Page 51 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

seem no longer to have sought out the Senate even as a gesture of cour-
tesy, an indication of the conceptual equality of embassies from within
or without the borders of the empire. 73
As in earlier antiquity, so under the Roman empire, representation of
a community was the prerogative of the aristocracy. An embassy repre-
sented both a burden, for the expense involved and the strain of travel-
ling, and an honour, to represent the community and possibly to gain
personal rewards from the emperor. For both reasons, provincial coun-
cillors chose emissaries from their own ranks. But the essential quality
determining the selection of an envoy was still rhetorical skill. The move-
ment known as the Second Sophistic, which developed and flourished
in the first two centuries after Augustus, provided its students with tech-
nical skills to produce a range of oratorical occasional pieces. The genres
and forms defined by the Sophists shaped the conduct of public speech
within the empire; both orators and their audiences were conscious of
the conventions to be observed. The late third-century handbook at-
tributed to Menander Rhetor outlines the forms of panegyrics to be
74
delivered to public magistrates, including the emperor. These rhetori-
cal practices were intrinsically tied to public administration under the
empire:

all might depend on the favour with which the emperor greeted the oration;
hence arose that well-attested role of the orators of the Second Sophistic on
embassies before the emperor. It is impossible to over-emphasise both the fact
that these endlessly-repeated journeys to the emperor were the essential means
by which the cities and other groups communicated with him, and that they
required on the part of the ambassador a comportment, diction and choice of
words in accordance with the exacting canons of Graeco-Roman culture. 75
The oration, not the mere journey to the court or any letters delivered
to the emperor, was the essential component of an embassy. When the
emperor was in residence in Rome, provincial communities sometimes
sent a letter by a carrier to a fellow-citizen already residing in the imperial
city, asking him to present an oration to the emperor; it was the orator,
not the carrier of the letter, who was paid the viaticum, the expenses

73
Talbert, Senate of Rome, 411–25; Millar, Emperor in the Roman World, 343–50.
74
Menander Rhetor, ed. and trans. D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson (Oxford, 1981), Treatise ii, 1–2
(imperial panegyric), 12 (speech for delivery of aurea coronarum), 13 (‘envoy’s speech’ on behalf
of a city ‘in trouble’). G. W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1969), esp.
43–58; G. Anderson, The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire (London,
1993).
75
Millar, Emperor in the Roman World, 382–5 (quote at 385); for examples of the sophists as envoys to
the emperors: ibid. 385 n. 69, references from Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists; also Peter Brown,
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992).
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