People always ask, "What do teachers do during the summer?" Some actually work. In fact, I normally work at my school's summer camp. This year, I decided to take a breath and sit down. It's been almost a week now, and I'm about to go crazy. LOL. Kinda. I've always been someone who can't sit still mentally...well, or physically. I'm researching two really cool projects for next year so I thought I'd share what I'm learning, as I like to do.
ANCIENT CRYPTOGRAPHY!!!! A few years ago, one of my Latin/Science Olympiad students approached me to tell me about his cryptography club at the library. Intriguing. He told me that he had learned about the Caesar Cipher, an ancient mechanism whereby Julius Caesar, the 1st century Roman general, encrypted his messages during wartime. I had never heard of it! Of course, he told me everything he knew, and I furiously wrote it down...thinking, "OHHHH, this will be a GREAT RoTech unit!" I immediately thought of that time in DE BELLO GALLICO where Caesar sends a secret message to one of his men using a spear. I ALWAYS wanted to know how he did it.
Then, during spring break, by divine intervention, I'm sure, I ran across an online webinar about the Roman dodecahedron. Since we had talked about this little mystery device in my RoTech class, I decided to click the link. It led me to a tour company that sponsors professionals in many different fields to talk about topics related to their tour locations. It was here that I discovered a series of lectures on ancient Greek and Roman cryptography! These lectures, given by Dr. Martine Diepenbroek, discussed all kinds of ancient encryption. She talked about ancient encryption techniques, including the Spartan scytale which involved wrapping a message around a stick or spear. I immediately bought her book, The Spartan Scytale and Developments in Ancient and Modern Cryptography. She also mentioned a Greek author I had never heard of: Aineias the Tactician whose book on war tactics includes a whole chapter about encryption. I ordered that too! LOL
I've started reading these two works, and I'm having an absolute blast. Aineias, a 4th-century BCE Greek writer, wrote a work called How to Survive Under Siege. Lots of info here, but the most interesting chapter is all about hiding messages so that your enemy can't read them. If you're on TikTok, you've probably seen that trend where someone says, "Give me your most UNHINGED examples of blah, blah." Examples include nurses asking for ways to assist with difficult patients to teachers asking for ways to quiet a classroom. Well, this Aineias guy is something else!! Reading his encryption techniques is basically that TikTok trend: "Give me your most unhinged ways to hide a message that will evade the enemy!" Hold my beer: "Shave a slave's head, tattoo your message on his scalp, and then give him time to regrow his hair before sending him off." Like, WHUT??! "Scratch your message into a thin piece of lead, secretly slip it into the leather layers of a shoe heel, and then send off the shoe wearer. Unbeknownst to the shoe wearer while he's sleeping, the receiver of the message will retrieve the shoe, find the message, scratch his answer, and sew it back into the shoe."
Diepenbroek's work has been so informative as well. For example, I learned the difference between STEGANOGRAPHY and CRYPTOGRAPHY. In case you didn't know, steganography is "the practice of hiding a message within another message, an image, or an object, without giving the idea that a secret message is hidden in it." It's a broad term for LOTS of different types of messages, similar to the ones above. She also has a comprehensive list of ancient authors who use or talk about cryptography in their works.
I got so excited reading about these that I decided to try out the Caesar Cipher as a quick end-of-year activity with my students. I led them in creating a Caesar Cipher wheel, linked here. And then, they enjoyed decoding a few current brain-rot words that made them cringe like "THE RIZZLER". Their faces fell in true bitterness when they decoded BOOGER TOUCH - our favorite little game to play on Fridays.
I've started reading these two works, and I'm having an absolute blast. Aineias, a 4th-century BCE Greek writer, wrote a work called How to Survive Under Siege. Lots of info here, but the most interesting chapter is all about hiding messages so that your enemy can't read them. If you're on TikTok, you've probably seen that trend where someone says, "Give me your most UNHINGED examples of blah, blah." Examples include nurses asking for ways to assist with difficult patients to teachers asking for ways to quiet a classroom. Well, this Aineias guy is something else!! Reading his encryption techniques is basically that TikTok trend: "Give me your most unhinged ways to hide a message that will evade the enemy!" Hold my beer: "Shave a slave's head, tattoo your message on his scalp, and then give him time to regrow his hair before sending him off." Like, WHUT??! "Scratch your message into a thin piece of lead, secretly slip it into the leather layers of a shoe heel, and then send off the shoe wearer. Unbeknownst to the shoe wearer while he's sleeping, the receiver of the message will retrieve the shoe, find the message, scratch his answer, and sew it back into the shoe."
Diepenbroek's work has been so informative as well. For example, I learned the difference between STEGANOGRAPHY and CRYPTOGRAPHY. In case you didn't know, steganography is "the practice of hiding a message within another message, an image, or an object, without giving the idea that a secret message is hidden in it." It's a broad term for LOTS of different types of messages, similar to the ones above. She also has a comprehensive list of ancient authors who use or talk about cryptography in their works.
I got so excited reading about these that I decided to try out the Caesar Cipher as a quick end-of-year activity with my students. I led them in creating a Caesar Cipher wheel, linked here. And then, they enjoyed decoding a few current brain-rot words that made them cringe like "THE RIZZLER". Their faces fell in true bitterness when they decoded BOOGER TOUCH - our favorite little game to play on Fridays.
Diepenbroek's book mainly discusses the Spartan scytale, a method of encrypting messages using a particular size of stick (trust me, the lesson on this one is gonna be SOOO fun) and how it gave birth to the modern cryptography movement. I'm excited to read it because in the modern STEM world, teaching kids to code at all ages is the rage. I'm excited to connect this stuff to the ancient world of Greece and Rome!
I'm particularly interested in ancient cryptography right now because I'm so fortunate to be the recipient of the 2025 Classical Association of the Middle West and South's Benario Travel Award, a fellowship for travels to classical lands. Herbert and Janice Benario, the award's namesakes, are former Latin teachers from Georgia, but before she became a Latin teacher, Janice served as a code breaker for the US Navy during WWII! Check out interviews done with her here as part of the oral history project done by the National WWII Museum (in my home state of Louisiana.) What a connection!
I chose to use my fellowship to take an archaeological tour of ancient Provence (southern France). I've always wanted to see the Pont du Gard, a super famous Roman aqueduct and UNESCO World Heritage Site. But before I make my way south, I've decided to see the WWII sites on the Normandy Beaches, the Bayeux Tapestry, and Mont St. Michel. I can't wait to learn all I can about the work that Janice Benario did and many other codebreakers like her. Recently, I read Bruchac's Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two. I also need to get hold of Kahn's Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. More secret messages to come!
