Page 43 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

Republican and imperial Rome
Diplomatic relations under the Roman empire, up to the battle of Adri-
anople, were conducted within substantially different political and ad-
ministrative frameworks from that of the classical Greek cities. But the
mode of comunication, the Greek model of the envoy as an eloquent
advocate, persisted throughout the Roman imperial period into late an-
tiquity. These conventions affected not only embassies to foreign powers,
but also internal embassies among communities and authorities within
the empire. 45
Even before its imperial expansion, republican Rome played an impor-
tant part in the diplomatic traffic of the Mediterranean world. According
to Varro and other antiquarians, the earliest Roman relations with other
polities were conducted within a religious framework; both the conduct
of embassies and the conclusion of treaties were carried out by priests
of the college of fetiales. By the late republican period, this framework
was long superseded, the fetiales retaining only a ceremonial religious
role in the conclusion of treaties. Roman political dominance shifted the
conduct of interstate relations from a quasi-religious sphere to a more
explicitly military and state context. The Roman state exercised greater
control over embassies than did the Greek cities. Envoys of allied states
were supported at state expense; those of enemy powers had to seek
permission to enter Roman territory, were excluded from the central
precincts of the city itself (within the pomerium), and sometimes were
required to travel under Roman escort. Unlike the Greek cities, only the
Senate received foreign envoys, not the assemblies of the populus Romanus.
Though in the early republic the populus voted on prosecuting war or
concluding peace treaties, foreign policy was primarily the domain of the
Senate. 46

45 For the following: in addition to Matthews, ‘Gesandtschaft’, 660–72 and Kienast, ‘Presbia’,
587–90: von Premerstein, ‘Legatus’, RE xii.1, 1133–41; Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman
World (31 BC – AD 337) (London, 1977), 341–55; Millar, ‘Emperors, Frontiers, and Foreign
Relations, 31 bc to ad 378’, Britannia 13 (1982), 1–23; ‘Governmentand Diplomacy’; Richard
J. A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (Princeton, 1984), 408–30; John F. Matthews, ‘Hostages,
Philosophers, Pilgrims, and the Diffusion of Ideas in the Late Roman Mediterranean and Near
East’, in F. M. Clover and R. S. Humphreys (eds.), Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity
(Madison, WI, 1989), 29–49; Linderski, ‘Ambassadors Go to Rome’ and Jean-Louis Ferrary, ‘Ius
fetiale etdiplomatie’, in Fr´ ezouls and Jacquemin (eds.), Les Relations internationales, 411–32; Elton,
Warfare in Roman Europe, 175–98; Jones, Kinship Diplomacy, 81–121; Richard Duncan-Jones,
Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge, 1990), 100–6.
46
Polybius, Histories iii, trans. W. R. Paton (LCL; London, 1923), vi, 13, 6–8; Theodore Mommsen,
R¨ omisches Staatsrecht, 3rd edn, iii.1 (Leipzig, 1887; repr. Graz, 1952), 590–606, 1147–73; Erich
S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley, 1984), i, 203–49, esp. 231–44;
Arthur M. Eckstein, Senate and General: Individual Decision-Making and Roman Foreign Relations,
264–194 BC (Berkeley, 1987), xviii–xx.
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