Un aspetto dell’intelligence nel mondo greco: la parola d’ordine

Abstract

In the ancient world, visual and verbal σύνθημα appears to be of enormous importance during conflicts. It is one of the elements pertaining to the management and organization of political intelligence. In particular, the signal, declined in the verbal form, for its fundamental function of ‘recognition’ to validate the belonging of a soldier to a particular side, had to be chosen with great care. Its use appears to have intensified and, at the same time, perfected, according to what can be gathered from historiographical evidence and from military treatises, at the time of the transition between the Classical and Hellenistic eras, when the way of waging war also underwent an important transformation.