The Caesar Cipher: Ancient And Simple Yet Effective Cipher Used By Julius Caesar

MessageToEagle.com – Ancient Rome’s dictator and general Julius Caesar turned the Roman Republic into the powerful Roman Empire, but he had a lot of enemies.

When he sent messages to his generals he used a simple, yet difficult code to decipher. The Caesar Cipher was long impossible to break.

In most cases Caesar used a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is ‘shifted’ a certain number of places down the alphabet.

With help of the alphabet, Caesar would write a letter and then shift it 3 times to the right. The letter “B” would become an “E” and so forth. The Caesar cipher is probably the easiest of all ciphers to break.

Caesar Cipher
The action of a Caesar cipher is to replace each plaintext letter with a different one a fixed number of places down the alphabet. The cipher illustrated here uses a left shift of three, so that (for example) each occurrence of E in the plaintext becomes B in the ciphertext.

See also: Code Of Nesilim: Ancient Laws Of The Hittites

However, despite being so simple Caesar Cipher did its trick and it was allegedly never cracked by his enemies. Some variation of the cipher was used up to 1915 by the Russians during the First World War, but it did not take long to break.

The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, a method originally described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in his 1553 book La cifra del. Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso. Though the cipher is easy to understand and implement, for three centuries it resisted all attempts to break.  The Caesar Cipher still has modern application in the ROT13 system.

Another method cipher method used by Caesar was to exchange Latin letter against Greek ones.

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