| Summary/Abstract |
The most prominent feature of ancient historiography appears to be the matching and welding of two essential components: narrative and speech. The rhetorical feature of envoys’ speeches should not encourage the belief that they are mere literary evidence, as their presence in the narration is normally proportional to the historian’s interest in diplomatic events. This analysis focusses on envoy speeches during the negotiations of the peace treaty of 561–562 AD between Emeror Justinian I and the Persian King Khosro I as reported by the Byzantine historian Menander the Guardsman in the fragment 6.1 of his History. Since no documents survived after the destruction of the Byzantine archives, Menander’s documents are a precious witness. The envoy’s speech was not a distinct rhetorical genre; rather, it developed from the epidictic discourse for petitions and praise during the Hellenistic and Roman eras as a means of political communication between provincial cities and the central administration. Indeed, a fiction of internationality shaped the language of Roman diplomacy until late Antiquity. The speeches delivered by Roman and Persian delegates before laying down the treaty of 561–562 display discursive strategies articulated on the sharing of communal political and moral values.
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