Tinker Tailor Soldier Spartan: Spies and Spycraft in Ancient Greece

We may think of Ancient Greek warfare as scantily dressed musclemen
thrashing it out on the desert plain (and there may have been an
element of that), but there was a whole other side of spy work too.
Much of this was the result of its fraught relationship with the
vast Persian empire to the east - a centuries long rivalry which
makes the Cold War look like a hot skirmish. Mary and Charlotte
share some of the surviving stories of Ancient Greek espionage,
including secret messages concealed in women’s earrings and even
tattooed onto an enslaved person’s head. Most of these stories
focus on writing and it’s a reminder that in the Ancient World,
writing was as innovative and inherently suspicious as drones are
to us today. Societies with advanced written culture had the
technological upperhand on their rivals, so it’s little surprise
that the surviving stories about spies reveal an anxiety about this
new form of communication.  @instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok
and YouTube @insta_classics for X email:
instantclassicspod@gmail.com Mary and Charlotte recommend some
further reading: The story of Bellerophon is told in Book 6 of the
Iliad (the “dangerous signs” line 165) The stories of Gorgo can be
found in Herodotus, Histories Book 5, 49 and Book 7, 239 (she is
described as one of the first cryptanalysts by David Kahn in The
Codebreakers (Scribners, 1996)). She is one of the women who
features in Sarah B Pomeroy, Spartan Women (OUP, pb, 2002).
Herodotus Histories Book 5 (chaps 35 ff) describes the message
tattooed into the slaves head. Aeneas Tacticus: the relevant
passage is at section 31.20 The revolutionary effects in general of
early literacy (and different technologies of writing) are
discussed by Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (Routledge pb, new
ed. 2012). For Greece, in particular, Oswyn Murray’s Early Greece
(Fontana pb, 2nd ed, 2010) stresses the importance of the
beginnings of writing.  Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci
Producer: Jonty Claypole  Executive Producer: Natalia
Rodriguez Ford Video Editor: Jak Ford Theme music: Casey Gibson
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