Subsidies and Diplomacy: Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity

Abstract

D URING LATE ANTIQUITY (4th-6th c. A.D.) it was a common practice of the Romans to pay subsidies to foreign peoples. The purposes of these subsidies and the circumstances under which they were paid varied, but they fell into two broad categories. They were either a genuine subsidy, such as a reward for good behaviour or payment for assistance (usually military), or they were a rental of good behaviour. In the former case the subsidy, which was paid from strength, could be terminated at will and was often an economic alternative to military action. In the latter case the subsidy was paid from weakness (since a credible military alternative did not exist), and so the payments tended to become regular and to increase.' These payments, too, might be justified economically,2 but the political costs could be very high since the regularised subsidy had, in effect, become a tribute which implied the subordination of the payer to the recipient.3 This danger, in various forms, was recognised and debated during the period. In the fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus (24.3.4) makes the Emperor Julian, in an address to his troops, say that payments to the barbarians have reduced the Roman Empire to beggary. In the fifth, Priscus (Fr. 15.2) makes Attila claim that Theodosius II is his slave bound to the payment of tribute.4 But discussion was most intense in the second half of the sixth century over the systematic use of payments by Justinian in the later part of his reign. Although both Agathias (5.24.2-25.6) and Menander the Guardsman (Fr. 5.1/4) see a positive side to the use of payments in sowing dissension amongst the barbarians, the position of Procopius (Anecd. 11.3-12), that the payments, by confessing Roman