Addressing Paul's understanding of the church (ekklēsia) means raising other difficult questions that a brief essay cannot adequately answer. The most critical question concerns which of the letters ascribed to Paul should be considered. Ephesians and 1 Timothy, for example, provide fuller information on aspects of the church than do some undisputed letters. But they are commonly regarded as pseudonymous. Should they be excluded altogether, read as a faithful continuation of themes in the authentic letters, or adjudged betrayals of the authentic Paul's spirit? In order to maintain conversation with the dominant scholarly position, this essay will discuss the evidence of the undisputed letters before that in Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Letters, even though there are strong reasons for accepting all thirteen letters attributed to Paul as authored by him through a complex process of composition. The present analysis does, however, emphasize thematic links between the disputed and undisputed letters, in order to respect the genuine lines of continuity among them and the marked diversity within even the collection of undisputed letters.

Another procedural question concerns consistency and variation amongthe expressions of Paul’s thought. Which images and understandings areof fundamental character, and which are only brought to the surface bythe peculiar circumstances that Paul faces in a specific community?

In 467, the Gothic army of Toulouse assembled before its new king Euric. The soldiers, fully armed, were watched by several envoys sent to Euric by Remismund, king of the Sueves in western Spain. Circumstances were tense, for the Sueves and the Goths were on the verge of conflict. As the assembly proceeded, the envoys witnessed a strange sight, which they took to be a portent. The metal blades of the Goths' weapons changed colour; the natural metallic hues drained away, replaced for a time by green, rose-red, saffron-yellow, or black.

This story is recorded by Hydatius of Lemica, a bishop of the western Spanish province of Gallaecia, towards the end of his continuation of the Chronicle of Eusebius and Jerome. It is fitting that the most picturesque incident in Hydatius' Chronicle concerns an embassy, for embassies are an important topic in his record. Late antique chronicles are generically brief, yet Hydatius gives considerable room to accounts of embassies. His presentation of events is unique; no other western narrative source gives such prominence to the actual mechanics of political communication. This apparently minor difference in content deserves to be recognised and underscored, for it is the key to gaining insights into the nature and conduct of fifth-century developments. Extensive patterns of communication, though characteristic of the time, would be barely discernible but for this one source.

Hydatius, Sidonius, Constantius, and Ennodius are concerned with the activities and status of legates acting on behalf of provincial councils, cities, and other regional communities. The two authors discussed here speak from the point of view of the royal court of post-imperial Italy. The status and rewards of palatine emissaries differ from those of provincial legates: they look to achieve status not only within their local community, but also within the ranks of their professional peers, and to gain more tangible returns in terms of career path and financial reward. Cassiodorus and Senarius, demonstrating their part in political communication in the late antique West before the time of Justinian, display a court official's professional ethos. They provide a thumbnail sketch of the career of a court servant who was well seasoned in foreign embassies, and of certain aspects of his public life: the qualities for which he was chosen for such tasks; the nature and scale of the journeys he undertook; the rewards he gained within the civil bureaucracy; and the social capital accrued by success. Some of the intellectual and spiritual concerns which occupied such a Roman official while at the royal court of Ostrogothic Italy can also be glimpsed. Senarius and others like him were not professional ambassadors in the modern sense. They undertook important embassies, at the direction of emperors or kings, as an adjacent duty to their proper palatine office, whether in financial or other administrative posts.

Besides Sidonius' Panegyric on Avitus, the most extensive dramatisations of embassies in late antique Latin literature occur in several hagiographic Lives of bishops. Scenes of bishops undertaking legations to rulers on behalf of their communities are well-known attestations of the increasing involvement of the episcopacy in public functions, in turn a reflection of the annexation of the office of bishop by members of the provincial aristocracy. Such tableaux also appear to give evidence of a concomitant ebb of municipal and imperial authority, a vacuum filled perforce by the church. This latter impression is misleading. Embassies appear in late fifth- and early sixth-century hagiography precisely because the undertaking of legations was a common but prestigious political occurrence in secular centres of power, carried out by non-ecclesiastics including provincial magnates and palatine officials. Authors of episcopal biographies sought to appropriate for their subjects the social credit attached to this function. The impression that bishops shouldered the burden of municipal duties in undertaking embassies stems from the general invisibility of non-ecclesiastic envoys in the sources. A series of Vitae show the growth of a new saintly image, a distinct extension of earlier hagiographic types, which flourished between the late fifth and mid-sixth centuries. These Vitae were a reaction to the increasing social value of the role of envoy in public life.

The text was first published by Pierre Pithou in 1590 among anonymous epitaphs, despite Senarius' name in line 2. Pithou edited Latin poems from manuscripts, inscriptions, and earlier printed editions, but gave no indication of provenances for individual poems. After his edition was typeset, but before publication, Pithou sought advice on this and other poems from the philologist François Juret, editor inter alia of Symmachus' Epistolae; unfortunately, Juret's extant reply sheds no light on the source of the epitaph. It is thus unclear whether, in the sixteenth century, the epitaph was preserved in the original inscription or in a syllogue. The latter, however, appears more likely; certainly, the epitaph does not appear in early collections of Latin inscriptions. It is therefore not possible to determine the locality of Senarius' tomb.

All later editions and citations appear to be derived from Pithou's.

INTRODUCTION

Embassies were ubiquitous, constant, and crucial during the break-up of the late Roman West and the establishment of the first medieval kingdoms in the fifth and early sixth centuries. The conduct of political communication through formal conventions was a shaping force in this period of change, more frequent if less obvious than warfare. This study examines the literary monuments for the envoys who carried out the task of communication. Their story brings to the fore new aspects of political processes in the late and post-imperial world. Late antique embassies present uninterrupted continuations of Greco-Roman public oratory and administration, functioning in new and complex circumstances. The patterns of communication traced by envoys reveal a wide range of participants in political affairs. Envoys had long been the voice of cities and provinces to imperial authorities; in late antiquity, municipal envoys spoke not only of taxation and civic honours, but also of war and peace. Envoys now became also, as one himself put it, the ‘voice of kings’: with the rise of a multiplicity of states, rulers required forms of representation not needed by emperors in earlier centuries. Many constituents of the western polities employed envoys as their instruments, participating in classical conventions of communication which remained common to all regions and all parts of society in the West, long past the fragmentation of political boundaries. Rewards accrued to those who successfully undertook embassies, either on palatine service or for local communities.

Formal embassies were an aspect of public life which continued from the later Roman empire through the fifth and sixth centuries into the time of the early medieval kingdoms. Originating in the exchanges of civitates before the rise of Roman hegemony, the ‘internal diplomacy’ of embassies played a fundamental part in the administration of the Roman empire. Cities, provincial councils, and other bodies communicated directly with the emperor and his senior magistrates, raising and resolving issues outside those addressed by bureaucratic administration, and maintaining the political cohesion of the vast empire through regular affirmations of loyalty. The conventions of the Second Sophistic, which flourished in the first and second centuries ad with a resurgence in the newly Christian empire of the fourth century, formalised the rhetorical practices of embassies, while imperial legislation regulated their conduct in regard to access to imperial officials, obligations and recompense for envoys, and the provision of state facilities to assist the undertaking of the journeys involved. Municipal and provincial embassies were thus officially coopted into the machinery of government. This system of internal communication was important to the functioning not only of the empire as a whole, but also of local society, where the successful completion of the burden of undertaking legations brought social advantage through prestige and perhaps rewards from the emperor. The traffic in embassies was essentially one-way: embassies from cities and provinces approached the imperial centre and returned with the authority's reply.

TEXT (ED. MOMMSEN)

IV, 3: Senario v.i. comiti privatarum Theodericus rex

Ad ornatum palatii credimus pertinere aptas dignitatibus personas eligere, quia de claritate servientium crescit fama dominorum. Tales enim provehere principem decet, ut quotiens procerem suum fuerit dignitus aspicere, totiens se recta iudicia cognoscat habuisse. Moribus enim debet esse conspicuus, qui datur imitandus. Facile est quemque sibi degere: multis autem electum vivere decet. Cape igitur per indictionem tertiam illustris comitivae nostri patrimonii dignitatem, quam tibi non inmerito tribuit regalis auctoritas. Diu namque nostris ordinationibus geminum mutuatus obsequium et concilii particeps eras et disposita laudabili assumptione complebas. Subisti saepe arduae legationis officium: restitisti regibus non impar assertor, coactus iustitiam nostram et illis ostendere, qui rationem vix poterant cruda obstinatione sentire. Non te terruit contentionibus inflammata regalis auctoritas, subiugasti quin immo audaciam veritati et obsecitus ordinationibus nostris in conscientiam suam barbaros perculisti. Quid studium tuum longa lucubratione sollicitum et laboris continui inculpabile referamus obsequium? Usus es sub exceptionis officio eloquentis ingenio: favebat ipse sui delectatus auditor, dum meliora faceres, cum recitare coepisses. Pronuntiatio tua nostrum delectabat arbitrum, quia tantum dictantium reficiebas animum, quantum se lassare poterat cura cognitantum. Fuit quoque in te pars altera vitae laudabilis, quod arcana nostra morum probitate claudebas, multorum conscius, nec tamen, cum plura nosses, elatus. Collegis gratia, superioribus humilitate placuisti. Sic omnium pro te factus est unus animus ex magna diversitate sociatus. Carpes certe probatae institutionis gratissimum fructum, quando provectus tuus ita potuit omnes laetos efficere, ut universi in te iudicent sua desideria profecisse.

The chronology for the life of Epiphanius offered in chapter 4 differs by one year from that of e.g. Cook and Cesa. PCBE offers a chronology similar to chapter 4, but without a full justification. The central datum in any reconstruction of the chronology of Epiphanius' life is the date of his embassy to Euric, during the reign of Nepos, in the eighth year of Epiphanius' episcopate. Cook places the embassy in spring 475 on the following basis: Nepos ruled in Italy from 19 or 24 June 474 (summer) to 28 August 475 (summer); Ennodius indirectly refers to the season during which Epiphanius undertook the embassy as spring by a passing mention of spring rains; therefore only spring 475 is possible. But the evidence in the Vita of the season in which Epiphanius undertook his embassy is very slight. In fact, as far as it goes, the text suggests summer, not spring: during stops at mansiones on the journey to Toulouse, Epiphanius regularly draws apart from his retinue to pray by himself, under the shade of trees for protection from the sun, where, prostrate on the verdant grass, his tears water the soil which is parched for want of rain. This is hardly an explicit time indicator, but it has the virtue at least of autopsy, for Ennodius accompanied Epiphanius on the journey to Toulouse. The references to the heat of the sun, the verdant grass, and the dry soil suggests the heat of summer, not the rains of spring.

The response of modern critics to Sidonius' rhetorical question has been remarkably positive. In 439, three years of hostilities between the Goths of Toulouse and the empire ended through the intercession of Eparchius Avitus, then praetorian prefect of Gaul, later, briefly, emperor of the western half of the empire. Where the army had failed, Avitus succeeded by exercising his personal influence over the court of Toulouse. This, at least, is the version given by Sidonius in his Panegyric, delivered sixteen years later to celebrate the imperial consulate of his father-in law, Avitus.

With some reservations, Sidonius' version of the events of 439 generally has been accepted – a small victory for a poem described as possessing ‘a very moderate portion either of genius or of truth’. This acceptance reflects less Sidonius' credibility than the rarity of well-informed testimony of the relations between the empire and the barbarian settlers in the West in the mid-fifth century. The Panegyric on Avitus is an almost unique portrait of contacts between the Gallic aristocracy and the Gothic monarchy of Toulouse. Most of the political elements active in Hydatius' Gallaecia are present: regional aristocracy, civil and military imperial officers in the provinces, barbarian rulers and army, and the western imperial court in Italy (but not the Church, which has no role to play in the genre of poetic panegyric). The narrative of the poem is structured on incidents of political communication.

This study sprang from several coincidences. I chanced to read Hydatius, Priscus, and Senarius' Epitaph (tucked away in the indexes of Mommsen's edition of Cassiodorus) at much the same time, and was struck not only by the importance of ‘diplomacy’ to all three texts, but also by the fact that while diplomatic communication was a prominent feature in modern literature on the Byzantine East, it was not much evident in studies of the early medieval West. At much the same time, we were all wakened each morning by radio news of the ‘shuttle diplomacy’ preceding the Gulf War of January–February 1991. These tense events suggested parallels with the repeated embassies in Hydatius, and with Senarius' boast of visiting eastern and western capitals twice within one year; more significantly, they focused the mind on the interconnectedness of communication and warfare. Some time later I began to research ‘diplomacy in the West’, but soon became convinced that the fragmentary nature of the sources precluded any meaningful ‘diplomatic history’ of the period, if the purpose of such a history was to gain insight into what our sources call the arcana and secreta of the imperial and royal courts. The most expansive sources tend to describe the policy intentions of the centres of power at best superficially and very rarely with any real claim to insider knowledge; what they are interested in is the importance of embassies to the careers of envoys themselves, or to their local communities.