Page 53 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

honestiores, but also the conventions for communication in all spoken or
80
written public media. Italy retained the highest level of education in the
West, but Gaul, Spain, and North Africa all also continued to produce
young men trained in a classical curriculum, atleastduring the pre-
81
Justinianic period. The rise of episcopal and monastic schools, prompted
by the shrinkage of public schools, shifted emphasis of the purpose of
education, but not necessarily of its content. Rhetorical education and
literary proficiency on the one hand, and engagement in public life on
the other, remained mutually linked. It is not surprising to find the poet
Maximianus, apparently a contemporary of Boethius in Ostrogothic Italy,
opening an elegy on a particularly infelicitous love affair with the lines:
Sent to the lands of the dawn on the duty of an envoy,
To weave for the sake of all a tranquil work of peace,
While I strove to bring together covenants of the two-fold realm
I met with impious wars of my own heart. 82
Conventions of education and rhetoric shaped not only the conduct of
communication, but also thereby the works which we use as sources for
the period. 83
The context of political embassies, however, grew more complex af-
ter the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms. During the early em-
pire, the administration of conquered territories as provinces transformed
80 On late antique education: Pierre Rich´ e, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West: Sixth through
Eighth Centuries, trans. J. J. Contreni (Columbia, 1976); RobertA. Kaster, Guardians of Language:
The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1997); RobertBrowning, ‘Education in
the Roman Empire’, in The Cambridge Ancient History xiv: Late Antiquity: Empire and Succesors,
ed. Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Michael Whitby (Cambridge, 2000), 855–83;
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford, 2001), 318–41.For
late public schools and episcopal schools in the West: Rich´ e, Education and Culture, 15–135;
e
Rich´ e, ‘La survivance des ´ ecoles publiques en Gaule au V si` ecle’, Le Moyen Age 63 = 4th ser.
12 (1957), 421–36; Martin Heinzelmann, ‘Studia sanctorum: ´ education, milieux d’instruction et
valeurs ´ educatives dans l’hagiographie en Gaule jusqu’` alafindel’´ epoque m´ erovingienne’, Haut
Moyen-Age: culture, ´ education et soci´ et´ e (Nanterre, 1990), 105–38. Rhetoric: G. A. Kennedy, Classical
Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill, 1980).
81
For the sixth to ninth centuries: see the articles by Ian Wood, Thomas F. X. Noble, and Roger
Collins in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge,
1990).
82
Maximianus, Elegia v,in Poetae latini minores v, ed. E. Baehrens (Leipzig, 1879), lines 1–4: Missus
ad Eoas legati munere partes/Tranquillum cunctis nectere pacis opus/Dum studeo gemini componere foedera
regni/Inveni cordis bella nefanda mei. Date: PLRE ii, ‘Maximianus 7’, 739–40. Cf. the careers of the
Gallic aristocrats Arator and Parthenius, who acted as representatives to the court of Theoderic
in Ravenna on behalf of Provence and Dalmatia respectively; PLRE ii, 126–7, 833–4; below,
chapter 6 atn. 102.
83
Two examples of the impact of late antique educational conventions on genres of source materials
are Alan Cameron, ‘Wandering Poets: A Literary Movement in Byzantine Egypt’, Historia 14
(1965), 470–509 (for panegyric); and Geoffrey Greatrex, ‘Lawyers and Historians in Late Antiq-
uity’, in Ralph W. Mathisen (ed.), Law,Society,and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2001),
148–60 (for historia).
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