Diplomacy in the Roman world (c.500 BC-AD 235)

This paper tries to establish that diplomacy had an important place in the management of the Romans' relations firstly with other rival communities in Italy and then with foreign peoples as they established an empire. The Romans developed a distinctive procedure of diplomacy, which embodied principles that were to be important in the evolution of diplomatic method, notably respect for treaties, good faith, equivalence, personal contact, formal meetings and protocol. However, the Romans often used offensive diplomacy, in that the threat of their powerful army enabled them to get what they wanted without fighting.