Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  Indeed, as the following chapters show, weapons that target human biological vulnerabilities are notoriously undiscriminating, capable of harming civilians as well as soldiers. Trying to control weapons based on deadly poisons, volatile chemicals, windborne smoke, unquenchable flames, virulent pathogens, venomous creatures, and unpredictable animals and materials has always posed dangers not just to the victims but to the perpetrators themselves. As we shall see, these practical and ethical issues were first broached in ancient Greek myth and they show up again and again in real historical battles.

  In nearly all cultures, both ancient and modern, “biological and chemical weapons are seen as more repugnant than conventional weapons,” remarked biochemical weapons expert Dr. Leonard Cole in the TV series “Avoiding Armageddon.” We should “nourish that sense of repugnance for out-of-bounds weapons” which should “have no place in civilized society.” “Every weapon that we can develop a cultural antipathy for, so much the better.” This, suggested Cole, could “create a model for how we might eventually minimize the use of all kinds of weapons” of war.

  The evidence from ancient myth and history shatters the notion that there ever was a time when biological and chemical warfare was unthinkable. But the evidence also shows that doubts about the use of such weapons arose as soon as the first archer dipped the first arrowhead in poison. And that’s a reason for hope, I think. To delve into the long history of humankind’s ingenuity in weaponizing nature is a fascinating yet sobering undertaking. Once released from the genie’s bottle, the horrors of biological and chemical war technologies are loosed on the world. Yet, like Pandora’s Box, one can discover, embedded in the ancient Greek myths, a ray of hope that anticipates modern efforts to restrain the dark sciences of war.

  SOURCES

  Vat in Pompeii: Marina Ciaraldi, People and Plants in Ancient Pompeii. London: Accordia, 2007. Ciaraldi, “Drug Preparation in Evidence.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 9 (July 2000): 91-98. Mithridatium: Adrienne Mayor, Poison King: Mithradates the Great, Rome’s Deadliest Foe. Princeton University Press, 2009.

  By 2004 it was evident that Iraq had no biochemical or nuclear weapons. In July 2008, Egyptian-born Al Qaeda biochemical weapons mastermind in Afghanistan, Abu Khabab al-Masri, was killed in Pakistan by US missile strike. As of this writing, the case of the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 remains unsolved, after the prime suspect, a US government anthrax/bioweapons researcher, committed suicide in August 2008.

  Biosecurity 2003, October 20-22, 2003, Washington DC, was organized by Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical International, in conjunction with the RAND Center for Domestic and International Health Security and Jane’s Information Group. International biosecurity experts conferred on how to respond to biological events involving anthrax, smallpox, SARS, etc.

  A&E History Channel International, “Global View” talk show, December 23, 2004. Serguei Popov has worked at the National Center for Biodefense, George Mason University, since 2004, with his former Biopreparat supervisor Ken Alibek, author of Biohazard (2000). Their research in the Soviet Union and in the United States is described in Mark Williams, “The Knowledge.” MIT Technology Review (March 2006): 1-18.

  Scorpion bomb: Cathy Newman, “Twelve Toxic Tales,” National Geographic (May 2005). See http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0505/feature1/assignment2.html for the photographer’s experience.

  History Channel (“Where Did It Come From?”) “Ancient Greece: Weapons of Mass Destruction,” 2006, available on DVD from www.history.com.

  Blowback, Hannibal’s secret weapon: “After reading Adrienne Mayor’s book about chemical and biological warfare in the ancient world and John Prevas’s book about Hannibal’s crossing the Alps, I knew I had to take my novel in an entirely different direction.” Brad Thor, “Behind the Book,” www.bradthor.com.

  Gothic sieges of Roman cities: Procopius, De Bello Gothico, cited by J. Lascaratos, “Mass Poisonings During the Gothic War,” Mithridata, Toxicological History Society Newsletter 9, no 1 (January 1999).

  “Killer Donkeys Were First Bioweapons,” by Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News, December 3, 2007. Siro Trevisanato, “The Hittite Plague, and epidemic of Tularemia and the First Record of Biological Warfare.” Medical Hypotheses 69 (2007): 1371-74.

  The molecular biologist and Soviet general Igor Ashmarin ordered Biopreparat scientists to splice human neurotransmitters, opioid beta-endorphins produced in response to pain and other stressors, into infectious viruses beginning in 1979. Bioweapons that target enemy personality and behavior, and cobra venom delivered by virus, Williams 2006.

  Jeffery A. Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: The Use of Insects as Weapons of War. Oxford University Press, 2008.

  DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Program Agency, announced in March 2006 that the Hybrid Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program “seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses.” Once these insect-machine hybrid “platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion.”

  Flaming pigs: Activision’s “Rome: Total War ” video game, developed by Creative Assembly, was released in 2003, pigs added in 2004, totalwar.com. Reviewed by Dave “Fargo” Kosak, GameSpy.com, May 19, 2004. Also reviewed by Mike Burns, in Archaeology (March/April 2005), 54.

  Yucca Mountain is still highly controversial: Allison Macfarlane and Rodney Ewing, eds., Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste. MIT Press, 2006.

  Taj Ali et al., “Southern Asia’s Oldest Incendiary Missile?” Archaeometry 48 (2006): 641-55.

  Archimedes’ mirror weapon was reproduced successfully by Dr. David Wallace and his students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in San Francisco harbor, igniting a 1924 wooden fishing boat, on October 22, 2005, broadcast on Discovery Channel’s “MythBusters” on January 25, 2006. For full technical details and photos, see http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experiments/deathray/10_Mythbusters.html.

  DARPA’s “active denial” system (ADS) heat ray research began in 1995. The new ray-gun was widely reported in 2007. “Pentagon Looks to Sci-Fi Weaponry,” Agence France Presse, January 30, 2007. The Pentagon decided not to deploy the weapon in Iraq in 2007, for fear it “might be seen as a torture device.” “Pentagon Denied U.S. Calls for Ray Gun Weapon in Iraq,” AP news story, August 30, 2007.

  Dr. Leonard Cole, professor of political science, Rutgers, appeared in the “Silent Killers: Poisons and Plagues” episode of PBS “Avoiding Armageddon” TV series, spring 2003.

  HISTORICAL TIME LINE

  THE MAPS

  Map 1. Italy, Greece, and the Aegean.

  (Map by Michele Angel)

  Map 2. The ancient world.

  (Map by Michele Angel)

  Map 3. Asia Minor, Near East, Mesopotamia, and Parthia.

  (Map by Michele Angel)

  INTRODUCTION:

  WAR OUTSIDE THE RULES

  In times of peace, individuals and states

  follow higher standards. . . .

  But war is a stern teacher.

  —THUCYDIDES, History of the Peloponnesian War

  A PHALANX OF warriors armed with swords and spears advances across an open plain to confront a force of similarly armed men. Following the rules of fair combat, the fighting is hand to hand and grimly predictable. After the battle, the dead are retrieved, and victory is clear and honorable.

  This stark picture has been widely assumed to sum up the ancient experience of armed conflict. Images of a long-lost era of heroic combat by brave men wielding simple weapons continue to inspire us: the Trojan War of Homeric myth, the historic Battle of Marathon, the Spartans facing Persian hordes at Thermopylae, the outnumbered Athenian triremes defeating the Persian fleet at Salamis, the Romans resisting Hannibal. But behin
d these glorious vignettes lurks a darker military reality, and terrifying options that rendered the courage of warriors meaningless. This book chronicles how the genie of biochemical warfare first escaped.

  Germ warfare? Chemical weapons? Most people assume these terrors are recent innovations. Surely the ability to manipulate pathogens, toxins, and chemicals into tools of war requires modern scientific understanding of epidemiology, biology, and chemistry, as well as advanced delivery systems. Besides, wasn’t warfare in antiquity based on honor, valor, and skill? Outside of a few well poisonings, the odd plague victim catapulted over walls in the Middle Ages, and the fabled Byzantine recipe for Greek Fire, no one really waged deliberate biological or chemical warfare until the modern era. Or did they?

  Ways of turning nature’s armory into weapons of war were practiced—and documented—much earlier and more extensively in pre-modern eras than has been commonly realized. Even when the practice of ancient biowar is acknowledged, modern historians have lacked convincing evidence for it. In their 1992 article “History of Biological Warfare,” for example, the microbiologists Poupard and Miller mentioned that early civilizations used crude forms of biological warfare, but they alluded to only two vague examples before the eighteenth century. “Historical documentation [of] the use of biological warfare has always been sparse,” they write. “The murkiness of the historical record may discourage academic pursuit of the subject but does add a certain mystique to attempts to chronicle the history of biological warfare.”

  Why has the ancient world remained uncharted territory in the history of chemical and biological warfare? In the first place, many historians, like the general public, have assumed that biochemical weaponry required scientific knowledge not yet developed in antiquity. Second is the assumption that even if cultures of the past knew how to make war with toxins and combustibles, they generally refrained from such strategies out of respect for traditional rules of war. The third reason is the difficulty of systematically collecting widely scattered and little-known ancient accounts of biochemical weapons and their forerunners in the ancient world.1

  That evidence is gathered and analyzed for the first time in this book, and it far exceeds what we have been led to expect for prescientific societies. The evidence also reveals that despite the ancient literature expressing deep-seated aversion to the use of poison in war, toxic weapons were deployed by many ancient peoples. The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.

  The ideas of poison and incendiary weapons were first described in ancient myths about arrows dipped in serpent venom, water poisoned with drugs, plagues unleashed on armies, and secret formulas for combustible weapons. The legendary Trojan War was won with poison arrows, and the celebrated heroes of Greek myth—Hercules, Odysseus, and Achilles—deliberately treated their weapons with toxins.

  But killing enemies by exploiting the lethal forces of nature was not just mythical fantasy. I have gathered accounts from more than fifty authors in the ancient world, along with numerous archaeological finds, to provide evidence that biological and chemical weapons saw action in historical battles—in Europe and the Mediterranean, North Africa, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Asian steppes, India, and China. Among the historical victims and perpetrators of biochemical warfare were such prominent figures as Hannibal, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great.

  The timeframe of this book covers almost three thousand years of antiquity, beginning with Near Eastern records of 1770 BC and archaic Greek myths written down by Homer in about 750 BC. Greek historians, from the fifth century BC through the second century AD, document many examples of warfare waged by biological and chemical means, as do Latin accounts beginning with the foundation of Rome and continuing through the late Roman Empire of the sixth century AD. Meanwhile, in China and India, weapons of poison and combustible chemicals were described in military and medical treatises from about 500 BC onward. The story continues with the development of Greek Fire and other incendiaries described in Byzantine and Islamic sources of late antiquity, from the seventh through fourteenth centuries AD.

  In each chapter, I have presented modern scientific discoveries and technological developments that help illuminate the ancient accounts and show how early unconventional weapons and strategies have evolved into today’s biological and chemical armaments. The range of human inventiveness in the early annals of biochemical warfare is staggering. But equally impressive is the way the ancient examples anticipated, in substance or in principle, almost every basic form of biological and chemical weapon known today, even the most scientifically advanced armaments.

  Pathogens and toxins unleashed on enemies? Archers in antiquity created toxic projectiles with snake venoms, poison plants, and bacteriological substances. Other options included contaminating an enemy’s water and food supplies, or forcing foes to camp in mosquito-infested marshes.

  Anthrax, smallpox, and bubonic plague as weapons? Deliberate attempts to spread contagion are recorded in cuneiform tablets and biblical traditions and by Roman historians who decried “man-made pestilence.” Vaccinations to protect against bio-weapons? The ancients were the first to try to seek immunity against the toxic weapons of their day.

  Today, it is feared that a single “smallpox martyr” could deliver a devastating biological attack. The practice of sending infected individuals into enemy territory was already operating more than three thousand years ago among the Hittites. Later, “Poison Maidens” were sent to assassinate Alexander the Great and other military commanders.

  What could be more modern than “ethnic” bio-weapons? These agents, based on genetic engineering of DNA, would target certain racial groups. Yet, the primitive roots of such weapons lie in the systematic slaughter of men and the rape of women, crude but effective blows against an enemy’s reproduction. Practiced since earliest times, such strategies have been documented most recently in the ethnic wars of former Yugoslavia.

  The current “war on terrorism” has launched new, so-called nonlethal weapons, such as “calmative mists,” to tranquilize, disorient, or knock out enemies, rendering them incapable of defending themselves. The same principle was first applied in warfare in an ingenious plot by the ancient Greeks when they conquered Ionia (modern Turkey). Victories via intoxicants occurred in ancient military engagements in Gaul, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia. The biological “calmatives” of antiquity included toxic honey, drugged sacrificial bulls, barrels of alcohol, and mandrake-laced wine.2

  What about stench warfare? Acoustic weapons? In recent years the Pentagon has unveiled “psychologically toxic” armaments designed by bioengineers to assault the senses with unbearable odors and sound waves. More than two millennia ago, armies in Asia and Germany employed noxious smells and blaring noises to overwhelm foes.

  Cyborg rats wired to deliver explosives? Sea lions as sentinels or assassins? Bees enlisted to detect the presence of enemies and chemical agents? Even these sophisticated biological operations have ancient antecedents. Live insects and animals have been drafted for war for thousands of years: wasps’ nests were lobbed over walls, vipers were catapulted onto ships, and scorpion bombs were hurled at besiegers. A veritable menagerie of creatures—from mice and elephants to flaming pigs—became allies on the battlefields of antiquity. Generals even devised ways for animals to deliver combustibles and figured out how to exploit inter-species hostilities.

  How about poison gas, flamethrowers, and incendiary bombs? Propelling fire and creating toxic fumes have a venerable history, too. Flaming arrows were only the beginning. The Assyrians tossed firebombs of oil, and during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans created poison gas and a flame-blowing machine to defeat fortified positions. Recipes for toxic smoke were secret weapons in ancient China and India, and asphyxiating gases suffocated many a tunneler in Roman-era sieges. Meanwhile, catapults shot firebol
ts fueled by sulphur. In the time of Alexander the Great, fire ships laden with burning chemicals destroyed navies, and foot soldiers were incinerated by incendiary shrapnel in the form of red-hot sand. During the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, mirrors were used to ignite ships, more than two thousand years before the development of high-tech laser and microwave guns.

  Napalm? Invented in the 1940s, the devastating effects of this petroleum weapon that flows like water and adheres like flaming glue were prominent in Vietnam in the 1970s. Greek Fire had similar properties and became the dreaded naval incendiary of the Byzantine era, until the formula was lost forever. But many centuries earlier, long before the invention of Greek Fire in AD 668, petroleum and other chemicals were combined to create harrowing weapons of unquenchable fire, used to immolate Roman soldiers in the Middle East.

  What all these modern weapons and their ancient precursors have in common is the fact that they allow their creators to weaponize nature, according to the best understandings of the day. Not all of the ancient examples presented in the following chapters fit the strict definitions of biological or chemical weapons current today, but they do represent the earliest evidence of the intentions, principles, and practices that evolved into modern biological and chemical warfare. The parallels between the pre-scientific methods of antiquity and the most up-to-the-minute armaments suggest the need to expand definitions of biological and chemical weaponry beyond narrow categories.