Page 37 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

writers as the initiatives of each emperor. Nevertheless, though emperors
and kings may have been the source of foreign policy, many officials and
private persons were involved in its implementation. The ruling elites
of the provinces in which the new kingdoms were situated also shaped
the course of events, by accepting or rejecting annexation, and by their
relations with the new rulers. A constant stream of emissaries between
the imperial palace, officials in the provinces, military commanders, royal
courts, ecclesiastical sees, cities, and provincial assemblies formed the con-
text in which political events occurred. The intentions of monarchs can
only be seen at a distance through official propaganda and the record of
their deeds. But the experience of several individuals of a more modest
position, who served as envoys or drafted diplomatic correspondence,
can be fleshed out by close examination of literary sources, providing an
insight into the nature of communication throughout the West, rather
than a reconstruction of central policy.

the framework and conventions of embassies
in the classical world
Though the circumstances giving rise to political communication in the
fifth- and early sixth-century West were new, a millennium of exchanges
between political powers throughout the Mediterranean world lay be-
hind the forms and conventions of late antique embassies. The practices
of the fifth and sixth centuries are best appreciated in the light of two ear-
lier periods of Mediterranean civilisation, classical Greece and the early
Roman empire. The forms and patterns of communication developed
in these periods were the basis for the practices in the different political
conditions of the fifth and early sixth centuries.

Classical Greece
Despite the intellectual adoption of a biblical past by Christian writers,
the late Roman empire remained culturally and politically the product of
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classical civilisation. Late antique conventions of communication had a
cultural pedigree leading back to the Greek city states of the fourth and
fifth centuries bc. 29 Embassies were among the most common political

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Biblical past: e.g. most bluntly, Gregory of Tours, Hist. i. Averil Cameron, ‘Remaking the Past’,
in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical
World (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 1–20.
29
For the following: Dietmar Kienast, ‘Presbeia’, RE Suppl. xiii, 499–628;D.J.Mosley, Envoys and
Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (Historia Einzelschriften 22; Wiesbaden, 1973); Frank Adcock and
D. J. Mosley, Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (London, 1975); and Matthews, ‘Gesandtschaft’, 653–85.
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