saintly image, a distinct extension of earlier
hagiographic types, which flourished between the late fifth and mid-sixth
centuries. These Vitae were a reaction to the increasing social value of
the role of envoy in public life.

the embassy of pope leo i to attila
A convenient illustration of the appropriation by hagiographers of the so-
cial credit due to those who carried out embassies is the story of the meet-
ing of Pope Leo I with Attila. Most hagiographic accounts of embassies
are the sole testimonies of the legations concerned, but for a few, instruc-
tive comparanda are available. The Chronicle of Prosper records an embassy
of 452 to Attila in northern Italy. The journey was undertaken, on be-
half of the senatus populusque Romanus and the emperor Valentinian III,
by three envoys: Trygetius, perhaps formerly prefect of Rome or prae-
torian prefect of Italy, who had previously negotiated with Geiseric in
North Africa; Gennadius Avienus, a member of the highest Roman no-
bility who had shared the consulate with Valentinian two years previously,
later described by Sidonius Apollinaris as one of the two most powerful
3
senators in Rome; and Pope Leo I. Prosper, an enthusiastic supporter
of Leo, credits the success of the mission to Leo’s divine support and
Attila’s joy at the presence of the bishop. In an earlier edition of the
Chronicle, published before these events occurred, Prosper had already
portrayed Leo as a peace-maker of the great when, as a deacon of Rome
in 440, he was sentto Gaul on a legatio publica to settle a quarrel be-
tween the magister utriusque militiae Aetius and the praetorian prefect of
4
Gaul, Fl. Albinus. Prosper’s partisanship may have led him to exagger-
ate Leo’s pre-eminence over his notable companions on the legation of
452; Leo’s role was perhaps to negotiate the ransoming of captives, a duty

3
Prosper, Chron., 1367. PLRE ii, ‘Gennadius Avienus 4’, 193–4; ‘Trygetius 1’, 1129.
Other attestations to the embassy: Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies
in Their History and Culture, ed. Max Knight(Berkeley, 1973), 129–30, 134–5, 140–2 (probably
Leo, Sermo, 84.1, PL 54, 433–4;Leo, Ep., 113, PL 54, 1024; Epistola orientalium episcoporum ad
Symmachum, PL 62, 59–60).
On the hagiographic elements of Prosper’s account of Leo throughout the Chron.: Muhlberger,
Fifth-Century Chroniclers, 131–5.
4
Prosper, Chron., 1341. Muhlberger, Fifth-Century Chroniclers, 111 (erroneously identifying Albinus
as a general).
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