Page 52 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

owing to an envoy. 76 The oratorical nature of diplomatic missions was
in accord with the primacy given to oral pronouncements in all imperial
77
decisions and other public business. The fortunes of Sophistry declined
with those of the empire during the mid-third century, but flourished
again in the fourth century with the talents not only of pagan rhetoricians
such as Libanius of Antioch and Themistius of Constantinople, but also
of their Christian pupils, including John Chrysostom. In the shadow of
these great figures, however, many nameless holders of civic or imperial
office regularly put into practice the techniques of rhetoric in the constant
communication between government and its constituents.

contemporary perspectives
The conventions covering embassies in classical Greece and imperial
Rome, and the administrative arrangements of the latter, formed the
background to the patterns of political communication in the kingdoms
78
of the post-imperial West. Many traditional practices and attitudes are
evident in the fifth and early sixth centuries. In the 460s, a Gallic aristocrat
described in a letter the honour accruing to a member of a provin-
cial council when he represented his city to the imperial authorities;
his addressee was obviously more conscious of the burden an embassy
entailed. 79
Perhaps the most obvious continuity was skill in traditional rhetoric
as the essential criterion for selection as an envoy, for representatives of
provincial communities as much as those of kings and emperors. Despite
the contraction of publicly supported schools, grammar and rhetoric
remained the core of the educational curriculum, providing not only one
of the most important distinguishing features of the governing classes, the

76 Digest l, 1.36; Millar, Emperor in the Roman World, 363 (oration), 379 (letters).
77 Millar, ‘Governmentand Diplomacy’, 358.
78 The best accounts of diplomatic procedures in late antiquity are Helm, ‘Untersuchungen ¨ uber den
ausw¨ artigen diplomatischen Verkehr’; F. L. Ganshof, ‘Merowingisches Gesandschaftswesen’, in
Aus Geschichte und Landeskunde: Forschungen und Darstellungen [Festschrift for Franz Steinbach]
(Bonn, 1960), 166–83; Ganshof, The Middle Ages: A History of International Relations, trans.
R. I. Hall (New York, 1970), esp. chaps. 1 and 3; Matthews, ‘Gesandtschaft’; Blockley, East
Roman Foreign Policy,chap. 4: ‘Policy and Its Instruments’, 129–63; P. S. Barnwell, ‘War and
Peace: Historiography and Seventh-Century Embassies’, Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 127–39.
The discussion of strategic information collection in A. D. Lee, Information and Frontiers: Roman
Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1993), addresses many aspects of foreign policy
and diplomacy. Several of the articles in Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (eds.), Byzantine
Diplomacy (Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publication 1; Aldershot, 1992) offer
useful if later comparanda; see especially E. Chrysos, ‘Byzantine Diplomacy, ad 300–800: Means
and Ends’, 25–39. No study has focused on the fifth- and sixth-century West and the Latin
sources. For earlier and later periods, see n. 107 below.
79
Sid. Ap., Ep. v, 20.
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