Page 284 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

a truce, declined the king’s offer of gifts. Not money and valuables, said
Severus, but the handing-over of Roman captives, was an appropriate gift
for an envoy; Geiseric, impressed by his personal integrity, concurred. 172
The cultivation of ties through gift-exchange, however, was not restricted
to the long-distance exchange of monarchs and generals and their rep-
resentatives. Private petitioners to provincial authorities took gifts to lu-
bricate their demands. 173 Somewhatmore surprisingly, emperors, kings,
and senior magistrates are attested giving gifts to provincial envoys. 174
The ceremonial of an imperial or royal audience demanded ritual
clothing. At the imperial court of Constantinople, envoys from the
West changed into dark-coloured chlamyses before entering the imperial
presence. 175 Clothing projected multiple symbolic messages in different
contexts. In the tableau of authority which a formal reception entailed,
the ritual symbolism of power overrode even religious ideology. Lupici-
nus, abbot of a monastery in Burgundian Gaul, imitated St Martin in his
extreme poverty of clothing,aninversionofsocialconventionsintendedto
make a bold statement of humility. Yet, when undertaking intercessions
atthe courtof the Burgundian kings, even Lupicinus putshoes on. 176
No late antique source attests any distinctive emblem marking envoys,
with one exception. In a scene set in 585, Gregory of Tours describes
two legati dispatched from the Merovingian royal usurper Gundovald to
king Guntram, ‘with staffs [virgae] consecrated according to the manner
of the Franks, so that they should not be interfered with by anyone, but
should return after their embassy with the king’s response’. This is one
of the very few apparently Frankish customs Gregory describes, but its
mention is not incidental. Gregory’s unique reference to this token of
inviolability bodes ill for the envoys, for only a few lines later they are
put in chains, set on the rack, beaten, interrogated under torture, and
thrown into prison, a characteristically Gregorian punch-line. 177

172 Malchus, Fr., 5 (Fr. Class. Hist., 411); see above, chapter 4,n. 191.
173
E.g. Sid. Ap., Ep. iv, 8.5.
174
Sulpicius, Dial. ii, 5 (the emperor Valentinian I to Martin); Constantius, Vita Germani, 24
(praetorian prefect of Gaul Auxiliaris to Germanus); Vita Viviani, 6 (Theoderic I of Toulouse to
Vivianus); Ennodius, Vita Epiphani, 188 (general reference to the many gifts Theoderic bestows
on envoys).
175
De cer. i, 87.
176
Vies des P` eres du Jura [Vita Lupicini], ed. Martine, 63. On clothing symbolism in saints’ Vitae:
Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia,
1997), 52–70.
177
Gregory of Tours, Hist. vii, 32–3: cum virgis consecratis iuxta ritum Francorum ut scilicet non continger-
entur ab ullo,sed exposita legatione cum responsu reverterentur (the names of the envoys, Zotanus and
Zahulfus, are interpolated in only one late manuscript; Krusch-Levison, n. ad loc.). W. Goffart,
‘Foreigners in the Histories of Gregory of Tours’, in his Rome’s Fall and After (London, 1989),
275–7; E. James, ‘Gregory of Tours and the Franks’, in Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall, 60.
258