Читать книгу Secret and Urgent - The Story of Codes and Ciphers - Анон - Страница 11

LYSANDER of Sparta, commander of the city state’s armies in the north, sat in his house at Sestos. At the moment he was the most powerful man in the Greek world. A year had not gone by since he crushed forever the power of the Athenian Empire in the great sea-fight at Aegospotami, captured that proud imperial city, and sailed on to the Hellespont, where Greece met Persia, to put the world in order.

Yet victory had brought problems as well as power. It was the nature of Greeks to be jealous; in overthrowing the parties that had held for Athens among the cities of the north his proceedings had necessarily been highhanded, and of late there had reached him from the home city nothing but an ominous silence. His position was the more difficult because precisely at this moment he had arrived at a parting of the ways of policy, a point where instruction as to the intent and position of the Spartan government was most needed.

Pharnabazus, the Persian satrap who held the Asia Minor shores, had supported him and Sparta in their war with Athens. Outwardly, the Persian was friendly still; but Lysander had reason to believe that Persia looked with as much disfavor on a Greece united under Spartan hegemony as on a Greece united under Athens. The riots among the cities had seemed spontaneous, but there were not wanting signs that Persia had interfered.

The question before Lysander was what course to take—what course the home government wished him to take. Action against Persia might precipitate a major Persian war for which Sparta was unprepared. Doing nothing might allow the anti-Spartan, pro-Athenian movement among the cities to gather such momentum it could not be halted. It was altogether possible that the home government was already planning on that great war with Persia which Lysander had discussed with them before leaving the city. If he went back to Sparta now, he might just miss the troops and ships coming north for the great adventure. This would be equal to desertion.

As he meditated, a slave was brought in. The man said he was from Sparta, one of four, with messages from the government. Where the other three were he did not know; probably killed or taken somewhere along the route. He himself had been carried off to prison till those who held him were satisfied that he had no message beyond the innocuous one on his tablets, commanding Lysander to observe some religious festival.

The general nodded, and asked the man for his belt, a narrow one of soft leather, written round with one of those meaningless jumbles of letters which the priests of certain mysteries prepare for travelers as invocations to the patron god of journeys, Hermes. The slave handed it over and was dismissed. When he had gone Lysander detached from his own belt the baton which always hung there, an article which those who did not know the Spartan system understood as merely the emblem of his office. The baton was pierced at the end farthest from the handle; through this hole Lysander inserted the end of the slave’s belt and wound the strip of leather spirally around the staff, close-packing it so that no wood was left bare between one circuit and the next.

As he did so the dissociated letters, which had been merely gibberish while the belt lay in a straight line, were brought into a new relation to one another. Words and sentences leaped from loop to loop; Pharnabazus had played false to the general and to Sparta. Lysander’s friend Thorax had been murdered; his messages to the home city evidently had been intercepted, and there was a bribery complaint against him before the government. Since Lysander had not responded to their request for a reply to these charges (which he had never received) he would be presently judged guilty in absence and condemned.

Within the night a fast galley bore Lysander of Sparta south, homeward through the Aegean; the first recorded use of cipher had saved a general and an empire, and set in motion the chain of circumstances that led unbroken to the triumph of West over East under Alexander the Great.