Hey dear Hive Community, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you are all well! Today I would like to discuss a rising topic and hope you can expand your knowledge a little.
The tradition to encrypt messages has already a long history and in this post I would like to discuss how the Romans stood to this topic and I have created some illustrations with the help of artificial intelligence. Similar to ancient Greece, it was mainly about transporting messages unnoticed past the enemy troops during warlike confrontations so that they could then be deciphered by the allied troops and those who are also interested in cryptography in ancient Greece will find a contribution here. A well-known method of the Romans to encrypt messages is also known under the name Caesar Cipher and according to some traditions by the scholar Suetonius, this procedure goes back to the well-known Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar who used this method to hide messages from the Gauls unnoticed and others also used the procedure like Emperor Augustus who continued the inheritance of Caesar. The Caesar cipher is a symmetrical method which is basically about replacing the used letters of a message with another and with the help of an encryption disc it is possible to decipher the message and on the basis to be able to decrypt the message at all, the recipient needed the order of the sequence to be able to decipher the message. The encrypted texts were then handed over to messengers so that they could then go to the troops to assign the commands and if should happen that they were stopped on the way, no one could do anything with the message except the one who also had the right key and the Romans often used encryption. The Roman scholar Pliny the elder also described methods of encryption in his works and he mentioned the juice of a plant called Tithymalus as well as lemon juice which became invisible on paper and this invisible ink could then be made visible again with the light of a candle to read the message.
Thanks for taking the time to read through my post and I hope you like it and can learn something new about this topic!