Page 285 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

In the classical Greek and early republican period also, heralds and other
messengers bore staffs as tokens of their peaceable office. The custom
appears in Virgil, and several late antique Latin commentators gloss the
virga of envoys as a pacis signum. 178 It seems unlikely that the practice
Gregory reports had any direct continuity from the classical convention;
an iconographical attribute such as a staff would probably have been
worked into literary descriptions of envoys by authors such as Sidonius
Apollinaris or Ennodius. It is striking that a golden staff (aurea virga,
) was an emblem of office of several early sixth-century
officials of the imperial court of Constantinople and the Ostrogothic
royal courtof Ravenna: the cura palatii (curopalatus in Constantinople),
the decurions of the silentarii, and the ostiary. 179 The duties of the cura
palatii and decurions included the reception and conduct of foreign and
western imperial envoys, but there is no indication that they bore their
staffs when conducting legations. Rather, the ceremonial function of the
golden staffs was associated with the person of the ruler: the cura palatii and
decurions bore them before the emperor or king when he travelled; the
ostiary carried his staff when introducing high officials into the imperial
presence. 180 It is possible but by no means certain that the staffs mentioned
by Gregory of Tours (which he does notdescribe as golden) represent
a transfer of these imperial emblems to envoys, as a token of the royal
authority they represent.

Ius gentium
Eulogies of individuals who had undertaken embassies to rulers often
stress the dangers they faced from hostile recipients; several sources refer
to envoys who were imprisoned or killed by their host. Such acts could
be deliberate provocations or, in the case of captivity, insurance against
attacks. 181 The position of legates was precarious in times of war, and

178
‘Virga’, in Dictionnaire des antiquit´ es grecques et romaines (Paris, 1919; repr. Graz, 1969), v, 924–5.
Virgil, Aeneid iv, 242. Servius, In Vergilii carmina commentarii, ed. A. F. Stocker et al., iii (Oxford,
1965), 333–5, on Vergil, Aeneid iv, 242 (late fourth century); Varro apud Nonius Marcellus,
De compendiosa doctrina, ed. W. Lindsay (Oxford, 1903), 528 (Nonius: early fourth century);
Placidus, Liber glossarum in Corpus glossariorum latinorum v, ed. G. Geotz (Leipzig, 1894), 550, line 8
(mid-fifth century).
179
Whitby, ‘On the Omission’, 468–83; ostiary at 469–70 n. 55.
180
Cura palatii: Whitby, ‘On the Omission’, 466; decurion: 478–9.
181
Provocation: Hyd., cc. 121, 139 [113, 131]: the comes Censorius, captured by the Sueves in 440,
executed during a period of Suevic–imperial hostility in 448; The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the
Stylite, trans. Trombley and Watt, 50, 54: the shah Cavades I holds Anastasius’ envoy Rufinus
during the seige of Amida, releasing him in order to spread news of the city’s destruction;
Gregory of Tours, Hist. iv, 40: Persarmenians kill Persian envoys, then seek miliary aid from the
emperor Tiberius; Nikephorus, Short History, vii: the shah Chosroes II imprisons envoys of the
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