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Tradecraft in ancient GreeceRose Mary Sheldon a ba Staff at The Center of Helenic Studiesb Teaches at Georgetown University, Defense Intelligence CollegePublished online: 09 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Rose Mary Sheldon (1988) Tradecraft in ancient Greece, International Journal ofIntelligence and CounterIntelligence, 2:2, 189-202, DOI: 10.1080/08850608808435059

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ROSE MARY SHELDON

Tradecraft in Ancient Greece*

The old cliché "The Greeks have a word for it" does not apply to tradecraftor, for that matter, espionage. The ancient Greeks knew a great deal aboutthe ins and outs of spying,1 but they did not make our modern termino-logical distinctions among intelligence collection, security, counterintelli-gence, and covert operations. If the Greeks did have a word for it, it wasstrategemata, the single heading under which they grouped all such activities.We are able to study these "stratagems of war" today, thanks to the survivalof several Greek military handbooks called strategika biblia. Their chapterson intelligence-gathering instruct a commander in what would today becalled tradecraft: the finer arts of running agents, sending secret messages,using codes, ciphers, disguises, and surveillance. We can also get informationfrom the works of Greek historians and other ancient writers who, even ifthey are not primarily concerned with military matters, do refer occasionallyto techniques of secret operations. Here is what these how-to-do-it sourcessay about ancient spying.

Of all the surviving military treatises, by far the best is the one writtenabout 357 B.C. by Aeneas the Tactician, another name for Aeneas of Stym-phalos, general of the Arcadian Confederacy.2 As a fourth-century com-mander, he very likely served most of his time as a mercenary soldier. TheArcadians had been the first Greeks to turn to soldiering as a profession andwere more in demand than any other mercenaries.3 The Greeks were said tohave been the first practical instructors in the art of war. A man of sagacity,whose use of sources proves he was both well traveled and well read, Aeneashad a keen understanding of human nature. His insight and experience,

*An earlier version of this paper appeared in the conference papers of the Defense Intelligence Col-lege's Symposium on Intelligence and Education, Fort McNair, 11 June 1986.

Rose Mary Sheldon is on the staff at The Center of Helenic Studies andteaches at Georgetown University and the Defense Intelligence College.

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gathered from a career of adventure, give his work an immediacy lacking inthe works compiled in libraries by mere epitomizers. Living in an age whenthe general alone was the driving power behind the whole army, Aeneasrecognized intelligence collection and counterintelligence as integral parts ofthe defense of the state. A commander could afford to leave nothing to theinitiative and good faith of his subordinates; he could not even trust his ownmen and often set them as spies against one another.

SECRET MESSAGES

One of Aeneas's basic observations is that intelligence being sent into or outof a fortified city has to be transmitted clandestinely to avoid capture by theenemy; he provides us with the first instructional texts on communicationssecurity, and describes in detail eighteen different methods of sendingmessages, some of them ciphers.4 Aeneas probably used recognized andtraditional devices, though he no doubt made additions or refinements of hisown. One example involved the use of message boards — wooden tabletscovered in wax with messages then inscribed in the wax, a common vehicleof writing in his day. Aeneas suggested writing the secret message on thewood and then covering the wood with wax in which another, more innocu-ous message could be written. This device5 originally comes from Herodotusand was used to transmit one of the most important messages in all of Greekhistory. Demaratus, a Greek living as an exile in Persia, learned that KingXerxes of Persia planned to invade Greece. Realizing the danger, Demaratusattempted to warn the Spartans. He scraped the wax off a pair of hingedwooden tablets, wrote his secret message on the wood, and then covered theboards again with wax. When the tablets arrived, the daughter of the SpartanKing Cleomenes discovered the hidden message, and this discovery makes herthe first known female cryptanalyst. Tragically and ironically, in the warthat resulted, her husband Leónidas died leading the valiant Spartan bandthat held the pass at Thermopylae for three days before the Persians found away through.

A related method of sending secret messages was to write with goodquality black ink on a boxwood tablet, letting the ink dry and then whiten-ing the tablet (presumably with white slip) to make the letters invisible. Therecipient then immersed the tablet in water to wash away the whiteningagents and make the writing visible.6 The same method was used for dis-guising a message as a votive offering at a local shrine. Aeneas suggested usinga wooden plaque with the picture of a heroic horseman carrying a torch andwearing a white cloak, since sculptured tablets of this kind were commonlyoffered at altars. (Vows requiring such offerings were made to heroes on

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many occasions — like childbirth, rescue from shipwreck, or recovering fromillness.) The tablet was sent along with an unwitting accomplice and postedat whatever temple he went to for prayer. (A dead drop, one might say.)It was later retrieved and soaked in oil to bring out the message.7

BLADDERS, STROKES, AND DOTS

One rather amusing way to send a secret message required a bladder largeenough to hold a message. (No particular animal is recommended, forobvious reasons; the longer the message, the larger the bladder required.)The sender inflated the bladder, knotted it, and let it dry. A message couldthen be written on the outside of the bladder with a mixture of ink and glue.When the writing dried the bladder was deflated and stuffed into a flask ofappropriate size. The flask, lined with the bladder, was filled with oil andcorked. In this state, the secret message, hidden in one of the most commonobjects in antiquity (a flask of oil) could be carried around unnoticed. Whenthe recipient was given the flask, he could empty it, remove the bladder, andread the message. The bladder was also reusable: an answer could be sent bysponging off the bladder, writing a new message, sealing it back into theflask in the same way, and returning it to the original sender.8

"Especially secret messages," Aeneas writes, "might take the followingforms. Insert a book (probably a scroll) into your traveling gear which hasthe message coded by marking certain letters with dots at long intervals orby strokes of unusual length."9 Thus OrnisPetomenoseLipenoikiAn disguisesthe word öpla. The recipient merely had to transcribe the marked letters.This method has a long history that reaches up until the present. The Wash-ington Post of 24 April 1918, for example, reported the story of RamChandra, an Indian revolutionary, who received information for his ownnewspaper in San Francisco through specially marked copies of the Koransent from India, which the Indian censors would not touch. A variantmethod requires using two copies of the same book and sending a codeseparately to indicate the designated words or letters; but this refinementhad to await the invention of printing. The printing press both standardizedcopies of books and made them easily available to the general public; and thesuccess of this method requires that the unaltered originals be identical inevery detail.

In his study, The Codebreakers,10 David Kahn explains some of Aeneas'smethods for encoding messages. Among the simplest was replacing vowelsfor the plain text by dots: one for alpha, two for epsilon, etc. A typicalmessage would look like this:

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"Dionysus Docked"

D:.::N:::S:.:.:S D::CK:D

"LET HERACLIDES COME"

L:T H:R.CL::.D:S C::M:n

A more complicated steganographic system used a disk that bore holesrepresenting the letters of the alphabet. The encipherer passed yarn throughthe holes that represented the letters of his messages and the deciphererwould undo the yarn and get the text in reverse.12 The holes in the centerwere used between the letters that had to be repeated. In Figure 1 HermannDiels gives us a reconstruction:

FIGURE 1. Antike Technik, p. 74, Leipzig, 1924.

A similar method used an astragal (a sheep's ankle bone) instead of a disk.The astragal had four flat sides, which could be marked with dots, and werefrequently used as dice. With the 24 letters of the alphabet naturally fallinginto four groups of six, the thread would be passed through the appropriateletters with a needle. When this operation was finished, the appearancewould be of a simple astragal with a ball of thread around it. The recipientwould have to unwind it and transcribe the message. This device is the onecertain invention attributed solely to Aeneas and not traceable to anothersource.13

Simple, uncoded messages could be disguised in several ways. They werewritten on thin strips of papyrus, then concealed in the shoulder of atunic,14 tied to the bridle of a horse,15 or sewn into the leather skirts on asoldier's cuirass.16 Aeneas even reports a man from Ephesus who sent amessage written on leaves bound to a wound on his leg.17

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In special cases a message might need protection from water or mud. Suchmessages, written on sheets of beaten tin, were sewn into sandals and walkedthrough a checkpoint. If the communicators worked carefully, they couldeven slip the message unnoticed into the sandals of an unsuspecting personand then retrieve it while he slept.18 Similarly, small rolled and inscribedplates of lead could hang from a woman's ear as earrings.19 One Romanexample from a later time shows the general Hirtius sending messages on leadplates tied to the arms of a soldier who then swam the Scultenna River.20

There are several Roman examples of communications techniques thatwere most likely used by the Greeks also.21 Commentators have expressedsurprise, for instance, that Aeneas does not mention doves as letter carriers.Our only citation for their use is Roman but it seems likely that the Greeksalso used this method. The Roman general Hirtius shut pigeons in the darkand starved them before fastening letters to their necks by a hair.Released near the city walls, the birds immediately headed for food and lightat the highest building, where Brutus waited for the message. By learningthat food was left in certain spots, the pigeons became trained to returnautomatically with subsequent messages.

Among other Roman techniques with probably Greek antecedents arepractices like writing messages on animal skins tied to the carcasses of gameor sheep,22 or fastening the message under the tail of a mule to escape aguard post.23 Finally, the linings of scabbards sometimes concealed messagesas well. One ingenious Roman needed to get information into a city sur-rounded by water and occupied by enemy troops. On the opposite bank, hesewed letters inside two inflated skins and ordered one of his betterswimmers to get on the skins and swim the seven-mile strait. The soldier,steering with his legs as a rudder, navigated the entire trip so skillfully thateven when enemy soldiers spotted him, they mistook him for some unusualmarine creature.24

Aeneas tells us that in Epirus, a local practice was to take a dog out of itsmaster's house, fix a note inside its collar, and then at night release the dogto find its master. Dogs were better able to find their way in the dark thanhuman messengers, and there was less risk of the enemy spotting the dog.25

Glus, an admiral to the Persian king, smuggled notes into the royal palaceby writing them between his fingers. Because protocol required visitors tothe palace to keep their hands inside their long sleeves as a precaution againstassassinations, it is difficult to understand how memoranda written betweenhis fingers would be useful. Aeneas, obviously impressed by this device,unfortunately gives no other details of its use.26

Aeneas understood that important intelligence succeeded only if the rightperson received it and acted on it properly. Astyanax, tyrant of Lampsacus,received a letter informing him about the assassination plot against him but

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he failed to read it. By the time he finally opened it, the conspirators wereupon him and killed him with the letter still in his hand.27 A parallel caseoccurred later when Julius Caesar died holding in his hand a full exposure ofthe conspiracy against him.

The effectiveness of secret communications also depended on the loyaltyof the bearer. During the siege of one city, a certain man carrying a secretmessage entered the town, but instead of giving the letter to the traitor itwas intended for, went straight to the commanding officer of the city andconfessed. The wise officer ordered him to deliver the letter intact andreturn with their answer. The courier did so and thus the commander wasable to confront the traitors with proof of their treachery — the letterbearing their seal.28

Another writer whose work gives details about tradecraft is Polyaenus, aMacedonian rhetorician. He wrote a book of stratagems dedicated to thejoint Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and intended toaid them in their Parthian War of A.D. 162. His examples (some fact, somefiction) came from numerous sources, and he himself admits not evenmaking his own extracts but using earlier compilations.29 Discussing hissources is therefore useless, and each example must be judged on its ownmerits. For our purpose, the importance of these stories is not whether theyoccurred exactly as described, but that they reveal techniques known to theancients.

One of Polyaenus's more clever stratagems appeared in a recent JamesBond film. The tyrant Lachares, who tried to escape from Athens afterDemetrius Poliorcetes captured it in 295 B.C., disguised himself as a slave,blackened his face, and carried a basket of money hidden under dung. Heslipped out of the city, mounted a horse, and escaped. A party of horsemengave chase but as they closed in, Lachares reached into the basket of moneyand started scattering gold coins on the road behind him. His pursuers dis-mounted to pick up the coins, and Lachares escaped to Boeotia.30 Lacharesalso once concealed himself for several days in a pit with just enough pro-visions to keep himself alive. When he was hiding on the island of Sestosafter the island had fallen to the enemy, he noticed a funeral cortège passing,put on a black veil and a woman's gown and escaped through the city gateswith the mourners.31 Far simpler was the ruse of Demetrius of Phalareus,who escaped from the King of Thrace by hiding in a load of straw.32

Polyaenus tells of a successful royal disguise used by King Seleucus, whoposed as an enemy armor-bearer after his own men had been defeated. Hesurvived, and after regrouping his own army's shattered remains, donnedagain his royal robes.33

An ingenious, if somewhat indelicate, device saved one captive held bypirates. Kept in close confinement on the island of Lemnos, Amphiretus the

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Acanthian waited for someone to ransom him. He secretly drank a mixtureof salt water and vermilion (red mercuric sulphide), which gave him "thebloody flux." The pirates feared he was suffering from serious disease andwould die unransomed so let him out of his cell for exercise and fresh air,hoping it would restore his health. Once out of his cell, he waited for nightand escaped.34

Polyaenus has also contributed to our knowledge of methods for sendingsecret messages. One notable story came straight out of Herodotus and con-cerns the Median noble Harpagus who tried to aid the Persian king Cyrus.The Medes ruled Persia at this time and had the road system carefullyguarded, making all clandestine communication difficult. To offer help inoverthrowing the Median king, Harpagus sewed his message in the belly of ahare. The messenger arrived at Cyrus's quarters disguised as a hunter carryinga hunter's net with the hare inside. The messenger had been instructed togive Cyrus the hare and bid him cut it open with his own hand and with noone else present. This plan worked, and with Harpagus's help Cyrus revoltedagainst the Median King.35

Not only the Persians but all ancient commanders appreciated communi-cations security and took pains to see that no information leaked fromtheir own ranks. The Greek Demetrius, while leading a naval expedition,kept his destination secret even from his own men. He gave the captain ofeach ship sealed instructions and told him not to break the seal unless hisship became separated from the main group by a storm; only then could thecaptains discover their destination.36 Communications security could takestringent forms. In the flaps and seals department, Aeneas Tacticus, whosework was designed to prevent internal treachery, advocated outright censor-ship. He suggested that the outgoing and incoming letters of exiles shouldbe brought to the censors before delivery.37 Alexander the Great read hisown troops' mail to discover signs of disaffection and he punished com-plainers. His agents and informants reported suspicious activities among hisown officers and men. Considering the long record of palace intrigues,assassination attempts, and treachery against previous Macedonian kings,these precautions were not entirely without justification.38 Checkpoints onpublic roads and a system of internal passports are related to censorship.(They exist in the Soviet Union today.) These practices appeared widely inthe Near East, but in Spartan territories too; guards were sometimesstationed on the roads, and some use of passports or permits for travel tookplace.39

THE SKYTALE CONTROVERSY

One of the most controversial methods of secret writing from the Greekworld was the skytale thus described in the Oxford Classical Dictionary:

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...a secret method of communication used by Spartan magistracies duringwartime, especially between ephors and king or general. Each of them had astick of equal size, so that a message written on a strip of leather woundround the stick of the sender, and then detached, became illegible until thestrip was rewound on the stick of the recipient.40

General histories of cryptography, including Kahn's,41 refer to it as the firsttranspositional cryptograph. While it may be the first, it cannot be dated tothe classical period and is almost certainly not Spartan. There is even seriousdoubt that it was a method of cryptography. J. H. Leopold,42 who firstassembled the ancient evidence for the skytale, came to the conclusion thatit was not a device for sending coded messages at all. More recently, TomKelly has added a substantial amount of historical evidence to Leopold'sargument and also concluded that the skytale, as described by Plutarch andAulus Gellius, was not used by the early Greeks.43 A close examination ofthe ancient evidence shows discrepancies between the description of theskytale as a cryptograph and what seems to be its use as a form of opencommunications.44 It is necessary to cite only a few examples from thebetter-known passages to illustrate this point. Xenophon uses the wordskytale in his account of Cinadon's conspiracy. The Spartan ephors (magis-trates) discovered a plot and decided to suppress it. They called for Cinadonto go to the city of Aulon with a skytale on which were written the names ofthose to be arrested.45 If the message was encoded, how could he have readit? Since the list was given to him directly and was not being delivered toanother recipient, why encode it at all?

A similar story from Pausanias presents the same contradiction. TheSpartans learned of Pausanias's treasonous plots and sent a delegation to himwith a message to return home or be sentenced to death in absentia. He wasstunned by the message and returned home immediately to extricate himself.He later conspired with the Persian satrap Artabazus by sending him a letter(also called a skytale), which he had delivered by a young boy who was oncePausanias's lover. The boy became suspicious because he remembered that noother messenger had ever returned from a similar assignment. After readingthe message and its instructions for the recipient to kill the bearer, the boyturned the letter over to the Spartan ephors, who now had written evidenceconcerning Pausanias's treasonous behavior with the Persians.46 Surely wemust ask ourselves how the messenger was able to read the letter if it wasencoded. In addition, if the skytale was a method used by Spartan kings,generals, and ephors, then what was a Persian satrap doing with a skytale,not to mention a suspected traitor?

Finally, there is the story from Plutarch concerning the Spartan com-mander Lysander, who was summoned home by means of a skytale to face

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charges against him leveled by the Persian Pharnabazus. Lysander went toPharnabazus and pleaded with him to write a letter to the ephors, clearinghim. Pharnabazus, however, wrote two letters — the one requested and asecond, secret one exposing Lysander's treachery. When he sealed the letter,Pharnabazus made a simple switch; Lysander returned home with a list ofhis own wrong-doings and turned it over to his judges.47 It would have beenmuch easier switching two conventional letters rather than the leather stripas described earlier. And again, we find a supposedly secret form of com-munication used by the Spartans in the hands of traitors and foreign rulers.

When we add the evidence of Aristotle,48 who asserts that the skytale wasused by Greeks other than the Spartans, we begin to wonder just how manypeople were onto this "secret." For the skytale to be used as an effectivetool for sending coded messages, it would have had to be kept a secret or itseffectiveness would be nullified. This does not rule out the possibility thatthe strip of leather or papyrus could have been hidden, along the lines ofthose messages described by Aeneas Tacticus. But it is telling that Aeneashimself, our single most important source of information on ancient Greekcryptography, does not mention the skytale once. The silence of Polybiusis equally suspicious. We can only conclude that it was unknown to them.

The word skytale is discussed by scholiasts and grammarians of muchlater periods49 and the erroneous notion that the skytale was a cryptographemployed by the Spartans seems to have come into existence then. Kellyattributes it to Apollonius of Rhodes.s0 The fact that it was described at allby any ancient author is certainly proof enough that the technique wasknown. But when or where it was used, and for how long, has yet to bedemonstrated. All we can say for certain is that it was ancient and that itwas Greek, but it was never classical and certainly not Spartan.

MILK AND ARROWS

From the Roman poet Ovid we learn that secret writing could be used forpurposes other than military ones. In his Art of Love, Ovid tells of loverssending clandestine communications:

Will a guardian forsooth prevent your writing when time is allowed you fortaking a bath? when a confidant can carry a written tablet, concealed by abroad band on her warm bosom? when she can hide a paper packet in hersticking and bear your coaxing message "twixt foot and sandal?" Should theguardian beware of this, let the confidant offer her back for your note, andbear your words upon her body. A letter too is safe and escapes the eye whenwritten in new milk: touch it with coal dust and you will read. That too willdeceive which is written with a stalk of moistened flax, and a pure sheet willbear hidden marks.51

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Although invisible ink per se was unknown to the ancients, this passageindicates that they could write with a milky substance obtained from aplant. Pliny describes how letters could be traced on the body with this milk,then allowed to dry; when sprinkled with ash, the letters became visible.52

The dead drop was well-known in antiquity. Herodotus gives the bestexample. Timoxenus was a Greek who wanted to betray the city of Potidaeato the Persian Artabazus. He arranged to use a certain tree in the city as thedrop. Artabazus would secure his message to an arrow and shoot it into thetree. One fateful day, Artabazus tied the message around the notched endof the arrow, feathered it, and aimed at the drop. Unfortunately, due to abad wind, bad aim, or perhaps an improperly feathered arrow, the shotmissed its mark and hit a local citizen. A crowd gathered immediately, dis-covered the message, and turned it over to the generals. The plot to betraythe city was uncovered and thus prevented. In this case, the term dead drophas more than a tinge of irony.53

Herodotus also described the most famous secret message in Greek history,a message important not only because of its unique delivery but also for theinformation it carried. The revolt of the Ionian Greeks against Persia beganwhen Histiaeus, a Greek residing at the Persian court, wanted to communi-cate with his son-in-law Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus. He shaved the head ofa trusted slave, tattooed the message on the slave's head, and let the slave'shair grow back. The slave went to Aristagoras with oral instructions to shavehis head. Aristagoras complied and read the message urging him to begin therevolt against Persia.S4

The study of intelligence collection presents a special problem for his-torians of all periods. Intelligence activities are supposed to be done clan-destinely, they are not routinely recorded. For this reason, studying intelli-gence has become, in the words of one writer, "the missing dimension" ofmost political and diplomatic history.55 In addition, ancient spies, unliketheir modern counterparts, did not retire and write memoirs. Ancientwriters dot their works with such phrases as "he received intelligencethat.. ." or "news arrived of..."; but they rarely report who transmitted thisinformation or how (sources and methods). Indeed, they may not haveknown. The ancient intelligence officer, if he were not successful, mightdraw the historian's notice indirectly because his failure meant his executionor a major military disaster. On the other hand, when an ancient intelligenceofficer succeeded, he remained unheralded and faded into obscurity, un-named and unrewarded, at least publicly.

Aeneas, Polyaenus, Herodotus, Onasander, and Polybius are forerunnersof modern writers on the art of intelligence. The Greeks, who consideredtheir polis or city-state the height of civilized life, knew well that "the neces-sity of defense against aggression devolves upon a watchful citizenship."56

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The examples we have just surveyed have been taken from widely diverseperiods of Greek history, but they bring two facts clearly into focus: al-though the Greeks did not have a centralized intelligence service, they appre-ciated the importance of having good intelligence, and they brought tointelligence-gathering the same cleverness and ingenuity that they brought tomany other fields they pioneered. These ancient tricks for collectinginformation and concealing messages seem amusing to us because of theirquaintness, and are simplistic by modern standards of technology. Theircryptograms would hardly deceive a modern military censor, but could wellhave fooled a simple-minded gatekeeper or a barbarian policeman in an agewhen reading and writing were uncommon. Tricks with vowels and con-sonants, for example, were unheard of even among educated people.

Like other elements of great inventions now part of our thought andaction, the ideas behind these ancient practices still apply. The Greeks wereacutely aware that intelligence played an important role in military opera-tions and in defending their cities. Without proper intelligence they failedor suffered major setbacks. For lack of a scout in 405 B.C., for example,the entire Athenian fleet of almost 300 ships was destroyed at Aegospotami,and the Peloponnesian War ended in a Spartan victory. The Greeks, too, paida high price for intelligence failures.

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank the following readers for their helpful suggestions: Professor Emeri-tus Chester G. Starr, The University of Michigan; Professor Zeph Stewart, The Center forHellenic Studies; Professor John P. Karras, Trenton State College; Professor Anne Groton,St. Olaf College; Professor Susan Shelmerdine,University of North Carolina, Greensboro;Professor F. E. Romer, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Col. Russell J.Bowen, and Ms. Meredith Akerstein. All errors and fact and judgment remain mine,

1See, for example, Chester G. Starr, 1974, Political Intelligence in Classical Greece,Mnemosyne Supplement 31, Brill, Leiden; André Gerolymatos, 1986, Espionage andTreason: A Study of the Proxenia in Political and Military Intelligence, Gieben, Amster-dam; Luis Losada, 1972, The Fifth Column in the Peloponnesian War, MnemosyneSupplement 21, Brill, Leiden.

2 Aeneas wrote several military treatises but only one, on the defense of fortified places,survives. For the controversy over the authorship of this work see T. Hudson William,1904, "The Authorship of the Greek Military Manual Attributed to Aeneas Tacticus"in American Journal of Philology 25, pp. 390-405; Aeneas Tacticus is translated in theLoeb Classical Library edition by the Illinois Greek Club and appears in the samevolume with two other important military writers Onasander and Asclepiodotus; L. W.Hunter, Aeneas on Siegecraft, (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927), provides the bestEnglish commentary.

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3 On the Greeks as mercenaries see G. T. Griffith, 1935, Mercenaries of the HellenisticWorld, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 237; and W. Lengauer, 1979, GreekCommanders in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.: A Study in Militarism, Stud. Ant.Warszawa Wydawnictwa Uniw., Warsaw.

4 Aeneas Tacticus Book 3 1 .5Aeneas Tacticus 31 .14 . Compare Herodotus 7 .239; Polyaenus 2 .20; Justin 2.10.13ff;

In Aulus Gellius 17.9.16 the method is attr ibuted to Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal.Cf. Front inus 3 .13 , Herodotus 6.4; Thucydides 1.128-129; Plutarch, Alcibiades 2 5 ;Xenophon, Anabasis 1.6.3.

6 Aeneas Tacticus 31.14-16.7 Aeneas Tacticus 31.15-16.8 Aeneas Tacticus 31 .10-13.9 Aeneas Tacticus 31 .3 .

1 0David Kahn, 1967, The Codebreakers, Macmillan, New York , p . 82 . Kahn also discussescodes in Homer, Greek m y t h and other fictional sources.

11Aeneas Tacticus 3 1 . 3 1 . Loeb edit ion, p . 171 .12 Aeneas Tacticus 31.21 suggests using a disk or a piece of wood.13 Aeneas Tacticus 31.17-20; Cf. L. W. Hunter, Aeneas on Siegecraft, p p . 2 0 9 - 2 1 0 .14 Aeneas Tacticus 31.2315 Aeneas Tacticus 31.916 Aeneas Tacticus 31.817 Aeneas Tacticus 31 .6 .18 Aeneas Tacticus 31 .4 . This method is also mentioned in Ovid, Art of Love 3 .621 .

"and she can bear your coaxing message ' twixt foot and sandal.' "19 Aeneas Tacticus 31.720 Frontinus 3.13.7. The consul Hirtius used this method to communicate with Decimus

Brutus, who was besieged by Antony at Mutina. Cf. Dio Cassius 43.33-34. The missionwas a success; after swimming the river, the soldier disguised himself, learned thepassword of the city and gained entrance.

21 Sextus Julius Frontinus, for example, wrote a theoretical treatise on Greek and Romanmilitary science (de re militari) used by Vegetius (1 .8 ; 2.3) bu t it has not survived. Hewrote a collection of Stratagemata during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitianwhich is a more general manual of historical examples illustrating Greek and Romanstrategy. It was written for the use of officers in the field; the work survives in fourbooks. The author is the same Frontinus who wrote the account of the water supply ofRome, de Aquis urbis Romae which describes the aqueducts and their history.

22 Frontinus 3 .13 .3 .23 Frontinus 3.13.4.2 4 Fron t inus 3.13.6.25 Frontinus 3.13.5. For the use of dogs in war see Aeneas Tacticus 22 .14 . E. S. Forster,

1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 1 , "Dogs in Ancient Warfare" in Greece and Rome 12, pp . 114-117; G. B. A.

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Fletcher, 1941-1942, "Another Word on Dogs in Ancient Warfare," in Greece and Rome11 , p . 34; R. M. Cook, 1950, "Dogs in Batt le" in Festschrift Rumpf, Cologne, pp . 3 8 -4 2 .

26 Aeneas Tacticus 31 .35 . The correct form of the name is Glos, and he is well knownfrom Xenophon 's Anabasis as one of those w h o supported the younger Cyrus in therevolt against his brother . He was admiral of the Persian King's forces in 387-6 B.C.and 380-79, the year in which he was murdered.

2 7Aeneas Tacticus 31 .33 . Nothing else is known about this Astyanax. Similar incidentsoccurred during the recapture of the Cadmeia from the Spartans by the Theban patriotsin 379 B.C. See Plutarch, Pelopidas 10; Cornelius Nepos, Pelopidas 3.

28 Aeneas Tacticus 31.9-10.29 Collections of such extracts on every subject and from all sources were called hypo-

mnemata and were quite common in the Hellenistic period. The best edition of Poly-aenus is the Teubner text edited by E. Woelfflin and I. Melber (Leipzig, 1970). Theonly English translation available is by R. Shepherd, 1974, Ares Press, Chicago, areprint of the 1793 edition.

3 0Polyaenus 3 .7 .1 . For the identify and date of Lachares, see W. S. Ferguson, "Lacharesand Demetrium Poliorcetes" in Classical Philology 34, no. 1, January, 1929, 1.31.

31 Polyaenus 3.7.33 2Polyaenus 3 .15.3 3Polyaenus 4.9.6.3 4Polyaenus 6.54.3 5Polyaenus 7.6.7; Herodotus 1.123; Justin 1.5.10.3 6 Polyaenus4 .7 .2 .3 7Aeneas Tacticus 10.6. Plautus in the Trinummus 793-5 makes mention of portitores

who broke seals and inspected letters even in times of peace.3 8 Donald Engels, 1980, "Alexander 's Intelligence System," in Classical Quarterly 30,

p . 336 .3 9Polyaenus 3.9.57. Cf. Herodotus 1.123, 5.52.40 Victor Ehrenberg, 1970, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, s.v. sky tale. Cf. A. Marin,

Daremberg-Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, Paris, n.d., s.v.skytale.

41 David Kahn, 1967, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, London, p . 82 .E. Lerville, 1972, Les cahiers secrets de la cryptographie; le chiffre dans l'histoire deshistoires du chiffre, Monaco. L. D. Callimahos, 1975, "Cryptology," in EncyclopediaBrittanica, 15th ed. , vol. 5, p . 332 . On the effectiveness of the skytale as a cryptographsee A. d'Agapeyeff, 1939, Codes and Ciphers, Oxford, 14.15.

4 2 J . H. Leopold, 1900, "De Skytala Laconica," in Mnemosyne 2 8 , pp . 3 6 5 - 3 9 1 . Veryfew modern authors seem to be familiar with this article. Among those who were andcommented on it, see W. Suss, 1922, "Ueber antike Geheimschreibmethoden und ihrNachleben," Philologus 7 8 , p p . 142-175, esp. 158-162.

43 Tom Kelly, 1985, "The Spartan Skyta le" in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays

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in Honor of Chester G. Starr, University Press of America, Lanham, Md., pp. 141-169.The relevant passages in the ancient sources are Plutarch, Lysander 19 and AulusGellius, Attic Nights 17 .4.21ff.

44 This includes an examination of the nine Greek authors who use the word skytale:Aristophanes, Archilochus, Aristotle, Ephorus, Nicophron, Pindar, Thephrastus, Thu-cydides and Xenophon. For the later authors, see Kelly, pp. 156-160. The most recentdiscussions of the philological evidence are L. Jeffrey, 1961, The Local Scripts ofArchaic Greece, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 57-58. T. A. Boring, 1979, Literacyin Ancient Sparta, Mnemosyne Supplement 54, Brill, Leiden, pp. 39-41. W. K.Pritchett, 1974, The Greek State at War, The University of California Press, Berkeley,pp. 45-46. P. A. Cartledge, "Literacy and the Spartan Oligarchy," 1978, Journal ofHellenic Studies 98, pp. 25-37. All recognize to some extent the discrepancy betweenthe use of the word by early and late authors. Among modern discussions that don'tsee any discrepancy: E. Reinke, 1962, "Classical Cryptography" in Classical Journal 58,pp. 113-121. W. Riepl, 1913, Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums, Teubner, Leipzig,pp. 313-315.

45Xenophon, Hellenica 3.3.8. For a more detailed discussion of the incident see E. David,1979, "The Conspiracy of Cinadon," Athenaeum 67, pp. 239-259.

46Cornelius Nepos, Pausanias, 3-4.47Plutarch, Lysander, 20.48Aristotle, Constitution of the Ithacans 509 R.49Tom Kelly, The Spartan Skytale, pp. 156-160.50Tom Kelly, The Spartan Skytale, p. 159.51 Ovid, The Art of Love 3.620-630. J. H. Mozley, trans., Loeb Classical Library edition.52Pliny, Natural History 26.62 mentions a plant called herba lactaria or latuca caprina

(tithymallus) which has these characteristics.53Herodotus 8.128.54Herodotus 5.35. Cf. Polyaenus 1.24 and Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 17.9.19ff.55See David O. Dilks, The Missing Dimension (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984),

p . l .56 Aeneas Tacticus, Loeb Edition, p. 13.

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