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.

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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.

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Producer: Jonty Claypole

Executive Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spartan: Spies and Spycraft in Ancient Greece

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