Page 299 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

CONCLUSION

Formal embassies were an aspect of public life which continued from the
later Roman empire through the fifth and sixth centuries into the time of
the early medieval kingdoms. Originating in the exchanges of civitates be-
fore the rise of Roman hegemony, the ‘internal diplomacy’ of embassies
played a fundamental part in the administration of the Roman empire.
Cities, provincial councils, and other bodies communicated directly with
the emperor and his senior magistrates, raising and resolving issues outside
those addressed by bureaucratic administration, and maintaining the po-
litical cohesion of the vast empire through regular affirmations of loyalty.
The conventions of the Second Sophistic, which flourished in the first
and second centuries ad with a resurgence in the newly Christian em-
pire of the fourth century, formalised the rhetorical practices of embassies,
while imperial legislation regulated their conduct in regard to access to
imperial officials, obligations and recompense for envoys, and the provi-
sion of state facilities to assist the undertaking of the journeys involved.
Municipal and provincial embassies were thus officially coopted into the
machinery of government. This system of internal communication was
important to the functioning not only of the empire as a whole, but also
of local society, where the successful completion of the burden of under-
taking legations brought social advantage through prestige and perhaps
rewards from the emperor. The traffic in embassies was essentially one-
way: embassies from cities and provinces approached the imperial centre
and returned with the authority’s reply. The central government did not
regularly need to delegate emissaries to represent itself to its constituents
in the same manner.
Communications between the imperial government and external
forces occurred largely through military channels. Only rarely were the
conventions of internal communications transplanted to outside environ-
ments. The use of Sophists as envoys to foreign powers, however, begins to
be attested in fourth-century relations with Sassanian Persia. The accept-
ance of permanent confrontation with an equally powerful neighbour,
and a shared Hellenistic heritage, made possible two partial shifts: in the
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