Page 251 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

(and, possibly, of the original text of Peter patricius) as a practical hand-
book for courtprocedure. A more significantelementof the description
is the public and ceremonial nature of the reception of the embassy. One
of the duties of the magister officiorum clearly is to carry out the substan-
tive communications between the emperor and the envoys in private, to
ensure that issues are decided before the actual audience. The procedure
of the later formal audience, carried out before the full consistory, is ritu-
al, not negotiation. The presentation of panegyrics, and the ritual for
the presentation of letters, stresses the ceremonial nature of the formal
audience.
The following two chapters of De ceremoniis detail the procedures for
the reception of envoys from the Persian shah. 14 This section is consid-
erably longer than the account of western imperial officials, for it details
not only the stage-managing of the envoys’ presence at court, but also the
accommodation and care they are to receive from the time they cross into
Roman territory, and provisions for an extended stay in Constantinople;
the comparable details for the lodging of western envoys are perfunctory.
Though the text is prescriptive, it is very likely that substantial parts de-
scribe the actual reception of specific Persian embassies at Constantinople.
To illustrate the summons into the imperial presence given to the Persian
envoy by the magister officiorum, the text reads: ‘the magistros summons [the
envoy] as follows, for example: “LetIesdekos, the envoy of Chosroes the
15
king of the Persians, and those who accompany him, be called.” ’ The
Persian envoy is identified as Isdigousnas Zich, a senior palatine official at
Ctesiphon who undertook three embassies to Constantinople between
547 and 557, dying en route to Constantinople a fourth time in 567. Peter
patricius met Isdigousnas possibly as many as five times: in his capacity as
magister officiorum from 539 to 565, he will have overseen the Persian no-
ble’s three visits to Constantinople; as an envoy himself twice to Chosroes
in 550 and 561, Peter metIsdigousnas atDaras and probably atCtesiphon.
A number of senior palatine officials from Constantinople and Ctesiphon
were extensively involved in embassies between the two powers in the
time of Justinian; Peter and Isdigousnas are striking because their careers
intertwined. 16 The accountof De ceremoniis is perhaps a compilation of
several visits to Constantinople by Isdigousnas and other Persian envoys.
14 15
De cer. i, 89–90. De cer. i, 89 (Reiske 405).
16
On Isdigousnas (Yazd-Gushnasp): Stein ii, 503–4 (‘le repr´ esentant principal de son souverain
dans toutes les n´ egociations avec l’Empire’); N. Garso¨ ıan, ‘Byzantium and the Sasanians’, in The
Cambridge History of Iran iii.1 (Cambridge, 1983), 574; PLRE iii, ‘Isdigousnas Zich’, 722–3 (not
citing De cer.); Tinnefeld, ‘Ceremonies for Foreign Ambassadors’, 194–5 (reading De cers. i, 89–90
as a description exclusively of Isdigousnas’ visit of 547/8, but the provision in the text of alternative
procedures, i.e. arrangements for when the emperor is in Chalcedon (De cer. i, 89 (Reiske 403)),
indicates that the author is drawing on observations of several occasions).
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