Page 27 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Chapter 1

EMBASSIES AND POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION IN THE
POST-IMPERIAL WEST

introduction
Embassies were ubiquitous, constant, and crucial during the break-up of
the late Roman West and the establishment of the first medieval king-
doms in the fifth and early sixth centuries. The conduct of political
communication through formal conventions was a shaping force in this
period of change, more frequent if less obvious than warfare. This study
examines the literary monuments for the envoys who carried outthe
task of communication. Their story brings to the fore new aspects of
political processes in the late and post-imperial world. Late antique em-
bassies present uninterrupted continuations of Greco-Roman public ora-
tory and administration, functioning in new and complex circumstances.
The patterns of communication traced by envoys reveal a wide range of
participants in political affairs. Envoys had long been the voice of cities
and provinces to imperial authorities; in late antiquity, municipal envoys
spoke not only of taxation and civic honours, but also of war and peace.
Envoys now became also, as one himself put it, the ‘voice of kings’: with
the rise of a multiplicity of states, rulers required forms of representation
1
notneeded by emperors in earlier centuries. Many constituents of the
western polities employed envoys as their instruments, participating in
classical conventions of communication which remained common to all
regions and all parts of society in the West, long past the fragmentation
of political boundaries. Rewards accrued to those who successfully un-
dertook embassies, either on palatine service or for local communities.
Their missions moulded both the grand and the local politics of the late
antique West.
Embassies were important cumulatively. Regularity and ubiquity of
political communication, constantly sustaining relations among the gamut
of participants in public life, characterise the role of embassies in the poli-
tics of the West. Sources, however, often present narratives of embassies

1
Senarius, Epitaph, line 4.
1