Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Roman World ed. by C. Eilers (review)

The nine studies collected in this volume (which results from the Sixth E. Togo Salmon Conference held at Hamilton in 2004) illustrate the continuing importance of diplomacy both during Rome’s rise to world rule and under the developed imperial system and make a valuable contribution to our understanding of various aspects of the topic.

The majority of the contributions focus on embassies to Roman authorities (the senate, emperors, governors and other officials) during the last two centuries of the Republic and/or under the early empire. Ager (15-44) discusses the Romans’ attitude to third party diplomatic interventions in their conflicts. Battistoni (73-98) examines the uses made of claimed Trojan kinship with Rome both by others’ embassies and by the Romans themselves. Rives (99-126) enquires how far Christian apologetic writings may have been influenced by the standard practices of embassies to emperors, and adduces as comparators the diplomatic relations with emperors and other Roman officials established by two other non-locally defined groups, namely the ‘world-wide assemblies’ of athletes and theatrical performers and the Jews. Ferrary (127-142) discusses the publication and implementation of Roman responses to embassies in the Republican period, demonstrating that ambassadors were normally expected to take the resulting Roman letters or decrees back with them and to communicate them both to their own community and, where required, to other affected parties. Jehne (143-170) assesses the Italian allies’ diplomatic dealings with Rome in the second century bc. Brennan makes the good point that, whereas inscriptions normally report only embassies’ successes, we hear of numerous unsuccessful embassies from literary sources, and discusses the difficulties ambassadors faced in the Republican period, oddly confining his discussion to the rather random selection of texts included in the Constantinian Excerpta de Legationibus. The distortions of the epigraphic record are also illustrated by Eck’s paper (193-208): Eck lucidly demonstrates that, although embassies dispatched by eastern cities and addressed to emperors predominate among surviving inscriptions, the cities of the western provinces will in fact have sent embassies just as often in the imperial period, and most embassies probably went to governors and procurators rather than emperors.

As Eilers remarks in his introduction (1-14), by contrast with the modern world in which diplomacy takes place between sovereign states, there was wide variation in the ancient world in the status of the communities (and individuals) involved. As Eck shows, the regular dispatch of embassies by communities played a central part in the administrative workings of the Roman imperial system under the Principate. Fergus Millar’s concept of “two-level sovereignty” is relevant here, as Haensch observes (209-225), using it to interpret the part played by some imperial procurators in the affairs of cities and kingdoms on the empire’s periphery.

Several contributors rightly stress the risks involved in ambassadors’ travels and the difficulties and delays, which they might encounter in getting a hearing from the Roman authorities. However, Jehne seems unduly pessimistic in concluding that the Italian allies gave up sending embassies to the senate in the later second century BC because the anticipated obstacles made the effort and risk seem not worthwhile (169). His argument starts from Postumius Albinus’ notorious demand for hospitality at Praeneste in 173, in which, as Livy noted (42.1.12), the Praenestines meekly acquiesced. Jehne may well be right that Italian allied communities generally did not think it worth protesting to Rome over abuses by individual Roman officials. However, as he acknowledges (148), eight embassies from Italian allies are attested in the first half of the second century, seven of these by Livy. This is no doubt only a sample of those actually sent, and it is surely likely that the Italian communities continued to send embassies to the senate, as occasion arose, in the period after 167, for which we lack Livy. Jehne supposes that they did not send embassies but merely lobbied individual...