Tradecraft Ancient Greece

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TRADECRAFf IN ANCIENT GREECE

Rose Mary Sheldon

1 The ancient Greeks knew a great deal about the ins and outs of spying , butthey did not make our modern terminology distinctions among intelligen cecollection, security , counterintelligence , and covert operations . I f the Greeks didh ~ v ea word for it , it was strategemata the single heading under which th e ygtouped all such activities . We are able to study these strategems of war today ,t ~ n k sto the survival of several Greek military handbooks , called strategika

i li . Their chapters on intelligence gathering instruct a commander in whatw ~ u ltoday be called tradecraft : the finer arts of running agents, sending secretrriessages, using codes . ciphers, disguises , and surveillance . We can also glean

information from the works of Greek historians and other ancient writers who ,even if they are not primarily concerned with military matters, do refer occasi bnally to techniques of secret operations . Here is a look at what these sourcesh ~ v eto say about the how to do it of ancient spying.

Of all the surviving military treatises, by far the best is the one written about~ B.C. by Aeneas the Tactician another name, it is thought, for Aeneas ofStymphalos, general of the Arcadian Confederacy. s a fourth-century comm lmder , 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 and weremhre in demand than any other mercenaries . They were said to have been thefirst practical instructors in the art of war . A man of sagacity , whose use of sources

proves he was both well traveled and well read , Aeneas had a keen understandingof lhuman nature . His insight and experience, gathered from a career of adventure , give his work an immediacy lacking in the works compiled in libraries bymere epitomizers. Living in an age when the general alone was the driving powerbehind the whole army, Aeneas recognized intelligence collection and counterintelligence as integral parts of the defense of the state. A commander . couldafford to leave nothing to ' the initiative and good faith of his subordinates; hecould not even trust his own men and often set them as spies against one another .

II One of Aeneas' basic observations is that intelligence being sent into or outI

of .a fortified city has to be transmitted clandestinely to avoid capture by theenemy ; he provides us with the first instructional texts on communications

security,and

describes in detailIS

different methods of sending messages , someof lthem cit>hers . Aeneas probably used recogn ized and traditional devices ,t h ~ u g hhe no doubt made additions or refinements of his own . One exampleinvolved the use of message boards , wooden tablets covered in wax w ith messagesthJn inscribed in the wax, a common vehicle of writing in his day . AeneasIsuggested writing the secret message on the wood and then covering the woodw i ~ hwax in which another , more innocuous message could be written . Thedevice originally comes from Herodotus and was used to transmit one of the mostimbortant messages in all of Greek history . Demaratus. a Greek living as an exile

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Ithe success of this method requires that the unaltered originals be identical inevery detail. ·

: David Kahn in his study The Codebreakers explains some of Aeneas'methods for encoding messages. Among the simplest was replacing vowels for

the p lain text by dots: one for aloha, two for epsilon, etc. A typical message wouldlook like this:

Dionysius Docked

D:.::N:::S:.:.:S D::CK:DLET HERACLEIDES COME

L:T H:R.CL::.D:S C::M:Aeneas Tacticw, 31.31

Loeb edition. p. 171

j A more complicated steganographic system used a disk that bore holesrepresenting the letters of the alphabet. The encipher er passed yarn through thehbles that represented the letters of his messages and the deciphere r would undo

the yarn and get the text in reverse. The holes in the ce nte r were used in betweentne letters that had to be repeated. Hermann Diels gives us a reconstruction:

similar method used an astraga) (a. I

sheep's ankle bone) instead of a disk.The astraga) had four flat sides whichco uld be marked with dots; they werefrequently used as dice. The 24letters ofthe alphabet naturally fall into four :;;gtoups of six. The thread would bep ~ s s ethrough the appropriate letterswith a needle. W hen this operation was

finished,the

appearance would beof

asimple astragal with a ball of threada found it. The recipient would have toubwind it and transcribe the message.This device is the one certain inventionattributed solely to Aeneas and nottraceable to anot her source.

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Hermann Dielst n l ike Technd: p . 74

Leipzig, 1924

I Simple, uncoded messages could be disguised in several ways. They werew itten on thin strips of papyrus, th e n concealed in the shoulder of a tunic, tiedto the bridle of a horse, or sewn into the leather skirts on a soldier's cuirass . Aeneaseven reoorts a man from Ephesus who sent a message written on leaves boundt ~a wound on his leg. .

I In special cases a message might need protection from water or mud. Suchm'essages, written on sheets of beaten tin, were sewn into sandals and walkedthrough a checkooint. If the communicators worked carefully, they could evenslip the message unn oticed into the sandals of an unsuspecting person and thenretrieve it while he slept. Similarly, sm a ll rolled and inscribed plates of lead

Icould hang from a woman's ears as earrings . One Roman example from a lateru ¢ e shows the general Hir tius sending m es sages on lead plates ti ed to the armsof a soldier who then swam the Scultenna River.

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There are several Roman examples of communicati ons techniQue s thatwere most likel y used by the Gre e ks also . om m e ntators have expressed surprise ,for: in stance, that Aeneas does not mention doves as letter c a r r i e ~ sOur onlycitation for their use is Roman but i t seems likely that the Greeks used this

Imethod too . The Roman gener al Hirtius shut p igeons in th e dark and starved

them before fastening letters to their necks by a hair . Relea sed near the city walls ,the bird s immediat ely headed for food and light at the highest building where

r ~ t u swaited for the message. By learning th a t food was l e ft in certain spots,t h ~pigeons became trained to r e turn automatically with subsequent messages.

~ o n gother Roman techniQues with probable Greek anteced e nts are practiceslike writing messages on animal skins tied to th e carcasses of game or sheep , orfastening the message under the tail of a mule to escape a guard post. (Retri evingthit one must have been fun ) . Finally, the linings of scabbards sometimesconcealed messages as well. One ingenious Roman needed to get informationinto a city surrounded by water and occupied by enemy troops. On the oppositebank , he sewed letters inside two inflated skins and ordered one of his betterswlmmers to get on the skins and swim the seven-mile strait. The soldier steered

Iwith his legs for a rudder and navigated the entire trip so skillfully that evenwhen enemy sold iers spotted him , they mistook him for some unusual marinecreature .

I Aeneas tells us that in Epirus , local pra ctice was to take a dog out of itsmaster's house, fix a note inside its collar , and then at night r elease the dog tofirid its master. Dogs were better able to find their way in the dark than humanmesseng ers, and there was less risk of the enemy spo .tting th e dog .

Glus , admi ral to the Persian king, smuggled notes into the royal palace bywriting them between his fingers. Because protocol required visitors to the palaceto keep the ir hands inside their long sleeves as a precaution against assassinations,

it is difficult to understand how memoranda writ ten between his fingers wouldlMluseful. Aeneas, obvi ously impre ssed by this device , unfortunately gives noother details of its use.

; Aeneas understood that important intellig ence succeeded only if the rightperson received it and acted on it properly . Asty anax . . tyrant of Lampsa cusreheived a letter informing him about an assassination plot against him but hefailed to read it and laid it aside. By the time he finally opened it, the conspiratorsw ~ r eupan him. They killed him with the letter still in his hand . A parallel caseoccurred later when Julius Caesar died holding in . his hand a full expasure ofthe conspiracy against him. ·

iAnother writer whose work gives details about tradecraft is Polyaenus, a

Macedonian rhetorician. He wrote a book of strategems dedicated to the jointRoman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and intended to aid themiri their Parthian War of 162 A .D . His examples , some fact , some fiction , came£rbm numero us sources; and he h imself adm its not even making his own extractsbtit using earlier compilations. Discussing his sources is therefore useless, andeach example must be judged on its own merits . For our purposes, the import ~ n c eof these stories is not whethe r they occurred exactly as described , but thatt ~ e yshow techniques known to th e an cients .

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One of Polyaenus' more clever strategems appeared in a recent James Bondfilm. The tyrant Lachares, who tried to escape from Athens after Demetrius .~ o l i o r e t e scaptured it in 295 B.C., disguised himself as a slave, blackened his(ace, and carried a basket of money hidden under dung. He slipped out of thecity, jumped on a horse, and escaped. A party of horsemen gave chase; but as

they closed in, Lachares reached into the basket of money and started scattering~ o l dcoins on the road behind him. His pursuers dismounted to pick up the coins,imd Lachares escaped to Boeotia. Lachares also once concealed himself forseveral days in a pit with just enough provisions to keep himself alive. He washiding on the island of Sestos afte r the island had fallen to the enemy; and whenhe noticed a funeral cortege passing, he put on a black veil and a woman's gownto escape with the mourners through the city gates. Far simpler was the ruse ofDemetrius Phalareus, who escaped from the King of Thrace by hiding in a loadof straw.

Polyaenus tells of a successful royal disguise used by King Seleucus, whobosed as an enemy armor-bearer after his own men had been defeated. He

survived, and afte r regrouping his own army's shattered remains, donned againhis royal robes.I

An ingenious, if somewhat indelicate, device saved one captive held bypirates. Kept in close confinement on the island of Lemnos, Amphiretus theAcanthian waited for someone to ransom him. He secretly drank a mixture of

~ t water and vermilion (red mer curic sulfide) which gave him the bloodyflux." The pirates feared he was suffering from seri ous disease and would die~ u n r a n s o m e d They let Amphiretus out of his cell for exercise and fresh air,·h oping it would restore his health; once out of his cell , he waited for night andescaped.I

Polyaenus has also contributed to our knowledge of methods for sending'secret messages . One notable story came straight out of Herodotus and concerns~ t h eMedian noble Harpagus who tried to aid the Persian king Cyrus . The Medes:ruled Persia at this time and had the road system carefully guarded, m a king all1clandestine communication difficult. In order to offer help in overthrowing theiMedian king, Harpagus sewed his message in the belly of a hare· The messenger'arrived at Cyrus 's qua rters disguised as a hunter carrying a hunter's net with thehare inside. The messenger had been instructed to give Cyrus the hare and bid

1him cut it open with his own hand and with no. one else present. This plan

1worked, and with Harpagus' help Cyrus revolted against the Median king.

1 Not only the Persians but all ancient command ers appreciated communi ations security and took pains to see that no informat ion leaked from their own

ranks. The Greek Demetrius, while leading a naval expedition, kept his desti-1nation secret even from his own men. He gave the captain of each ship sealed1 nstructions and told him not to break the seal unless his ship became separatedfrom the main group by a storm; only then could the captains discover their

'destination . Communications security could take stringent forms. In the flaps

I nd seals department , Aeneas Tacticus, whose work was designed to prevent

, nternal treachery , advocates outright censorship. He suggests that the outgoingand incoming letters of exiles should be brought to the censors before deliv e ry.

IAlexander the Great read his ~ w troops· mail to discover signs of disaffection,

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and he punished complainers . His agents and informants reported suspiciousa c t i~ i e samong his own officers and m e n. Considering the long re cord of palaceintrligues , assassination attempts , and tr eachery against previous Macedoniank i n ~ s these precautions were not entirely without justification. Checkpoints onpublic roads and a system of internal passports are related to censorship. (The y

exis t in the Soviet Union today .) These practices appeared widely in the NearEast, but in Spartan territories too. Guards were sometimes stationed on theroads, and some use of passports or permits for travel took place .

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he Skutale Controversy· One of the most controversial methods of secret writing from the Greek

world was the skytale. It is descr ibed in the Oxford Classical Dictionary as:

1 a secret method of communication used by Spartan magistracies dur-i ing wartime , espec ially between ephors and king or general . Each ofi them had a stick of equal size, so that a message written on a strip ofI leather wound round the stick of the sender , and then detached,Ibecame illegible until the strip was rewound on the stick of the recip-

G e J ~ : ~ \ i s t o r i e sof cryptography , includ ing Kahn's, refer to it as the firsttranspositional cryptograph. While it may be the first, it cannot be dated to theclas'sical period and is almost certainly not Spartan. There is even serious doubtthat it was a method of cryptography. It was J H. Leopold who first assembledthe :ancient evidence for the skytale and came to the conclusion that it was nota device for sending coded messages at all . More recently, Tom Kelly has addeda substantial amount of historical evidence to Leopold's argument and also

o n ~ l u d e dthat the skytale, as described by Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, was notused by earlier Greeks . A close examination of the ancient evidence showsdiscrepancies between the description of the skytale as a cryptograph and whatsee.ris to be its use as a form of open communications. It is necessary to cite onlya few examples from the better-known passages to illustrate this point. Xenophonu s e ~the word skytale in his account of Cinadon s conspiracy . The Spartan ephorsdisclovered a plot and decided to suppress it. They called for Cinadon to go toth e city of Aulon with a skytale on which were written the names of those tobe arrested. I f the message was encoded , how would he have been able to readit? Since the list was given to him directly and was not being delivered to anotherr e c ~ p i e n twhy encode it at all?

A similar story from Pausanias presents the same contradiction . The Spartans learned of Pausanias' treasonous plots and sent a delegation to him with ameSsage to return home or be sentenced to death in absentia. e was stunnedby the message and returned home immediately to extricate himself . e laterc o n ~ p i r e dwith the Persian satrap Artabazus by sending him a letter (also calledskytale which he had delivered by a young boy o was once Pausanias ' lover .ThJ boy became suspicious because he remembered that no other messenger hade v e ~returned from a similar assignment. After reading the message and itsinst

1ructions for the recipient to kill the bearer , the boy turned the letter over to

th e iSpartan ephors, who now had written evidence concerning Pausan ias' treasonbus behavior with the Persians . Surely we must ask ourselves how the messenger was able to read the letter if it was encoded. In addition, if the skytalewas a method used by Spartan kings , generals, and ephors, then what was aPersian satrap doin.g with a skytale , not to mention a suspected traitor?

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Finally, there is the story from Plutar ch conc e rning the Spartan com-inander Lysander who was summoned home by mean s of a skytale to face6harges against him leveled by the Persian Pharnabazus . Lysander went to .Pharnabazus and pleaded with him to write a letter to the ephors , clearing him.Pharnabazus, however, wrote two letters, the one requested and a second, secret

one e xposing Lysander's treachery . When he sealed the letter , Pharnabazusmade a simple switch ; L ysander returned home with a list of hi s own wrong-doings and turned it over to his judges . It would have been much easier sw itchingtwo conventional letters rather than the leather strip as described earlier. And~ g i n we find a supposedly secret form of communications used by the Spartansin the hands of traitors and foreign rulers. When we add the evidence of Aristotlewho asserts that the sky ale was used by Greeks othe r than the Spartans , we beginto wonder just how many people were onto this secre t. For the skvtale to beused as an effective tool for sending coded messages, it would have had to bekept a secret or its effectiveness would be nullified. This does not rule out thehossibility that the strip of leather or papyrus could have been hidden, along thelines of those messages described by Aeneas Tacticus . But it is telling that Aeneas

himself, our single most important source of information on ancient Greekbryptography, does not mention the skytale once. The silence of Polybius isequally suspicious. We can only conclude that it was unknown to them .

The word skytale is discussed by scholists and grammar ians of much laterberiods and the erroneous notion that the skytale was a cryptograph employedby the Spartans seems to have come into existence then . Kelly attributes it toApollonius of Rhodes . The fact that it was described at all by any ancient authoris certainly proof enough tha t the technique was known . But when or where it~ a sused has yet to be demonstrated . All we can say for certain is that it was~ n c i e n tand that it was Greek, but it was never· classical and certainly notSpartan.'I

Milk and ArrowsI

I From the Roman poet Ovid we learn that secret writing could be used forpurposes other than military ones . In his rt of Love Ovid tells of lovers sending~ l a n d e s t i n ecommunications:

Will a guardian forsooth prevent your writing when time is allowedyou for taking a bath when a confidant can carry a written tablet,·concealed by a broad band on her warm bosom? when she can hidea paper packet in her stocking and bear your coax ing message twixtfoot and sandal? Should the guardian beware of this, let the confidantoffer her back for your note, and bear your words upon her body . A

letter too is safe and escapes the eye when written in new milk : touchit with coal dust and you will read. That too will deceive which iswritten with a stalk of moistened flax and a pure sheet will bear hiddenmarks.

~ t h o u g hinvisible ink per se was unknown to the ancients, this passage indi catesI

that they could write with a sort of milk. Pliny describes how letters could be~ r c e don the body with this milk then allowed to dry; when sprinkled with ash ,the letters became visible .

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I he dead .d rop wa s we ll known in antiquit y Herodotus gives the be stexample. Timoxenus was a Greek who wanted to betray the city of Potidaea tothe Persian Artabazus . He arranged to use a certain tree in the city as the drop .A r t ~ b a z u swould secure his mes sage to an arrow and shoot it into the tr e e Onefateful day, Artabazus tied the me ssage around the notched end of the arrow ,·feathered it, and aimed at the drop . Unfortunately, due to a bad wind , bad aim,or p ~ r h a o san improperly feathered arrow , the shot missed its mark and hit alocai citizen. A crowd gathered immediately, discovered the message, andt u r n ~ dit over to the generals . The olot to betray the city was uncovered and thusoreJented. In this case. the term dead drop h a ~more than a tinge of iron y.

Herodotus also described the most famous secret message in Greek history,a message important not only because of its unique delivery but also for th ei n f o ~ m a t i o nit carried . The revolt of the Ionian Greeks against Persia began when

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Histjaeus , a Greek residing at the Persian court , wanted to communica te withhis sbn-in -law Aristagoras , tyrant of Miletus . He shaved the head of a trusted

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slave , tattooed the message on the slave's head , and let the slave·s hair grow back .

The1

slave went to Aristagoras with verbal instructions to shave his head . Arist a g o ~ a scomplied and read the message urging him to begin the revolt against

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Persia.I1The study of intelligence collection presents a special problem for historians

of all periods. Intelligence activities are suppoSed to be done clandestinely andtherJfore are not routinely recorded. For this reason, studying intelligence hasbecobe, in the words of one writer, " the missing dimension" of most politicaland ~ l i p l o m a t i chistory . In addit ion, ancient spies, unlike their modern count e r p ~ r t s did not retire and write memoirs . Ancient writers dot thei r works withsuch lphrases as " he received intelligence that . " or " news arrived of . . . " ;but they rarely report who transmitted this information or how . (Sources andmetHods .) Indeed , they may not have known . The ancient intelligen ce officer ,if he lwere not successful, might draw the historian 's notice indirectly becausehis failure meant his execution or a maj or mili tary disaster . On the other hand,wheri an ancient intelligence officer succeeded , he remained unheralded andfaded into obscurity , unnamed and unrewarded, at least publicly .

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I • •Aeneas, Polyaenus, Herodotus, Onasander, and Polybius ar e forerunners of

modJ rn writers on the art of intelligence . The Greeks, who considered their pol sor c i t ~ s t a t ethe height of civilized life , knew well that the ne cessity of defensea ga i ~ s taggression devolves upon a watchful citizenship. "

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The examples we have just survey e d have been taken from widely div er-

gent1periods of Greek history, but they bring two facts clearly into focus :

a l t h o ~ g hthe Greeks did not have a centralized intelligence servic e, they appreciated the importance of having good intelligence, and they brought to intelligenbe gathering the same clev e rness and ingenuity that they brought to manyother ields they pioneered. These ancient trickS for collecting information andconcealing messages seem amu sing to us because of their quaintness, and simplisti 9 by modern standards of technol ogy Th eir cryptograms would hardlyde ceive a modern military cens or, but could w e ll have fooled a simple-mindedgatekbeoer or a barbarian ooiicerilan in an age when reading and writing were

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Iuncommon . Tricks with vowels and consonants , for example , were unh eard ofeven among educated people . Like other elements of great inventions now partof our thought and action , the ideas behind these ancient practices still apply .

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The Greeks were acutely aware that intelligence p)ayed an important role inmilitary operations and in defending their cities. Without proper intelligence

they failed or suffered major setbacks . For lack of a scout in 405 B.C. , forexample, the entire Athenian fleet of almost 300 ships was destroyed at Aegosbotami, and the Peloponnesian War ended in a Spartan victory .

i The Greeks, too, paid a high ~ r i efor inteliigence failures.

FURTHER READING

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Chester G Starr, Political Intelligence in Ancient Greece Mnemosynei Supplement 31 (Leiden, 1974).

Aeneas Tacticus , Loeb Classical Library , ·Illinois Greek Club translation , 1948.II

Polyaenus, Stratagems of ar R. Shepherd translation, Ares Press, 1974 .I

vy K Pritchett, Ancient Greek Military Practices Berkeley, 1971.

Frontinus, Strategemata Loeb Classical Library, Charles E . Bennett transj lation, Cambridge, 1925 .

Tom Kelly, The Spartan Skytale, The Craft of the Ancient Historian : Essays' in honor of Chester G . Starr Lanham, Md., 1985; pp. 141-169.

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Tradecraft Ancient Greece

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