Millennia before the invention and widespread use of encrypted emails, coded radio transmissions or sophisticated intelligence agencies, the ancient Spartans had a remarkably ingenious method of keeping important military messages away from enemy eyes.
It was known as the skytale, or σκυτάλη, a wooden staff associated with secret communications sent between Sparta and its commanders fighting far from home. The principle behind it was ingenious in its simplicity.
According to the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch, when Spartan officials known as the ephors sent a general or admiral abroad, two wooden staffs of exactly the same dimensions were prepared. One remained in Sparta while the commander took the other with him.
Plutarch describes the arrangement in his Life of Lysander:
“They make two round pieces of wood exactly alike in length and thickness […] and keep one themselves, while they give the other to their envoy.” “These pieces of wood,” Plutarch adds, “they call scytalae.”
When the ephors needed to send a particularly sensitive message, they wrapped a long, narrow strip of parchment around the staff kept in Sparta.
As Plutarch explains, whenever the Spartans wished to communicate “some secret and important message,” they made the parchment “long and narrow, like a leathern strap,” and wound it tightly around the skytale, covering its surface. The message was then written directly onto the parchment while it remained wrapped around the staff. Once the strip was removed, however, the letters no longer appeared in their original sequence. Instead, the writing was broken into apparently disconnected fragments.
Plutarch explains that the recipient “cannot otherwise get any meaning out of it,” because “the letters have no connection, but are disarranged.” A messenger could therefore carry the strip without carrying the wooden staff needed to reconstruct the text. Someone intercepting the parchment might see the writing but would not immediately be able to arrange it into the original message.
The Spartan commander receiving it would take his own matching skytale and wind the parchment around it. Because the two staffs had the same dimensions, the spiral arrangement of the strip was restored and the letters lined up again, allowing the commander to read what Sparta had sent him. Interestingly, Plutarch notes that the word skytale came to refer not only to the wooden staff itself but also to the written dispatch carried on the parchment.
The skytale that ordered Lysander home
Plutarch provides a particularly striking example of the skytale in his Life of Lysander.
Lysander was one of Sparta’s most powerful commanders and played a decisive role in defeating Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. His victory at Aegospotami in 405 BC effectively destroyed the remaining Athenian fleet, helping bring the long conflict to an end.
However, Lysander’s activities in Asia later angered the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, who complained about his conduct to the Spartan authorities.
The ephors responded by sending Lysander a skytale ordering him to return home. It is at this point in the story that Plutarch pauses his account and explains in detail what a skytale actually was and how the Spartans used it.
His description, in Life of Lysander 19.5–19.7, gives us the famous image of two matching wooden staffs: one held by the authorities in Sparta and another entrusted to the commander in the field.
The episode also shows that the skytale was more than simply an early method of concealing information. Receiving such a dispatch meant that the commander was receiving an official communication directly from the Spartan authorities.
In Lysander’s case, there could be little doubt about what he was expected to do. Sparta was calling him home.
Was it really ancient encryption?
The skytale is consequently often described as one of the earliest cryptographic devices in history.
More precisely, the method described by Plutarch resembles what modern cryptographers call a transposition cipher. The letters themselves were not replaced with other letters or symbols. Instead, their order and position became disrupted when the parchment was removed from the staff. Wrapping it around another cylinder of the correct dimensions restored the arrangement.
There is, however, an important historical problem.
Plutarch wrote during the late first and early second centuries AD, several centuries after the classical Spartan world he was describing. Earlier Greek writers refer to Spartan skytalai as official communications, but they do not provide the same detailed explanation of a cryptographic system involving parchment wrapped around matching cylinders.
This has led scholars to debate whether the skytale had always been used in precisely the manner described by Plutarch, or whether the elaborate cryptographic explanation preserved by later authors reflected a later tradition.
What is clear is that the σκυτάλη became closely associated with official orders sent by Sparta to its commanders abroad.
For a society famous for military discipline, secrecy and brevity, it was a remarkably appropriate device: nothing elaborate, just a narrow strip of parchment, two matching pieces of wood and a message that made sense only when placed back into its proper form.
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