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WILLIAM IAN MILLER

The difference between negotiations and mediation is generally understood to be whether there are two parties or three. But sometimes it is very hard to count to three with confidence.1 It is not always clear just how ‘third’ a third-party is, even though many wish to paint an ideal portrait of the mediator as impartial, or as equally obliged to both sides, or as serving a community interest judged to be in moral, as well as in practical terms, higher, more enlightened, less twisted by self-interest and passion than if the matter were left to the unaided principle parties.2 Then too the mediator’s force is claimed to be mostly a moral force, aided by his rhetorical skills, or by his personal ability to cajole, flatter, or threaten; for by definition he is without formal authority to impose a settlement. He is not a judge or an arbitrator.

The thirdness of an arbitrator or judge is less ambiguous than the thirdness of mediators, precisely because the former have a clearly defined power to issue a judgment. The mediator’s force is much fuzzier. ‘Threeness’ is so fundamental to the essence of adjudicating or arbitrating that it informs the philology of the words for judge or arbitrator in more than a few languages: thus in Old Norse an arbitrator is called an oddman (oddamaðr), odd3 being the word for the point of the triangle and from which English takes its word for uneven numbers. The English word umpire which was borrowed from French in the thirteenth century where it was noumpere,4 that is non pareil, not equal, the odd man, the third party. And in modern Hebrew the verb to arbitrate is formed from the root for three: ‘to three,’ is to arbitrate. There is no such clarity of threeness in mediation.

The terms mediators/mediation tend to carry with them a positive moral valence. Mediation has come to suggest the values of peace, or in the idiom of new-age self-esteem therapy, it is about the ‘empowerment’ of claimants who are otherwise excluded from more expensive forms of dispute resolution that require lawyers and courts.

And should a mediator be worthy of being called an intercessor his moral stock rises even higher. Intercessor evokes images of Christ, Mary, or the saints mediating between a frightened and sinful mankind and a Dangerous Divinity. Mediation is talked about with much piety and celebration; mediators are the peacemakers blessed in the beatitudes.5

But mediation has a darker side. An intercessor, a mediator, for instance, is a go-between, which in English has a suspect, even immoral, suggestiveness that is lacking, for instance in German Vermittler. Or he is more neutrally a broker, bringing a buyer and a seller together, a middle-man. But the go-between in English is also a pimp, a procurer of prostitutes.

It is thus refreshing to have the Canadian social theorist, Erving Goffman, much the heir of Georg Simmel, treat mediators as playing what he calls a “discrepant role”. Thus Goffman: “the go-between or mediator … learns the secrets of each side and gives each side the true impression that he will keep its secrets; but he tends to give each side the false impression that he is more loyal to it than to the other … As an individual, the go-between’s activity is bizarre, untenable, and undignified, vacillating as it does from one set of appearances and loyalties to another. The go between can be thought of simply as a double-shill.”6

Mediators, in short, need not be all that honest, in fact probably cannot be all that honest and be successful; they might in some of their avatars be talebearers and spies. The historical record is so dense with examples of the dark side of mediation that one need not look long to find examples. It is hardly shocking to discover that mediators had their own interests to advance; they could benefit by gaining honor as a peacemaker, as well as by arranging a settlement that weakened the disputants who were often also the mediators’ competitors.

What I propose to do in this paper is to examine the embryology of mediation, the moment at which one party starts to split into two, as in the earliest cell-divisions of an organism, and then when two parties start to metamorphose into three, without it necessarily ever becoming analytically clear if particular people are truly principals or agents7 or third parties. I want to focus on the messenger, for it is in the simple messenger that we find the origins of the grandest of mediators, the archbishops, saints, and Christ. The messenger is the Ur-mediator. True, a mere messenger is not a full-fledged classic mediator, still it is undeniable that even the highest-status mediator is a messenger, a bearer of words, back and forth.

Consider the messenger sent by A to B whom B then sends back to A with an answer. The messenger starts out as an agent of A; he may be a high ranking official in his household, or he may be a lowly servant, and surely the status of the person asked to carry the message will depend on variables such as the absolute status of B, on the relative status of A and B, on the content of the message, whether good or bad news, and on its purpose, whether a request, an order, a claim, or a capitulation. But when the messenger bears B’s answer back to A, he is then acting, at least in part, as B’s agent. He is thus a double agent.

Double agent here has a double sense: in its benign sense, it merely describes a person who is the agent of two principals, in this case A and B. But such a double agent is now also in the suspect structural position of serving two masters whose interests may be in conflict, and he may now be tempted to be a double agent in the nefarious sense of being a specialist in betrayal. There are thus more than a few reasons why one might want to kill the messenger beyond making him the scapegoat for the bad news he delivers. It might well be that the messenger himself is the bad news. Duplicity is built into the structure of being a go-between. No wonder that Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is a trickster and the patron of thieves and conmen; or that Virgil says of Iris, Juno’s messenger, that she was “well acquainted with causing harm”.8

Consider how these issues reside at the very core of the mystery of the Incarnation. Could there be a better example of the conflation of principal and agent than in Jesus, the preeminent go-between, the messenger who is killed bearing what he thought was good news, but some important recipients disagreed. He is a double agent, as God and as man, whose very distinguishability from the principal who sent him or from mankind who sent him back was a matter of bitter debate, of heresies and schisms: was he one, two, or three, more man than God, more God than man? The Incarnation manifests all the ambiguities that haunt the mediator and the go-between. Who is he working for anyway? And what’s in it for him?

Our simple messenger, who began as an agent of the sender, is now in the position of becoming more fully realized as an agent in the philosophical sense, that is, as a decision-making actor. He has choices to make, temptations to resist, and risks to bear, and he can find that in his routine task of bearing words back and forth a world of possibility opens before him.

Even a mere courier, a letter carrier, can become an agent in the philosophical sense. Couriers bearing messages between Swiss towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were given gifts by the recipients. These gifts were a big part of the couriers’ income9 and evidence shows that the value of the gift was often proportionate to the weightiness of the message, even when the news was bad. Surely this gave messengers some inducement to exaggerate both triumphs and losses. A simple courier might start to play with the content of his message; and if his message was a written dispatch, that by itself need not prevent him from providing an oral gloss. It is hardly the case that the recipients of the messages blithely accepted message or messenger at face value. Samuel Pepys tells of a Dutch renegade who bears a false tale of Dutch atrocities committed against the English in hopes, it is alleged, of some reward from the English. Observes Pepys: “the world doth think that there is some design on one side or other, either of the Dutch or French – for it is not likely a fellow would invent such a lie to get money, whereas he might have hoped for a better reward by telling something in behalf of us to please us” (Feb. 25, 1665).10

There are also freelancing messengers, who are not agents of anyone in particular. In saga Iceland we find beggarwomen bearing tales from farm to farm, knowing that they will be rewarded for bearing malicious gossip, not always false. They even try to prompt the slanderous statements which they truthfully bear to the insulted persons.11 Freelancing go-betweens need not be peacemakers, so beloved of the dispute-processing literature; they are just as likely to be talebearers and fomenters of strife, cursed by moralists from the beginning of time. But talebearers too are mediators after a fashion.

If then the messenger might at times have a bit of the devil in him, he can also be something of an angel: our word angel renders the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messenger (mal’akh ). Malakh applied equally if he were a messenger sent by God, or by King Saul, or by an old farmer.

The root of mal’akh – l’kh – also figures in the word for task, or work: mla’kha . The root sense of l’kh is something like “to send (bearing a message)”, but comes to be generalized to mean any task. Compare this to Greek epistle, meaning that which is sent, the apostle, the messenger. Now consider the Akkadian (the Semitic language of ancient Babylon and Assyria) for message, letter, messenger: shipru. It too derives from a root meaning to send a message, spr, and also comes to generate a related form meaning task, work, thus showing the same semantic generative properties of Hebrew l’kh.12 The Hebrew may, given my very limited knowledge in this domain, show the influence of the Akkadian sense development. The spr root in Hebrew generates the word for book, letter, document, and the verb for to tell, narrate, count. I hardly wish to make too much of this but, as we see, there is in the Semitic languages a semantic constellation that finds in message-bearing the very model of a task. Add a dose of Neoplatonic Christianizing and no wonder that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word does the work of creation, the primal task. Even in the Indo-European languages there is, if not quite as obviously, a link between message-bearing and the notion of task, job, the undertaking of specific enterprises. Take the Carolingian missi, the messengers of the king, who go on missions. The word mission expands its core sense of “that which is sent” and slowly comes to mean the business that the missus, or messenger, is to carry out. He is on a mission, we say, and eventually in the jargon of the US military, mission comes to mean a particular operation, the task at hand. Mission Impossible. Thus too it is a missionary who bears the word, the message of God, so that his mission becomes an imitatio Christi, imitating Jesus as message bearer, the mediator between God and sinful man.

In texts ranging from the remarkable ‘Amarna Letters’ from 1300 BC Egypt and the Hebrew Bible to the chronicles and letters of the preindustrial ages, one could not avoid noticing that no one takes messengers for granted. They are frequently mentioned, and often named. One of the dominant themes, in fact, of the Amarna letters is the messengers themselves. Why have you detained them? Why do you not admit them? Why have you sent none to me? Why do your messengers lie to you? The Babylonian king says this to Pharaoh: “previously my father would send a messenger to you and you would not detain him for long. You quickly sent him off, and you would also send here to my father a beautiful greeting gift. But now when I sent a messenger to you, you have detained him for six years and you have sent me as my greeting gift, the only thing in six years, thirty minas of gold that look like silver. That gold was melted down in the presence of Kasi your messenger, and he was a witness” (EA 3).13

A letter from Tushratta, the king of Mittani, to Pharaoh, indicates that Mane, Pharaoh’s messenger, is being well-treated; he “is not dying. Truly, he is just the same” (EA 20).14 Tushratta comes to value Mane greatly and writes sometime later: “Keliya my envoy and Mane, your envoy, I have allowed to depart and they are coming to my brother [i. e., Pharaoh] … Mane your envoy is very good; there does not exist a man like him in all the world … And may my brother not detain my envoys … And my envoys may my brother let go as fast as possible … My brother may say: ‘You yourself have also detained my envoys.’ No, I have not detained them … May my brother let my envoys go as soon as possible so they can leave. And may my brother send Mane along, so he can leave together with my envoy. Any other envoy may my brother not send. May he send only Mane. If my brother does not send Mane and sends someone else I do not want him and my brother should know it. No. May my brother send Mane” (EA 24).

The messenger, Mane, the go-between, becomes himself the object of negotiation; he, as well as the amount of the marriage portion in this case, are the goods over which the parties are bargaining. Such has become Mane’s standing with Tushratta to whom he has been sent that it would be no longer accurate to describe him merely as an agent of the first party, Pharaoh, whose officer he is; the king of Mittani thinks him one of his own, precisely because he also knows he is dear to Pharaoh. By being so esteemed Mane has become a double agent and since known to be such by both principals, something of a third party too. Mane is clearly a man of high rank, a messenger fit to travel back and forth between kings. He is also, as indeed all the messengers whose detainment is lamented, not just a courier or ambassador, but a hostage, and what is especially noteworthy in this exchange is that he can be held hostage by either principal, since both want him back.

From ancient Sumer to sixteenth century Florence and beyond, messengers are treated to sumptuous hospitality. Let Tushratta vouch again: “Mane, my brother’s messenger, and Hane, my brother’s interpreter, I have exalted like gods. I have given them many gifts and treated them very kindly for their report was excellent” (EA 21). Recall what was said earlier about the incentives a messenger has to elaborate the message so as to please the ears of the recipient. Tushratta is quite frank about the quality of Mane’s hospitality being correlated to the quality of the message he bore. Messengers are guests, some times captive guests to be sure, but the norms of hospitality mean they are to be feted before they are allowed to state their business.15

In the Icelandic sagas, for instance, it is rare for a person bearing news, or arriving on business, ever to state the reasons for his coming the same day he arrives. The protocol suggests that it would be improper for the host even to ask why he has come, and sometimes a host, bewildered when his guest does not state a reason for his visit the next morning, must finally assert himself and ask to what he owes the visit.16 As medievalist Gerd Althoff notes, “emperors and kings … only brought up important or controversial issues after first treating their guest to a splendid reception and feast.”17 Althoff suggests, rightly, that one of the benefits, unintended, but there to be exploited, of sumptuous hospitality, was that it put the guest in a weaker bargaining position, for he was now in the host’s debt.

Sometimes fulfilling the proper forms of good hosting must have been hard to carry out without displaying some impatience, or curiosity. What if the matter were urgent? Urgency has to mean something different when time is measured in months rather than in seconds. If a message took six weeks to get from the River Nile to Nineveh, one could wait a day or two to talk business; it would mean waiting no more than to pause for a breath before stating one’s business nowadays. True, fire signals on mountain tops could get messages delivered much faster, but the informational content of such signals was rather limited – either the enemy is coming, send help, or we won, hurray. Moreover, the enemy, as Thucydides notes,18 could make the signals unintelligible by lighting their own fires, reducing what might have been a meaningful message to mere noise.

Feasting, of course, was not without its own dangers. In the saga world the competitiveness that went hand in hand with honor was most heightened during feasts, not infrequently over seating arrangements. The main entertainment often consisted of composing poetic insults of fellow guests, with more than hurt feelings being the consequence. The feting of messengers could go terribly wrong too, not because of agonistic competitiveness, but because the rules of proper behavior got lost in translation. Herodotus tells of Persian envoys visiting Macedonia who complain that the feast welcoming them had no women present. To entertain us properly there should be women, they say; we do it bei uns. The Macedonians answer that it is not their custom to feast in mixed company but reluctantly oblige the guests, who then complain that the women are not sitting next to them, which request is then also obliged. When the Persian envoys start fondling the women’s breasts, the Persians are killed in a bed-trick where the Macedonian hosts substitute armed adolescent boys for the girls.19

Sometimes a messenger was not feted, but deliberately insulted, thrown into prison, beaten or killed, or kept under house arrest, as we saw when the king of Babylon complained of detaining his messenger for six years. When Wenamun, an Egyptian on a mission to Byblos in about 1075 BC begs to leave, the king of Byblos answers that Wenamun should count his blessings: “‘Indeed, I have not done to you what was done to the envoys of Khaemwese, after they had spent seventeen years in this land …’ And he said to his butler: ‘take him to see the tomb where they lie.’”20 When David sends emissaries to Hanun, king of the Ammonites, to console Hanun on the death of Hanun’s father, Hanun has half the beards of David’s men shaved off, and their clothes cut to expose their buttocks. The messengers were mortified, and David in solicitude tells them to lay low in Jericho until their beards grow back (2 Sam. 10). When in Merovingian times high ranking legates from King Chilperic – Bishop Egidius and Duke Guntram Boso – have a contentious bargaining session with King Guntram, the legates are shown the door with excrement and filth dumped on them.21 A Hittite treaty from c. 1400 BC finds it necessary to include a provision against plying messengers with truth serum: “He must not ensnare [the messengers] by means of a magical plant.”22

Bearing messages was not the most enviable of tasks, unless the messenger had the fortune to bear good tidings on a peaceful mission. Even then there were the dangers of the road, weather, disease, toll takers, bandits – “Thus says Lugal-gish: Tell Lugal-mashkim that my messenger has been killed” (Sumerian, c. 2200 BC);23 Once in sight of his destination the messenger still had to get by palace bureaucrats serving as official and unofficial gatekeepers who, if not properly prompted with gifts and bribes, could ensure the message went undelivered.24 But should he not be bearing good tidings his arrival could often occasion bigger risks than the usual ones just rehearsed. The plot of the ‘Chanson de Roland’, no less than the plot of the Incarnation, depends on the assumption that volunteering someone to be a messenger between hostile parties was like sending a sheep to an abattoir.25 Message delivery was often heroic duty or a fool’s errand.

There was an understanding that varied from culture to culture of a kind of diplomatic immunity once messengers were passing between openly hostile parties. It seems the immunity was rather weak among the ancient Semites, less so among the Greeks or Franks, with their staffs and wands to mark them as bearing safe conduct.26

But neither the Spartans nor the Athenians dealt kindly with the envoys Darius sent to them to demand that they submit to him. The ones sent to Athens were thrown into a pit, the ones sent to Sparta were pushed down a well.27 Years later, however, the Spartans tried to make amends to Xerxes for their breach of heraldic immunity; they sent him, in atonement, two men of good family for Xerxes to put to death. Xerxes, an astute psychologist, sent them back alive, nicely noting that he was not going to behave as badly to emissaries as the Spartans did, nor was he about to free them of their burden of guilt for their crime.28

There were messengers no one wanted to see; these are the ones who came as tax collectors, tribute takers, or summoners, who often thought it prudent to arrive well-accompanied and heavily armed. More than a few messengers in the medieval chronicles designated as nuntii or legati and surely as missi, bring armies to deliver their messages.29 Bearing bad news to a hostile party is obviously dangerous business, but the paradigm case of killing the messenger is when the messenger is charged to bear bad news back to his own people. One suspects that he undertook the mission with misgivings and under some duress. Or who would be so unwise as to bring home the news of a disaster of which he had the luck to be the sole survivor? When the only Athenian survivor of a battle against the Aegintans returns to tell of the debacle, “the wives of the other men who had gone with him to Aegina, in grief and anger that he alone should have escaped, crowded round him and thrust the pins, which they used for fastening their dresses, into his flesh, each one, as she struck asking him where her husband was. So he perished.”30

Lords sent messengers to bear good news whom they meant to reward, and messengers to bear bad news who were expendable. When Joab sends a messenger to David whom Joab knows he is putting at risk because the news is decidedly mixed, he makes sure to give the messenger a saving clause at the end that will spare him: “and [Joab] instructed the messenger, ‘When you have finished telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then, if the king’s anger rises, and if he says to you, ‘Why did you go so near the city to fight? Did you not know that they would shoot from the wall? … Why did you go so near the wall?’ then you shall say, ‘Your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.’” (2 Sam. 11.19–21)31

The sagas suggest that people dressed in certain ways or took certain paths depending on the quality of their message. Although it is hard to get at this in the sources, there appears to have been a color coding to prepare the recipients for bad news so that it would not lead to an emotional response lethal to the messenger. In more than a few cases in the bible, messengers bearing bad tidings adopted ritualized humiliation markers: torn clothing, dirt or ashes heaped on their heads (e. g., 1 Sam. 4.12; 2 Sam. 1.2). I suspect they hoped this might save them.32

In some cases, though, it may be good policy to kill the messenger bearing news of a defeat or of a battle going badly. Raimondo Montecuccoli, an Imperial general, the hero of the battle of Szentgotthárd in 1664, who wrote perceptively about war and generalship, notes instances of battle leaders killing the messenger bearing bad tidings, not because of an irrational belief that the messenger bore some causal responsibility for the events he reported, but because the messenger was acting with culpable carelessness, given the common knowledge of the fragility of any army’s courage.33

Raimondo’s point is that it is incumbent on the messenger bearing ill tidings to make sure he gives out one message for public consumption, and whispers his honest assessment into the ear of the leader in private. Recall, in this regard, Yahweh’s killing the spies who return from Canaan announcing the invincibility of its occupants: “And there we saw the giants (Nephilim), the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13.33). The message demoralizes the people who now lament, yet again, that they ever left Egypt. It is precisely for this reason that a hostile messenger bearing bad tidings to the enemy might wish to have his message overheard. Thus the desperate attempt of Hezekiah’s main minister to have Sennecharib’s messengers not speak in Hebrew, but in Aramaic, so the commoners on the walls would not understand their threatening demands (2 Kings 18), to which the chief Assyrian messenger the Rab’shakeh answers: “Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the men sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine?” Nasty wit, we see, is a virtue in certain high status messengers; it got the Rab’shakeh immortalized, in his enemy’s historical record no less, not once but twice for the same scene appears in Isaiah (Is. 36).34

Aristotle gives us another reason for rightly blaming the messenger: his not caring not to cause pain.35 Yet we have from an inscription on a tomb from 1500 BC Egypt evidence of someone who took pride in his not killing messengers bearing bad news: “I did not confuse the report with the reporter … I was a model of kindliness.”36 Apparently the baseline expectation was to kill or harm the messenger.

And woe to the messenger who is the subject of the message he bears, unless he knew, like Mane, its contents, and that the contents were flattering to him: Uriah, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, these messengers were very much in the dark, and had to be, for they were bearing their own death warrants. A Sumerian myth (3rd millennium BC) attributes the invention of the envelope to this kind of letter.37

A messenger had to know how to deliver good news too, for if too good, it might sound “too good to be true”. Herodotus tells of a messenger from Samos who reports to the Greek commanders how vulnerable the Persians were to an immediate attack. To convince the Greeks he is telling the truth, he offers himself either as a hostage or to join with them in the fight (9.90, p. 612). This raises some interesting problems for a mediator, and for a messenger: how to make yourself believable. Truth, no less than lies, facts no less than fantasies, need to be properly dressed up to be believable; the truth, after all, has also to pass for true. The problem of the honest messenger bearing true good news is no different from the dishonest messenger bearing false good news. And yes, you could also get killed for delivering good news. The messenger who thought David wanted to hear that Saul was dead is one, Jesus another.

The dangers were not all the messenger’s. The recipients of messages also bore substantial risks.38 Take the case of Ehud in Judges 3. Israel had been a tributary of Moab for eighteen years. It was Ehud’s duty to bear Israelite tribute to Eglon, the king of Moab. After handing over the tribute, Ehud tells Eglon he has a secret message to deliver. The king of Moab dismisses his attendants; Ehud draws near: “I have a message from God for you” he says as he draws a short sword he has hidden under his clothing and plunges it into the king, whose folds of fat completely engulf the sword. Ehud departs closing the door behind him; Eglon’s servants assume their master is relieving himself as indeed he was for the account adds the detail: the “dirt” came out.39

If it is the rare messenger who is an assassin, it is the not-so-rare assassin who poses, indeed might be, as Ehud shows, a messenger. The assassin is the messenger of choice for Queen Fredegund in Gregory of Tour’s history.40 Saul too sends messengers, ml’achim, to kill David (1 Sam. 19.11); angels of death, so to speak. Being a messenger was replete with dangers, but so, we see, was getting a message. English still pays homage to this with the cold sneer: Did ya get the message? Eglon did. Israel was not going to be sending any more tribute; relations with Moab had just been redefined.

Ehud’s one-liner would suit a Clint Eastwood movie: “I have a message from God for you.” In English the pun with word/sword would be available, but such a pun is hardly necessary, as the lethality of Ehud’s message, could hardly have been clearer. The letter killeth, as Paul says (2 Cor. 3.6), in more ways than one. Ehud’s wit is not just the stuff of good stories. Look at the expectations he mobilizes: for one, he is posturing as a prophet, transmitting messages from God; on the other hand, Ehud is employing Eglon’s expectation that Ehud is a typical duplicitous messenger about to play double agent in Eglon’s favor by giving him important secret information. The dark expectation, the messenger’s assumed moral ambiguity, make this a delicious scene.

It is not surprising, in other words, that a messenger might betray his sender, indeed be expected to. Even innocent messengers have eyes and ears and will be questioned by the recipient as to the state of affairs from whence he came; and when he returns his master will surely question him as to what he heard and saw off the record. Thus it might be a wise strategy to stage false fronts for the messenger before he departed, deliberately misinforming him before sending him off, and for the recipient to do the same when he arrives. This is a not uncommon motif in the espionage genre.

A messenger thus couldn’t help but be a spy even if he had no evil intentions. But often he did have them. The Laws of Manu advise an envoy as follows: “By means of concealed hints and gestures, he should decode the bearing, hints, and gestures of the rival king with the help of seducible men in his service and uncover his plans with the help of his servants.”41 No wonder those ancient near eastern kings ‘entertained’ the messengers they received three, six, and seventeen years. A messenger had to make sure that his host believed the purpose of his mission was in fact its official purpose lest he be treated as a spy rather than as a messenger. Recall David’s emissaries sent home half naked and half shaved. The reason they were so ill-treated is that it was claimed by Hanun’s men that their visit was a pretense, and that spying was their mission. Suetonius reports of Augustus that at the beginning of his reign he kept in touch with provincial affairs by relays of runners spaced along the highway, but that he later organized a chariot service “which proved the more satisfactory arrangement because post-boys can be cross-examined on the situation as well as delivering written messages.”42 One of the many advantages of employing pigeons to deliver messages was not only their speed but that they couldn’t be bribed into betraying the sender’s interests, for the birds’ interests (getting home) were exactly what was mobilized on behalf of the sender.

Ancient Egyptian wisdom literature (c. 1800 BC) counsels messengers to “hold fast to the truth”, but then equivocates:

If you are a man of close trust,

Whom one great man sends to another great man,

Be entirely exact when he sends you!

Do the commission for him as he says!

Beware of making evil with a speech

Which embroils one great man with another great man

Hold fast to Truth! Do not exceed it!

An outburst is not to be repeated;

Do not speak out against anyone,

Great or small, it is a horror to the spirit.43

The advice wars with itself. It tells the messenger to stick to his text, exactly, but then tells him to exercise discretion, especially about suppressing certain things. If your master, the sender, was angry and said some ill-advised things, you should keep quiet about it. You are not to overstate, and you are to slant your account in favor of peacefulness and good relations. Here too is the suggestion that the messenger will be milked for information, will have to talk, and be asked to talk outside his text. Even the simplest messenger is thus on the way to becoming an orator, an ambassador, a negotiator, and as this text supposes, a mediator between one great man and another. To limit a freewheeling messenger this provision is added to a Hittite treaty c. 1400 BC: “If the words of the messenger are in agreement with the words of the tablet, trust the messenger … But if the words of the speech of the messenger are not in agreement with the words of the tablet, you … shall certainly not trust the messenger, and shall certainly not take to heart the evil content of his report.”44

The fact that the messenger will be thought to possess more knowledge than that which he has been officially charged to convey leads Montaigne, who did some messaging service in the civil wars, to observe that he wants to be nothing more than a pigeon. He wants no knowledge outside the text he is to deliver; he prefers to be in the dark: “I know that everyone rebels if the deeper implications of the negotiations he is employed on are concealed from him and if some ulterior motive is secreted away. Personally I am glad if princes tell me no more than they want me to get on with; I have no desire that what I know should impede or constrain what I have to say. If I have to serve as a means of deception let at least my own conscience be safeguarded.”45

Since the messenger will be queried beyond his text, he has the power to betray his sender advertently by revealing more than he should; or inadvertently, by being cajoled with drink, women, and flattery. He also may be tortured, if the softer persuasions do not work. That is why Themistocles, who himself knew a thing or two about betrayal (he was always cutting private deals for himself with the enemy), employs a particular messenger whom, Herodotus says, “he could trust to keep his instructions secret, even under torture.”46

There are other ways the sender is partly at the mercy of his messenger’s interests. Classic tales are devoted to the theme. Gregory tells of a count who, in hopes of having his office renewed, sent his son with gifts to King Guntram to plead on his behalf. But the son, by means of his father’s gifts, got the countship for himself, supplanting his father whose cause, Gregory says, he should have been supporting (4.42). The classic instance is the proxy wooer getting the girl for himself instead of for his principal.47

An array of possibility governs the relationship between the sender and the messenger. Some messengers are clearly official and even bear powers to bind the principal, as when they are styled legates; some are official and merely message carriers without any other powers; some are unofficial, or operate on their own motion, to be claimed as messengers by the unofficial sender if the mission is successful, to be denied if it is not. There are a multitude of points that can be occupied on an ‘officialness’ scale.48 Consider too that we read constantly of people designated as ‘secret messengers,’ who must operate outside certain official channels of message delivery and receipt, and have signs and rituals all their own. And there are so many ways for the sender to play with the meanings of sending, for the messenger to play with the rituals of message delivery; so much depends on the recipient’s varying ability to understand or misunderstand the meanings intended and those not intended but available to the astute observer nonetheless.

In the standard sending of a message, the sender is of higher rank than the messenger. Message bearing is a service that is burdensome and dangerous; better to send someone you can boss around to do the job. God’s angels provide the best example: they are nothing but messengers (remember the meaning of angel); in the Hebrew Bible they don’t even have names – with two exceptions: Gabriel and Michael in the late book Daniel. And angels are manifestly God’s inferiors. The messenger’s structural inferiority to the sender provides the ammunition for an argument against Jesus’s divinity made to Gregory of Tours by the Arian, Agilan, who himself is a messenger, a legatus, from the Visigothic king to King Chilperic: “No one sends a person who is not his own inferior,” Agilan says, greatly angering Gregory, “… God is he who sends; he who is sent is not God.”49 Gregory has arguments to oppose this but he does not deny the force of Agilan’s example, only countering that the Father also did the bidding of the Son, as when he raised Lazarus, an argument that proves too much since it makes any mere mortal claim that God had done his bidding, if he answers a prayer.50

But is Agilan right? There are special cases where the sender may be lower in rank than the message bearer, and this brings us back at long last to mediation, or more particularly to intercession. A lowly petitioner, to get his message to the person he desires access to, might not just have to use one intermediary, but a whole series of them. He seeks out first his own higher-status kinsman, who then seeks out his lord, who is a cousin of the bishop, and the bishop gains access to the archbishop, who goes to the king.51 Each person asks a favor of someone higher up the food chain and each serves as a messenger who is higher in status than his immediate sender. Intercessors, it can be claimed, are a subclass of mediators, and also a subclass of message bearers, who trade on whom they know and the gates they can enter. Though in one sense intercessors are the agents of the lowly principals who are the petitioners, in fact, the petitioners usually have to pay or pray to get the intercessor to intercede, no differently than when a lowly sinner asks the saints to intercede on his behalf.52

To conclude: in a book I wrote on disgust I talked about a class of people I called “moral menials”. These are people whose socially necessary jobs are somewhat distasteful, often demanding morally suspect action and very accommodating consciences – lawyers, politicians, hangmen are obvious examples. But there are others: I suspect we might have to add the mediator, the message bearer, the intervener, all perhaps morally suspect by having to go-between, by playing the ends from the middle. There is another point I wish to recall that I opened with. It was the ambiguity of the thirdness of the so-called third party, who often starts as an agent of one of the principals, and then must also work for the other party to carry out his task for the first party who employed him. Thus, even the simplest letter carrier puts himself and us, as I said more than once, in the world of double agents.

True thirdness, complete independence from either party is rare, a prerogative of the mightiest intervener who can force himself between the parties whether they like it or not. But watch how in Iceland this intervener’s very ability to make peace is accomplished by relinquishing his thirdness. In several saga cases we find a third-party intervener insisting that the contenders put down their weapons and stop fighting, or, and I quote: “I will join the first party that listens to me.”53 In other words, he can only be effective as a third party, by threatening to by become a first or second party.

It is standard knowledge among anthropologists and medieval historians that peacemakers are often drawn from the ranks of the contending parties. They are often those people who have changed their minds about the relation of risks to rewards of continuing to quarrel. So when we move from two parties to three, from negotiations to mediation, let us recognize that the third party is, as the Old Norse would have it, an odd man, caught in a regress of ambiguity and shifting alignments, who can be located on a point anywhere from principal to agent, from first to second to third party. He subsumes, if not quite as sacredly, the mysteries of three persons in one of the Incarnation.