Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411-533 (review)

Scholars have long recognized the symbiotic relationship between diplomacy and warfare. In this thought-provoking book, Gillett uses this link as an entry point into the profound political and social changes of the period between 411 and 533 c.e. This period encompasses the establishment and consolidation of barbarian kingdoms in regions that had formerly been provinces of the Roman Empire, ending with Justinian's wars of reconquest in North Africa, Italy, and Spain (6). Gillett's basic argument is twofold. First, with the emergence of new rulers and kingdoms in the post-Roman world, diplomatic relations became more complex and multilateral than they had been under the Empire (3, 7, 54, 64). Indeed, the surviving evidence vastly underrepresents the scale and regularity of embassies in the period, with the result that scholars have tended to place undue emphasis upon specific accounts of diplomatic missions, and ignored the context within which these individual events took place (1–2, 34, 74, 204, 275). Second, as a consequence of the expanded significance of embassies, the role of envoy became a more important marker of status and prestige within local communities, and individuals were more likely to acknowledge or stress this aspect of a public persona than previously (4, 16–17, 3, 276).

Gillett illustrates these propositions in four chapters that provide case studies of a series of fifth- and sixth-century texts. Those texts celebrate or employ the figure of the envoy as a motif, and attach it to broader claims about the individual's position in the transforming social and political milieu of the late antique West. Preceding these studies is a general introductory chapter outlining the historical development of embassies and envoys in the Graeco-Roman world. A final chapter details the set of shared ritual, ceremonial, and administrative practices that provided the various realms of the post-Roman world and their eastern neighbors with a common diplomatic vocabulary.

As consciously interdisciplinary, Gillett's project raises certain methodological questions. His stated aim is to focus upon "the interaction of sources, their genre, and their historical setting" (ix). Such an approach treads the line between the literary scholar's project of textual criticism on the one hand, and the historian's emphasis upon the text's context and the information that it provides on the other (2). The two projects need not be mutually exclusive, but the risk of attempting to do both simultaneously is that neither is done effectively. True, the distinction between literary topos and historical reportage is difficult to distinguish in the best of times; they are subtly interwoven. But, in interpreting a particular presentation of an envoy or embassy as both, Gillett creates difficulties for both his exposition of the literary aspects of the work and the historical conclusions that he draws from it. Throughout the book, there is tension between two slightly different interpretive stances. On the one hand, Gillett argues that these texts are unique literary creations, thematically different from other examples of their genre. On the other, he assumes that they can be interpreted as representative of a general ideology, which emphasized the importance of the envoy in the period. The argument appears to be circular: Specific cases are interpreted as reflecting a general context, which is used to explain the uniqueness of these cases (for example, 84–86, concerning Sidonius Apollinaris' portrait of the emperor Avitus as an envoy).

This criticism is not to deny the value of Gillett's work. Scholars of the post-Roman world will find much to ponder. Gillett offers a challenging insight into an exciting subject and asks important questions of interesting texts. He offers specialists a series of propositions with much broader implications for the post-Roman world, and provides a general audience with much methodological...