Page 245 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Cassiodorus and Senarius

duties. These religious activities reveal the ambiguity in which a court
servant, pursuing a successful career under a ruler of divergent faith, could
operate. Senarius prepared his epitaph for posterity with a traditional
concern for his worldly fame, a fame resting upon the favours he had
received from Theoderic.
The eloquence of rhetoric, the art of communication and persuasion,
was fundamental to contacts between rulers in late antiquity, as it was
for all aspects of imperial government and public life. The writings of
Cassiodorus and Senarius illustrate the role of traditional forms of epis-
tolography and spoken eloquence in communications among imperial
and barbarian rulers in the early sixth century. The style of the diplo-
matic letters represents a direct continuation of the rhetorical tradition
of epistolography, and has stylistic forebears in fifth- and sixth-century
communications between emperors, high officials, the Senate, provincial
councils, and important members of the Christian church. 162
Undertaking an embassy was traditionally a sign of distinction in clas-
sical Mediterranean culture. This honour only increased in the new con-
text of the fragmented West. Within provincial communities, the prestige
of completing a successful embassy prompted competition between local
magnates seeking the role of civic patron, most obviously by bishops who
sought to appropriate the role. At imperial and royal courts, the need for
monarchs ceaselessly to send and receive emissaries was impressed on the
workings of government not by generating bureaucratic changes to fa-
cilitate diplomatic communication, but by shifting those most important
elements of late antique society, rank and honour, in favour of court
servants who served as envoys. Senarius’ career and epitaph show that
legatine tasks now stood to be rewarded with high public office, and the fi-
nancial rewards and social rank which followed. It is natural that the docu-
ments which preserve the details of his career, his letters of appointment
and his epitaph, belong to genres largely concerned with encomium.

162
Fridh, Terminologie et formules, 5–8, 27–28; Macpherson, Rome in Involution, 70.

219