Commonplace Book: Aeneas Tacticus on Secret Messages

[ricardienne]

One of the problems with fantasy novels is that when you use magic for things like, say, encoding secret messages so that they look innocuous to anyone but their intended recipient, you take a lot of the potential fun out of it. Here are just three of the many examples of ways to send secret messages provided by Aeneas Tacticus (c. 4th/3rd century BCE?):

Send a man bearing a message or a letter about something unconcealed. When he is getting ready to set out, secretly put a message inside the soles of his sandals and sew them back up. (In case of mud or water, you should engrave it lightly on tin to provide against the letters vanishing because of the wet). When he arrives at the appropriate person and has gone to sleep, the recipient undoes the seams of his sandals, takes out the letter and reads it, writes another secretly while he is still sleeping, and, sewing it back up, sends the man back either to report or with another unconcealed letter. This way, no one else, and not even the bearer himself, will know. But you must make the stitching on the sandels as invisible as possible.

A letter was brought to Ephesus in the following manner. A man was sent with a letter written on leaves, and the leaves were bound into a poultice upon a wound on his leg.

A letter could also be sent via a woman's ears, if, instead of earings, she wore thin lead plates rolled up.
Aeneas Tacticus, "How to Survive A Siege", 31.4-7.

Comments

[awomanthatsblue.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the old engrave-it-on-tin trick. I love it!

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

Just add thin sheets of various metals to your siege-preparedness kit!

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

Never leave home without it!

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I mean, you never know when you're going to be like the chorus in Euripides's Phoenician Women and get stuck in the middle of a siege when you just planned to stop over on your way to somewhere else!

[existentialgoat.livejournal.com]

I can't decide which I love more: these tricks, or the fact that the guy who made them up/wrote them down is named Aeneas Tacticus.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

Well, we do only call him Aeneas Tacticus because we don't know much about him except that he wrote a books about military strategy. (He might have been a 4th century Stymphalian general, but that wouldn't help much, because the only thing we know about said general is that he was from Stymphalos in the 4th century and named Aeneas.)

[existentialgoat.livejournal.com]

Awww, spoil my fun. ;)

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry! *takes off pedantic graduate student hat*. Actually, his parents nicknamed him ὁ Τακτικός because when he was a baby, a snake crept into his crib but he mustered the household mice into formation and had them fight it off.

[existentialgoat.livejournal.com]

:D!

This is a beautiful, beautiful story! YOU SHOULD WRITE A CHILDREN'S BOOK. IT WOULD BE THE CUTEST THING EVER.