Page 248 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

Vitigis’ envoys, despite the potential danger posed by a written message
should it fall into the wrong hands, may be a habitual continuation of this
requirement by the king’s chancellery. Some basic patterns of communi-
cation can be assumed to arise from any situation in which two commu-
nities or states are brought into contact. But the Roman admininstrative
and cultural context is central to understanding the practices of the fifth
and sixth centuries throughout the Roman and post-Roman world and
beyond.
The following chapter essays a sketch of the conventions of practice
and thought which formed the framework for legatine traffic. The evi-
dence is discussed under two main headings: first, the few but instructive
sources which are prescriptive accounts of procedures for the reception
of embassies; second, the larger and more varied evidence which can
be deduced, often with caveats, from narrative and other accounts of
embassies. 6

prescriptive accounts of receptions
There are two short prescriptive accounts of the reception of envoys at
the imperial court of Constantinople, both originating in the early sixth
century. One is written from the perspective of the court, the other
from that of the office of a frequent correspondent with the imperial
court, the bishop of Rome. They therefore offer contrasting as well as
complementary information. 7

De ceremoniis aulae Byzantinae

A lengthy section of the work now known as De ceremoniis aulae Byzanti-
nae, initially compiled at the order of the tenth-century Byzantine em-
peror Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, records protocol used at the
eastern imperial court in the fifth and sixth centuries for a number of
ceremonial occasions. Part if not all of this record of earlier practice is

6
For earlier outlines of diplomatic procedures in late antiquity, see above, chapter 1,n. 78.
7
One other prescriptive account of the dispatch and reception of envoys is the short text On Envoys
( ) which forms chapter 43 of The Anonymous Byzantine Treatise on Strategy in Three
Byzantine Military Treatises, ed. and trans. George T. Dennis (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae
25; Washington, DC, 1985), xliii, but which also circulated independently; Douglas Lee and
Jonathon Shepard, ‘A Double Life: Placing the Peri Presbeon’, Byzantinoslavika 52 (1991), 15–39
(I am grateful to A. D. Lee for drawing this article to my attention). Lee and Shepard have called
the traditional mid-sixth-century date of the text into doubt; moreover, the identity and position
of the author is quite unknown (Dennis, Three Byzantine Military Treatises, 3 for speculations). It
is cited below, however, as comparative evidence for attitudes.
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