The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State. Jonathan Wright

be of a decent quality and in the same quantities as his father used to supply. A letter from the Cypriot kingdom of Alasiya warns the Egyptian king not to complain about receiving insufficient levies of copper. As a matter of fact, so prodigious an effort has been made that there is not a copper-worker left alive on the entire island, and suitable gifts are expected in recompense – namely, silver, sweet oil, an ox and a specialist in eagle omens.⁸

      The Amarna letters reveal a consummate understanding of the value and vagaries of diplomacy. The motivations that would so often inspire ambassadors’ missions – the fostering of trade, the payment of tribute, the search for alliances, the scolding of rivals – are all present, as are the pride, rivalry and petulance without which human diplomacy would be unrecognizable. Perhaps the story of the ambassadors provides an antidote to that thriving modern disease: the assumption that the past is either a quaint curiosity or an inevitable route-march to the present.

      This, then, is a book of journeys, a book about the individuals who, far more tangibly than any impersonal force of history, wrote the human story: the individuals who did as much as any conqueror, merchant, scholar or circumnavigating adventurer to help the world understand itself. Sometimes ambassadors would travel absurd distances, as did the thirteenth-century monks who trekked from Peking to Paris and from Flanders to the Asian steppe. Sometimes they journeyed no further than the nearest Greek city-state, or from one Renaissance court to another. They could be vile, snobbish and stupid, or they could be astute, sympathetic and wise, but, throughout all their missions, ambassadors were an inevitable facet of human history – offering an obvious way for squabbling rivals, potential allies and scattered civilizations to meet.

      Ultimately, this book is a sampler of ambassadorial endeavour. A few decades after Iosip Nepea’s mission to London, the otherwise unremarkable Francis Thynne pondered the meandering history of diplomacy. Perhaps weary of his culture’s obsession with all things classical, he devoted a chapter of his book about the perfect ambassador to proving that ‘other nations besides the Romans used ambassadors’. Therein, he calculated that ‘the best kind of persuasion’, the sort that allows us ‘to square our life, either in following virtue or avoiding vice…is to be drawn from the examples of others’. Thynne’s preachifying is best avoided, but his method was sound: ‘I will at this time set down the confirmation of the several matters belonging to ambassadors by examples, with short abridgement, drawn out of many histories.’⁹ As credos go, it serves.

THE ANCIENT WORLD

       CHAPTER I ‘Glorious Hermes, Herald of the Deathless Gods’

       i. The World of Greek Diplomacy

      I swear by Zeus, Gê, Helios, Poseidon, Athena, Ares and all the gods and goddesses. I shall abide in peace and I shall not infringe the treaty with Philip of Macedon. Neither by land nor by sea shall I bear arms with injurious intent against any party which abides by the oath, and I shall refrain from the capture by any device or stratagem of any city, fortification or harbour of the parties who abide by the Peace. I shall not subvert the monarchy of Philip and his successors…If anyone perpetrates any act in contravention of the terms of the agreement I shall render assistance accordingly as the wronged party may request and I shall make war upon him who contravenes the Common Peace…and I shall not fall short.

      The oath of the Greek city states when joining

      the League of Corinth, 338 BC¹

      In the eleventh century BC, during the reign of Ramesses XI, an Egyptian envoy named Wen Amun travelled to Lebanon to buy timber for the sacred barque of the god Amun-re. Much like Iosip Nepea, his journey was plagued with bad fortune. At the port of Dor in the Nile delta he was robbed of all his money, although he quickly made good his loss by seizing an equivalent quantity of silver on board a ship bound for the Syrian port of Byblos.

      The prince of Byblos was distinctly unimpressed by the arrival of an Egyptian envoy. He lacked written credentials, he had brought no gifts, so there was little incentive to provide him with precious timber. Wen Amun sent word to his superiors and they quickly despatched four jars of gold, five jars of silver, five hundred ox-hides, twenty sacks of lentils and thirty baskets of fish. The gambit was successful, and Wen Amun purchased his timber from a suddenly much more amenable ruler.

      Just before departing from Byblos, the men from whom Wen Amun had seized the silver arrived at court demanding justice. The prince took the night to mull over the envoy’s fate, though he was sure to treat Wen Amun courteously during his temporary captivity – providing him with wine, food and an Egyptian singer. The following morning the prince announced that, wince Wen Amun was an official envoy, he was immune from arrest.

      Wen Amun embarked upon his homeward journey only to encounter a storm that forced him to put ashore on Cyprus. The startled local people were intent on massacring the envoy and his crew, but Wen Amun begged for the right to plead for his life with the local princess, Hatiba. Mercifully, one of the locals could speak Egyptian, and he set about translating the envoy’s threatening words. Wen Amun insisted upon his ambassadorial immunity, and warned the princess that killing a Byblian crew would be a calamitous error of judgement. If she killed his crew, the ruler of Byblos would hunt down and kill ten of hers. Once again, Wen Amun skirted disaster and continued on his trek home.

      His story is exceptional – a detailed ambassadorial adventure that just happened to survive on a roll of Egyptian papyrus. The sources are rarely so generous. In the centuries since the Amarna period, the work of envoys, messengers and ambassadors had continued, just as it always would. All of the civilizations of the ancient world – whether Vedic India, the Cretan Minoans and the Greek Mycenaeans of the Mediterranean, the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Near East, or the tribes of Bronze Age Europe – had need of envoys. They fostered trade, brokered alliances, carried tribute, and the rest. But, almost without exception, they did so locally, with immediate or none-too-distant neighbours. The era of the continent-traversing ambassador had not yet dawned.

      Across much of Eurasia, however, the second half of the first millennium BC can be understood as an era of consolidation. The first great, stable Chinese empires were emerging, coming to dominate the politics of East Asia. In India, by the fourth century BC, the first empire to genuinely hold sway across much of the subcontinent had appeared. In the Near East the bridge between the two continents, the Assyrian empire, had fallen at the end of the seventh century BC, to be replaced by a series of redoubtable Persian empires – the Achaemenids, the Parthians and finally, in the first centuries AD, the Sassanids. The links between these civilizations were fragile, their knowledge of one another limited – but this was soon to change. As in much else, Greece led the way.

      Hermes, lover of Persephone and Aphrodite, protector of Perseus and Hercules, was the father of all ambassadors. God of gambling, trade and profit, he traversed the earth like a breath of wind, carrying Zeus’s messages, shepherding all travellers, escorting souls to the underworld. He would announce the weddings of the gods and execute their punishments, binding fire-thieving Prometheus to Mount Caucasus with iron spikes. He would visit all the communities of man to offer rewards for the return of Psyche, Aphrodite’s errant handmaiden: ‘seven sweet kisses’ from the goddess herself ‘and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue’. Ancient heralds, aspiring to his eloquence and cunning, would claim to be his offspring. They would carry his caduceus, his serpent-entwined staff, and it would grant them safe passage. Earnest and yet mischievous – stealing Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born – Hermes was to be the ambassadors’ archetype and paragon.²

      The caprices of diplomacy in classical Greece often demanded the talents of a Hermes. In southern Europe, Greece had enjoyed something of a resurgence