I,Claudius and the cipher extraordinary

摘要

In the midst of reading Robert Graves' I, Claudius, I was surprised to encounter a description of an interesting cipher used by the fictional Augustus. I therefore thought it would be worthwhile to write a short article to draw attention to what is perhaps not a particularly well-known cipher appearing in fiction. I will assume that the reader is familiar with the principle behind the famous Vigenere cipher (see [2] or [3]).