Page 44 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

The founding of the principate altered the political framework of
Roman foreign policy making and diplomatic practice. The power of
the triumvirs was recognised by neighbouring rulers, whose represen-
tatives sought out the imperator best able to offer Rome’s favour, rather
than the Senate. Octavian’s monarchy stabilised the situation, establish-
ing a single individual and sequence of successors whom ‘client’ kings
and dynasts could approach. Until the mid-second century, the Senate
continued occasionally to receive foreign envoys, and was advised, and
sometimes consulted, on the emperors’ dealings with other powers. This
involvement appears to have been little more than a formal acknowl-
edgement of the Senate’s republican responsibilities. Augustus’ Res gestae
displays the shift in real authority. The Senate formally voted the emperor
authority to conclude treaties in the mid-first century, a right possibly
confirmed at each succeeding imperial accession. By the early third cen-
tury, the Senate’s former role in the creation and execution of foreign
policy was a matter of nostalgia. 47
The emperors’ control of foreign relations was only one consequence
of the true basis of their authority, the exclusive control of the army.
Military force, actively employed or used indirectly as coercion, was the
determining factor in international relations; the military authority con-
centrated in the person of Augustus and his successors inevitably bestowed
48
the central role in foreign relations upon the emperors. Just as they acted
as commander-in-chief of the army, so the emperors alone received for-
eign representatives or rulers, and dispatched responses. From the late
second century, the ‘irreducibly personal character’ of the emperors’ com-
mand of military and diplomatic functions increased, as the delegation of
special commands to lesser generals became uncommon. The imperial
court was relocated from the Italian heartlands to the northern and east-
ern borders, the scene of the emperors’ major campaigns, and from the
time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, sharing of imperial author-
ity between co-emperors, each situated on a different frontier, became

47
Res gestae divi Augusti,in Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, ed. Victor
Ehenberg and A. H. M. Jones, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1955), cc. 31–3;cf. ibid., chap. 7, ‘Foreign
Kings’, 101–4;G.W.Bowersock, Augustus and the Greek World (Oxford, 1965), chap. 4, ‘Kings
and Dynasts’, 42–61; Millar, ‘Emperors, Frontiers, and Foreign Relations’, 4–5 and n. 25, citing
Cassius Dio lii, 31.1 on the former role of the Senate, 11–12; Millar, ‘Governmentand Dipomacy’,
348–51, 366–8; Talbert, Senate of Imperial Rome, 425–30. On Roman relations with foreign nations
under the early empire: Luttwak, Grand Strategy; Braund, Rome and the Friendly King; Lynn F.
Pitts, ‘Relations between Rome and the German “Kings” on the Middle Danube in the First to
the Fourth Centuries ad’, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), 45–58.
48
Luttwak, Grand Strategy, 2–3; J. B. Campbell, The Emperor and the Roman Army,31 BC–AD 235
(Oxford, 1984), 348.
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