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Envoys and political communication

genres which, unlike classical historiae, were not traditionally concerned
with embassies and political communication: chronicles, panegyric, ha-
giography, letters, and poetic epitaph. Instead, for the most part the works
belong to genres concerned with encomium, and the activities of envoys
register as part of this purpose. The works are not deposits of historical
data, but literature ‘in action’, engaged with both their literary and so-
ciopolitical contexts in order to fulfil specific purposes. The following
chapters explore the role of embassies during the break-up of the West
as much through literary as historical analysis. The phenomenon of po-
litical communication which the sources describe can only be elucidated
by analyses appropriate to each source. The functions each text sought
to fulfil, and the ways in which it differs, in its attention to embassies
and envoys, from other works in the same genre, provide insight into the
political and social contexts of political communication to which narra-
tive histories pay little attention. Close analysis of these works and their
unusual features brings to the fore an important aspect: the significance
to the participants themselves of undertaking embassies.
In chapter 2, the testimony of Hydatius’ Chronicle to the frequency and
ubiquity of legations throughout the fifth-century West, unique among
late antique chronicles, provides a case-study of one small part of the
fifth-century West. It also shows some of the patterns of communica-
tion in the period, both geopolitical and social, revealing the variety of
levels of authority – rulers, officials, provincial bodies, ecclesiastics, local
magnates – which dispatched and received embassies from each other.
The following three chapters concern the interaction of the envoy and
the society for which he acts, whether provincial community or palatine
court. Both provincial councils and imperial or royal courts relied on
envoys, who stood to reap significant rewards in terms of social status.
Chapter 3, on Sidonius Apollinaris’ idiosyncratic Panegyric on the em-
peror Avitus, examines a literary exploitation of the high status held by
envoys by the mid-fifth century. Sidonius seeks to supplant traditional
topoi of praise for emperors with a new image, of the emperor as a legate;
his portrait is the more striking because false. Very similar literary strat-
egies and exploitations of social status are evident in the four Gallic and
Italian saints’ vitae discussed in chapter 4. The authors appropriate for the
bishops they praise the same image of the envoy to which Sidonius ap-
peals – a portrait of an eloquent and commanding statesman who protects
his community and repeatedly accepts mission after mission. Their works
demonstrate the desire of provincial elites for the social credit gained by
undertaking embassies. Both Sidonius and the hagiographers present arti-
ficial representations of their subjects as envoys, though for different ends:
for Sidonius, as political propaganda; for the hagiographers, to promote
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