Anagrams and secret names: hiding and revealing with letters

An anagram rearranges the letters of a word to form another. For the ancients it was not merely a game: it was thought that a name contained a hidden truth, and that rearranging its letters could reveal it. At the same time the anagram was a tool for concealment, like the secret names that certain cities and deities jealously guarded. Revelation and secrecy are two faces of the same conviction: that a name is not just any label, but part of the thing itself.

Lycophron and the Ptolemaic court

Tradition credits the invention of the literary anagram to Lycophron of Chalcis, a poet active in Alexandria in the third century BC. According to the Byzantine commentator John Tzetzes, he flattered King Ptolemy II by deriving from his name, Ptolemaios, the phrase apo melitos, “from honey”, and from the name of Queen Arsinoe the formula ion Heras, “violet of Hera”. The report is late and cannot be verified, but it shows well the courtly value that the game could take on.

The Christian Middle Ages also loved devout anagrams. One of the best known turns Pilate's question to Jesus, Quid est veritas?, “what is truth?”, into the answer Est vir qui adest, “it is the man who stands before you”. The author is unknown and the formula is probably late, but it neatly sums up the idea that a sentence could contain its own answer, for those who knew how to rearrange its letters.

The secret name of Rome

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, records that Rome had another name, which it was forbidden to pronounce, and that Valerius Soranus was punished for divulging it. Plutarch and Macrobius also speak of this secret and of the city's protecting deity, whose name was supposedly kept silent so that enemies could not invoke her and lure her away with a rite of evocation, as the Romans themselves did with the gods of besieged cities.

Many hypotheses have been put forward about what the name was, none attested in the sources. Amor, that is Roma read backwards, is often cited, but it is a modern conjecture without documentary basis. The historically significant fact is the belief itself: the name was considered part of the reality it designated, and knowing it meant having power over it.

Pseudonyms and scientific discoveries

In the Renaissance the anagram became an elegant way of signing one's work. François Rabelais published Pantagruel under the name Alcofribas Nasier, an exact anagram of his own name. Humanists loved to discover a moral motto in the letters of a name, and whole collections of anagrams flourished, dedicated to sovereigns, prelates and saints, regarded almost as a prophecy contained in the name itself.

Scientists used anagrams to secure priority for a discovery without disclosing it too early. In 1610 Galileo Galilei sent Kepler an apparently random sequence of letters that concealed his observation of Saturn, which he interpreted as a triple planet. Kepler tried to decipher it and arrived at a wrong solution. A few decades later Christiaan Huygens resorted to the same device to announce the discovery of the planet's ring.

From courtly flattery to religious secrecy, from the literary pseudonym to scientific priority, the anagram long accompanied the history of European culture. At its root lies an ancient and powerful idea: that the letters of a name are not arranged by chance, but form a material from which a meaning can be extracted, or in which it can be hidden, visible only to those who hold the key.