Ancient & modern
However one regards Mrs Gun after her betrayal of the Official Secrets Act — selfless heroine of Antigonean stature, or self-important, sanctimonious little twerp — her actions raise an important question: the security of the written word.
In classical Greece, inter-state politics were usually carried out verbally, either by well-briefed ambassadors or by messengers with orders committed to memory. Personal letters between heads of state were long regarded with suspicion. First, they were seen as secretive; unlike a messenger, a letter could not blab about its contents to its fellows and, in a world where literacy was not universal, a sealed letter was a convenient way of keeping information from prying ears. Second, letters were felt to be deceptive; they might be forged, and had a general reputation for containing false information. In sum, they were not the open, face-to-face, 'democratic' Greek way of doing business, but a slippery medium espoused by untrustworthy foreign potentates, whose scribes could be guaranteed to use them in some nefarious way to further their masters' interests. Besides all that, they were unreliable. We hear an amusing story of how a letter sent to Dionysius II of Syracuse was lost when a wolf stole the bag containing it because the bag had a piece of sacrificial meat tied to it.
The historian Herodotus is full of stories of plots hatched by letters in this way; and, to demonstrate what a dodgy medium they were, we also hear of plots discovered because of them. A famous example comes from Spartan history. Their king Pausanias had been instrumental in finally expelling the Persians from Greece at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, but he then began a secret correspondence with the Persian king Xerxes. In it, he expressed his desire to marry Xerxes' daughter and between them bring all Greece under their control. The Spartans gradually came to suspect that something was up, but the truth came out only when it dawned on a messenger sent by Pausanias with a letter to Xerxes that none of the previous messengers had ever come back. So he opened the letter and read the contents — together with a postscript to the effect that he should be put to death.
With Antigones/sanctimonious twerps like Mrs Gun handling our secret communications at GCHQ, there might be something to be said for the concept.
Peter Jones
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