Page 279 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

legates to leading members and satellites of the court, as well as providing
informal opportunities for negotiation. 150
Ritual for the reception of embassies served several functions for the
host ruler. For domestic purposes, the tableau of a ruler receiving em-
bassies from foreign powers or from subjects impressed the importance of
his rule upon his court and subjects. The number of legations a ruler re-
ceived, and the distance they had travelled, was an indicator of his impor-
tance in affairs beyond the boundaries of his own realm. Multitudes of en-
voys are a feature common to Roman imperial panegyric, the propaganda
of the Persian shahs, and the public projection of the western kings. 151
The equation of a ruler’s importance with the range and foreignness of
legations he receives is nowhere more explicit than in the short pan-
egyrical poem Sidonius Apollinaris wrote for the Gothic king Euric. 152
The same message was aimed atforeign envoys, who could be shown
their host’s influence in other parts of the world. The historian Priscus,
who seems to have participated in an embassy from Constantinople to
Valentinian III in Rome c. 450, witnessed a diplomatic ceremony in-
volving another legation: the ‘adoption-in-arms’ by the magister utriusque
militiae Aetius of a Frankish prince, who had himself come to Rome from
the Rhineland on an embassy. 153

150 Vita Orientii 5; Vita Viviani 6; Ennodius, Vita Epiphani, 92; Cass., Variae vi, 3.6, 6.4, 9.7–8;
vii, 5.1, 33. Informal settings for negotiation: e.g. Sid. Ap., Epp. i, 2.8 (description of losing
to the Gothic king Theoderic II at a board-game ut causa salvetur); vii, 12.3; Priscus, Fr., 11.1
(Fr. Class. Hist., 245); Procopius, Wars iii, 24.9–15; Gregory of Tours, Hist. ix, 20.
151 E.g. Roman imperial: Pan. lat. x (ii) 3.4; Claudian, Cos. Stilich. ii, 184–207. Persian shahs: the
ninth-century ekphrasis by Al-Buhturi of mosaics in the palace of Ctesiphon, perhaps depicting
Chosroes I Anoushirvan, trans. in A. J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry (Cambridge, 1965), 72–80, versus
46. Royal: Ennodius, Pan. Theod. xii, 60; xxi, 92; cf. Cass., Variae xi, 1.7, 11 (on Amalasuntha,
regent to Athalaric in Italy). Also a stock image in non-panegyrical works, e.g. Sid. Ap., Ep. i,
2.4 (gentium to be understood as parts of Gaul, not foreign peoples); Pope Symmachus, Ep., 10 to
the emperor Anastasius; PL 62, 67, cited by Amory, People and Identity, 205 n. 50. Cf. Barnwell,
‘War and Peace’, 138.
152 Sid. Ap., Ep. viii, 9.5 versus, lines 21–54.
153
Priscus, Fr., 20.1. Date: Thompson, Attila, 221; PLRE ii, 906. This ceremony in Rome recalls
the Roman republican practice of foreign leaders swearing oaths of friendship in the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinis; the pagan temple of Isis at Philae was still used for this purpose in the mid-
fifth century; Priscus, Fr., 27.1 (Fr. Class. Hist., 323). The visit of the Frankish prince to Rome,
however, was probably necessitated by the presence there of Aetius, perhaps in connection with
the recent, permanent relocation to Rome by Valentinian III; Gillett, ‘Rome, Ravenna’, 144,
147–8.
The diplomatic tie of adoption per arma is identified as ‘barbarian’ by Procopius, Wars i,
11.22 and Cass., Variae iv, 2.1, 2, though not necessarily exclusive to the northern barbarians;
Procopius’ example involves the Persian royal family (the proposed adoption of Chosroes, son of
the shah Cavades, by the emperor Justin I). In Procopius, Wars i, 11.22, itis proffered by Justin’s
quaestor Proclus as a form of adoption inferior to Roman adoption by written document, but

it is unclear whether Proclus means that adoption
is inferior because itprecludes
inheritance, i.e. of the empire (cf. Procopius, Wars i, 11.17–18), or whether the term is a figure
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