Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  “Mighty-walled Troy” of Greek epic was probably the Late Bronze Age city designated Troy VI in the series of ruined cities in northwest Turkey first excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870-90. The ruins show that the citadel of Troy VI was destroyed by fire in about 1200 BC. The legendary Trojan War was most famously described by Homer in the Iliad in about 750 BC, but an extensive cycle of Trojan War stories circulated in Greek and Roman times, recounted by many other mythographers and playwrights, some of whose works now survive only as fragments.

  Most classical scholars agree that the oral epics probably grew up around actual battles during the Bronze Age (1300-1100 BC), and that some residue of truth exists in the legends concerning the Trojan War, including many aspects of real warfare of that era. This cycle of myths and legends provides striking evidence of the two complex, parallel pictures of warfare in classical antiquity: the familiar, idealized Homeric version of clean, fair fighting, epitomized by heroes like Achilles in the Iliad, and other, more nefarious ways of overcoming foes, often attributed to barbarians, but admired in crafty Greek heroes like Odysseus.5

  According to myth, Apollo’s divine arrows inflicted deadly epidemics and fevers, especially during wartime. The Iliad opens with the god aiming his bow at the Greek army in the tenth year of their siege of Troy, cutting down King Agamemnon’s troops with a devastating plague. (The gods took sides in Greek mythology: Apollo favored the Trojans while Athena helped the Greeks.) In Homer’s words, Apollo let fly his “black bolts of plague” on the soldiers for nine days. The god’s first targets were the pack animals and dogs, then “one by one our men came down with it and died hard as the god’s arrows raked the army.” Funeral pyres burned night and day, and the Greeks’ hopes of completing the siege of Troy were dashed.

  This opening scene is a not-so-subtle reminder of the ancient linguistic metaphor linking arrows and toxins. Several other passages in the Iliad hint strongly that poisoned weapons were wielded by warriors on the battlefield, although Homer never says this outright. When Menelaus was wounded by a Trojan arrow, for example, Machaon (son of the legendary god of healing, Asclepius) was summoned to suck out the “black blood.” This treatment was the emergency remedy for snakebite and poisoned-arrow wounds in real life. Elsewhere, Homer described “black blood” gushing from arrow wounds, and referred to Philoctetes’ “black wound from a deadly snake.” Black blood, as opposed to red, always signaled a poisoned wound to ancient battlefield doctors, and in fact snake venom does cause black, oozing wounds. In the Iliad, Machaon also applied a special balm prepared by the Centaur Chiron, recalling the treatment for the Centaur’s own poisoned-arrow wound.6

  Only once did Homer explicitly describe a Greek hero actually searching out a poison for treating his arrows (not surprisingly, it was Odysseus, master of cunning tricks). But many other ancient mythographers make it clear that arrow poison was employed by both sides in the Trojan War.

  The Trojan War began when the Greeks launched an expedition to avenge the abduction of the Spartan beauty, Helen, by the Trojan seducer, Paris. Hercules’ old friend, the great archer Philoctetes, commanded seven of the twelve hundred Greek ships sailing to Troy. Homer specified that each of Philoctetes’ ships was rowed by fifty expert bowmen. Did Philoctetes equip his archers with poison arrows from Hercules’ quiver, which he was bringing to Troy?

  Homer does not say, but an ill-omened accident involving serpent venom did occur on the voyage. Philoctetes received a hideous “black wound” in the foot. According to some versions of the myth, he was accidentally struck by one of the poison arrows he had inherited from Hercules. In other versions, he was bitten by a poisonous hydra, a water-snake. Both versions underscore the perils of handling toxic substances used to create bio-weapons. Philoctetes’ accident was an inauspicious start for launching the war. The men found the stench of his festering wound intolerable and his howls of pain a very bad omen. Agamemnon ordered his captain Odysseus to abandon Philoctetes on a tiny desert island called Chryse, near the island of Lemnos, and continue on to Troy.

  FIGURE 5. Archer testing shaft and point of arrow; any archer who tipped his projectiles with poison had to avoid all contact with the sharp point. Red-figure wine cup, Athens, 520-510 BC.

  (Henry Lillie Pierce Fund © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  For a decade, while his companions fought the Trojans, the warrior was marooned in unending pain and fever, as “a black flux of blood and matter” continued to ooze from his wound. Philoctetes, the most skilled archer after Odysseus, survived by shooting birds with Hercules’ bow and poison arrows. The mythic description of Philoctetes’ suppurating, never-healing wound and spreading necrosis is an accurate depiction of the aftermath of a snakebite.

  Until about AD 150, Philoctetes’ desert island was a popular landmark visited by Greek and Roman travelers. A small shrine there memorialized the warrior’s ordeal with the poisoned arrows: the altar displayed Philoctetes’ bow, his bronze armor, and a bronze water snake. Philoctetes’ tragic tale was widely known: he was celebrated as a god in Italy, where he was said to have settled at the end of his life. His tribulations were illustrated in numerous art works and presented on the Athenian stage in plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides.

  FIGURE 6. On his way to Troy, Philoctetes was abandoned on a desert island after his accident with a poison arrow. This Athenian vase (about 420 BC) shows him with bandaged foot and the quiver of poison arrows.

  (Fletcher Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  Ten years into the war with Troy, an oracle advised the Greeks that the Trojans could only be defeated by Hercules’ original poison arrows. So, Odysseus led an envoy of Greeks back to Chryse, where they had stranded Philoctetes so long ago. The men were horrified to find the once-proud warrior living like an animal in a cave, whose floor was slick with the fetid pus draining from his wound. The emaciated archer, surrounded by feathers and bird bones, was still racked by pain from the arrow poison. The Greeks were filled with pity for their companion, yet they expressed no qualms about using the same nasty poison against the Trojans.

  The delegation tried to persuade the long-suffering Philoctetes to bring the arrows to Troy, but he refused, embittered by their cruel treatment of him. He even threatened to shoot them with the poison arrows. So Odysseus hatched a scheme to deceive Philoctetes in order to get the bow and quiver. But Achilles’ son, an honorable youth named Neoptolemus, was outraged by Odysseus’s lack of principles. He insisted that “vile tricks and treachery” should be shameful to a true warrior. The scene, as described by Sophocles, is fraught with the age-old tension between war by the rules and war by devious means.7

  Finally, after the ghost of Hercules appeared and promised he would be cured, Philoctetes agreed to rejoin the Greeks. At Troy, Philoctetes’ wound was successfully treated by Machaon, the Greek army doctor, and out on the battlefield, Philoctetes became an avenging whirlwind with the Hydra arrows, destroying legions of Trojans. Then, in an archery duel with the Trojan champion Paris, Philoctetes turned the tide of the war in favor of the Greeks.

  Quintus of Smyrna, a poet of the fourth century AD, described the rain of deadly arrows in his epic, The Fall of Troy. First he told how the mighty Greek warrior Achilles was brought down with an arrow deliberately aimed at his vulnerable heel. Achilles’ mother had held the infant Achilles by the heel as she dipped him in the River Styx to make him invincible to iron weapons. Normally, a wound in the heel would be superficial—only an arrow carrying poison could render such a wound fatal. In some versions of the myth, it was Apollo who shot Achilles from behind with one of his plague arrows. But others said that Apollo had guided Paris’s arrow to the back of Achilles’ foot. According to Ovid, the god “saw Paris flinging an occasional arrow at some Greek of no importance.” “Why waste your shafts?” scolded Apollo, and turned Paris’s bow in the direction of Achilles’ heel.

  Reeling with “sudden pangs of mortal sickness,” Achilles toppled “like a tower.”
Rolling his eyes and gnashing his teeth from the pain of the “god-envenomed wound,” the dying Achilles expressed the traditional Greek warrior’s visceral loathing of dishonorable death. Not only had he been struck by a weapon of hidden poison, but his cowardly adversary had struck from behind, just as Hercules had shot Nessus in the back. As the doomed champion sensed the toxins racing through his veins, bringing an unheroic, “piteous death,” Achilles glared about and shouted, “Who shot me with a stealthy-smiting shaft? Let him dare to meet me face-to-face! Only dastards lurk in hidden ambush. None dare meet me man-to-man. . . . Let him face me then!”

  To avenge the shocking death of Achilles from a poisoned arrow in the heel, Philoctetes drew back his great bow and aimed a “merciless shaft” with its “terrible, death-hissing point” at Paris (the poet’s words evoke the imagery of snakes). The first arrow grazed Paris’s wrist, and the next one plunged into his side. “Torturing wounds” sent Paris into a “frenzy of pain, his liver seething as in flame.” The Trojan doctors rushed onto the battlefield to apply salves and blood-sucking leeches to draw out the poison, but these means were useless against the “fierce venom which crawled through his innards with corrupting fangs.” Parched with thirst, scarcely conscious, and writhing in pain, Paris desperately held onto the hope that a nymph he had once loved would bring special healing herbs. The nymph did arrive at last, but it was too late to save the Trojan warrior-lover, who finally perished in anguish.8

  Despite the importance of the bow and arrow from the Bronze Age and onward in Greece, Homer and many other writers tell us that archers were disdained because they shot safely from afar: long-range missiles implied unwillingness to face the enemy at close range. And long-range missiles daubed with poison seemed even more cowardly and villainous. Ambush from behind was another military practice that, like poisoning arrows, was usually attributed to barbarians. Traditional Greek—and Roman—warfare was supposed to be hand-to-hand, up close and personal, as ranks of similarly armed and armored soldiers engaged in face-to-face combat or one-on-one duels. Yet at the same time, clever, inventive deceptions were also admirable—as long as the tricks did not cross certain bounds. The line between acceptable and reprehensible ruses was difficult to pin down, but classical authors often indicate some generally accepted attitudes.

  Wounds in the back were never honorable, signaling cowardice or treachery on someone’s part (the Iliad and the Fall of Troy and other poems are filled with exhortations to face the enemy and avoid getting hit in the back or being taken by surprise).9 Individual courage, working together as a group, physical strength, military prowess, and steadfastness were key—and poisoned weapons and ambush undermined every one of those values. The mythic episodes pose a timeless question, deeply disturbing to warriors of any era: What good are bravery, skill, and strength when your enemy attacks deviously with weapons made ever more deadly with poison?

  After the carnage on the battlefield cut down the best of the Greek and Trojan champions, the Greeks devised the ingenious ruse of the Trojan Horse to gain entry to the citadel of Troy. The Greeks sacked the city. Then, after a series of adventures like those recounted in Homer’s Odyssey and other myths, the Greek victors headed home. Meanwhile, after the destruction of Troy, a party of Trojan survivors led by their hero Aeneas set off for Italy to found Rome, as described by the great Latin poet Virgil in his Aeneid. That epic poem, written during the reign of Augustus (first century BC), was intended to glorify Rome’s legendary past and destiny. The Trojans brought their poison weapons with them to Italy, according to Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s fellow warrior, Amycus: “No man was more skilled at dipping darts and arming metal with poison.”

  And what became of Hercules’ quiver of Hydra-venom arrows after the Greek victory at Troy? According to legend, Philoctetes, like many of the other Trojan War veterans, restlessly wandered the Mediterranean after the war. After fighting various mercenary battles with his deadly bow and arrows, he finally settled in Italy. Before he died and was buried near Sybaris, in the toe of Italy, he founded a Temple to Apollo at Krimissa. There, the old warrior dedicated his poisoned weapons to the god whose own bow and arrows brought plague and pestilence.10

  Ambivalence over the use of poison by Greek heroes stands out in a pair of passages in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem recounting the postwar adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus. After ten years of wandering, Odysseus finally returned home to Ithaca to find his wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus, besieged by a gang of swaggering suitors who had taken over his palace. The surly interlopers lay about drinking wine and idly speculating about how young Telemachus might try to roust them. Perhaps, proposed one suitor, he’ll travel to Ephyra, in northwestern Greece, to obtain a poisonous plant that flourishes there (as his father once did). “He could drop the poison into our wine barrels and kill us all!”

  If Hercules was the mythic inventor of arrows poisoned with snake venom, Odysseus was the first mythic character to poison arrows with plant toxins. Homer tells us that Odysseus, the archer renowned for crafty tricks, did indeed sail to Ephyra on a quest for a deadly plant to smear on his bronze arrowheads.

  Ephyra in Epirus, near the River Styx and the mouth of the Acheron River of Hades, was a fitting place to gather poisons, since it was famed in antiquity as one of the “gateways” to the realm of the dead. For one of his Labors, Hercules had descended by one of these entrances into the Underworld and dragged out Cerberus, the monstrous, three-headed hound of Hell. Foam from the beast’s jaws had flecked the green grass and was transformed into the poison flowers of aconite (monkshood). Other plants with potent poisons—such as black hellebore and deadly nightshade—thrived here too, nourished by Underworld vapors so noxious that birds flying over the area dropped dead.

  Odysseus had once come here to consult the pallid, embittered ghosts of the Underworld. Three centuries after Homer, in the fifth century BC, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described a renowned necromanteon, an Oracle of the Dead, at Ephyra. Archaeologists have discovered the substantial ruins of an underground labyrinth, whose features match Homer’s description of the Halls of Hades in the Odyssey. Scholars believe that local hallucinogenic plants were used in the ancient rites of the Oracle of the Dead at Ephyra.

  So Ephyra was a poisoners’ paradise. But King Ilus, the ruler of the territory, being “a man of virtue,” refused to supply Odysseus with the “man-killing” poison (Homer’s wording makes it clear that the poison would be used for war, not hunting). Odysseus did finally succeed in obtaining some arrow toxin, though, on an island south of Ephyra. But the incident with King Ilus reveals once again the conflicted emotions about using toxic weapons. Creative trickery, ruses, and deception were respected by the ancient Greeks. Should they admire Odysseus’s resourcefulness? Or should they agree with the honorable King Ilus that secret poisoning of foes was never virtuous? The moral issue was further complicated when the goddess of war and wisdom, Athena, suggested that poison arrows would be a good way to dispatch the gang of suitors besieging Odysseus’s family back in Ithaca. Perhaps the answer lies in the lessons to be learned from what happened to those who resorted to poison weapons.

  Given Odysseus’s involvement with shrewd ruses and arrow poisons, it is somehow fitting that Odysseus himself was killed with toxic spear at the hands of his other son, Telegonus. Unknown to Odysseus, Telegonus had been born to Circe, with whom Odysseus had dallied on the long way home after the Trojan War. A sorceress-goddess who knew the powers of many mysterious pharmaka (drugs, chemicals, and poisons), Circe had enchanted Odysseus’s men with a potion that turned them into swine. This was by no means the first time Circe used drugs to obtain a desired outcome. She had also once poisoned a river with “evil herbs, whose juices contained horrid powers” in order to destroy an enemy.

  With a mother like Circe and a trickster father like Odysseus, it was not surprising that Telegonus would use a poisoned weapon. The youth had journeyed to Ithaca searching for his
father. When he first encountered Odysseus, however, he mistook him for an enemy and ran him through with his lance. The spear was tipped with barb of truly diabolical and ingenious design—the poisonous spine of a stingray.11

  Awareness of the idea of biological weapons, as evident in the archaic Greek myths about Hercules, Philoctetes, Odysseus, and Apollo, existed long before the first historical reports of using poisons in warfare. One of the most remarkable features of these myths is the very early recognition of the ethical and practical questions surrounding such methods. Again and again, the ancient myths hammer home the idea that once created, weapons based on poison seem to take on a life of their own, with tragic consequences that can extend over generations. Not only are biological weapons difficult to direct with precision, but they are almost impossible to destroy once created.

  If the myth of Hercules and the Hydra was a poetic account of the invention of envenomed arrows in the deep past, then Hercules was the perfect figure for the role. In his celebrated labors and exploits, Hercules impulsively used his weapons to destroy all manner of monsters and enemies. Significantly, however, Hercules always managed to leave chaos in his wake. He was a paradoxical figure for the Greeks: an admired destroyer of monsters, he also frequently brought destruction to those he hoped to protect. The playwright Sophocles made it clear that when Hercules dipped his arrows in the Hydra venom, he was creating the possibility—even the inevitability—of his own death by the same agent. And his poisoned arrows certainly left a long trail of tragedy.12

  The image of the “Many-Headed Hydra” has come to symbolize a multifaceted, thorny dilemma that generates new obstacles each time one is overcome or solved. Indeed, the Hydra is a wonderfully apt symbol for the problems set in motion by biological weapons. The nightmarish image of infinitely replicating heads, the impossibility of ever completely destroying the monster, and the perils of unintended casualties: these are vivid details that capture the moral and practical dangers of creating and handling biochemical agents of destruction.