Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  Cutting off an enemy’s water supply to force surrender was an effective—and common—method of attack, but thirst could be compounded by compelling foes to drink foul waters. Actually poisoning the water was a more subtle strategy, especially effective in siege-craft. A related large-scale biological ploy was to take advantage of unhealthy terrain. The enemy could be maneuvered into malarial marshes or other environments where bad water or air ensured that illness would take a high toll.1

  The earliest historically documented case of poisoning drinking water occurred in Greece during the First Sacred War. In about 590 BC, several Greek city-states created the Amphictionic League to protect the religious sanctuary of Delphi, the site of the famous Oracle of Apollo. In the First Sacred War, the League (led by Athens and Sicyon) attacked the strongly fortified city of Kirrha, which controlled the road from the Corinthian Gulf to Delphi. Kirrha had appropriated some of Apollo’s sacred land and mistreated pilgrims to Delphi. According to the Athenian orator Aeschines (fourth century BC), the Amphictionic League consulted the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi about Kirrha’s religious crimes.

  The oracle responded that total war against the city was appropriate: Kirrha was to be completely destroyed and its territory laid waste. The League added a curse of their own, in the name of Apollo: the land should not produce crops, all the children should be monstrous, the livestock should also have unnatural offspring, and the entire “race should perish utterly.” The biological disaster described in the curse evokes an eerie “nuclear winter” scene. Then, taking into their own hands Apollo’s divine powers of sending sickness, the League destroyed the city of Kirrha by means of a biological stratagem. The event received a remarkable degree of attention from ancient historians.

  During the siege of Kirrha, someone “thought up a contrivance.” Depending on whose account one reads, four different historical individuals were credited with variants of the plan. According to the military strategist Frontinus (writing in the first century AD), it was Kleisthenes of Sicyon, the commander of the siege, who “cut the water-pipes leading into the town. Then, when the townspeople were suffering from thirst, he turned on the water again, now poisoned with hellebore.” The violent effects of the poison plant caused them to be “so weakened by diarrhea that Kleisthenes overcame them.”

  In the account of Polyaenus (second century AD), “the besiegers found a hidden pipe carrying a great flow of spring water” into the city. Polyaenus says it was General Eurylochos who advised the allies “to collect a great quantity of hellebore from Anticyra and mix it with the water.” Anticyra was a port east of Kirrha, where hellebore grew in great profusion. The Kirrhans “became violently sick to their stomachs and all lay unable to move. The Amphictions took the city without opposition.”2

  Pausanias visited the site of Kirrha in about AD 150, more than seven hundred years after its destruction. “The plains around Kirrha are completely barren, and people there will not plant trees,” he wrote, “because the land is still under a curse and trees will not grow there.” Pausanias attributed the fateful plan to Solon, the great sage of Athens. In this account, Solon diverted the channel from the River Pleistos so that it no longer ran through Kirrha. But the Kirrhans held out, drawing water from wells and collecting rainwater. Solon then threw “a great quantity of hellebore roots into the Pleistos.” When he determined that “the water was drugged enough, he sent it back through the city.” “The parched Kirrhans glutted themselves on the contaminated water, and of course became extremely ill,” wrote Pausanias. “The men defending the walls had to abandon their positions out of never-ending diarrhea.” Helpless to respond to the attack, the people of Kirrha were annihilated as the League hoplites overran the city.

  The use of a treacherous ruse to breach a city’s defenses, which then resulted in further atrocities inside the city, echoes what happened in Troy, in the aftermath of the Trojan Horse trick. That subterfuge was followed by the rape of Trojan women and the massacre of children and old people by the Greek warriors. In both myth and history, there is evidence that once an army has resorted to insidious strategies outside the conventions of combat, it is not uncommon for further violations to ensue, such as the mass killing of noncombatants. Unconventional strategies often result from frustration, and when devious or unscrupulous behavior appears to be the only way to victory, the door is then opened to atrocities.

  The destruction of Kirrha in 590 BC features some other striking mythological coincidences. The town happens to be located near the place where the Centaur Nessus was said to have died of the Hydra-venom arrow shot by Hercules, just west of Delphi. According to ancient legend, the Centaur’s rotting carcass poisoned the area’s water, making it unhealthy to drink. In the mid-nineteenth century, H. N. Ulrichs of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences discovered a brackish spring near Kirrha that induces violent diarrhea. Possibly, the besiegers’ knowledge of that naturally foul spring was the inspiration for their idea of poisoning the Kirrhans’ water with the violent purgative hellebore.3

  The fourth man credited with the plan to poison Kirrha was a doctor named Nebros, an asclepiad, or follower of the legendary healer Asclepius, son of Apollo. According to ancient medical sources, Nebros was an ancestor of the great physician Hippocrates, author of the Hippocratic Oath in the fifth century BC. The account that implicates Nebros is the earliest known source, written only a century after Kirrha’s destruction and during Hippocrates’ lifetime. It comes from the medical writer Thessalos, reportedly a son of Hippocrates. Thessalos visited Athens in the late fifth century BC as an ambassador from Cos, the seat of Hippocratic medicine. He wrote that after a horse’s hoof had broken open the secret pipe carrying Kirrha’s water supply during the siege, Nebros helped the besiegers “by introducing into the aqueduct a drug that brought intestinal illness to the Kirrhans, allowing the allies to take the town.”

  The involvement of a doctor in the destruction of the populace of Kirrha is startling. By sending sickness to Kirrha, did Nebros see himself as carrying out Apollo’s wrath on the town? That seems possible, given the sacred oracle and the curse used to justify total war. Perhaps in an attempt to rationalize Nebros’s participation in the town’s destruction, Thessalos avoided naming the drug, although it was identified by all the other sources as hellebore. And he implied that its debilitating effects were only temporary.

  But the implication that the drug’s effects were only temporary was duplicitous in this case. Everyone—especially doctors—knew that hellebore was extremely dangerous and that the dosage in medical treatments was notoriously difficult to calibrate. Hellebore was known to kill large animals, and it was used as a deadly arrow poison. Doctors never prescribed hellebore for the old or weak, or for women or children. Clandestinely contaminating a city’s drinking water with “a great quantity of hellebore” would sicken not just the guards and soldiers of Kirrha, but all the people inside the city walls, young and old. Taken by surprise and already suffering from thirst, they would have had no time to try to prepare antidotes. To deliberately harm noncombatants was proscribed by the ancient Greek notions of fair war, but during sieges of cities the entire population was considered the enemy.

  The ancient attempt to justify use of a “temporary” toxin to soften resistance was echoed in a modern biochemical attack on noncombatants in Iraq, in 1920. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, the British occupation of Iraq was resisted by the Kurds. According to Geoff Simons in his 1994 book, Iraq: from Sumer to Saddam, in 1920 the colonial secretary Winston Churchill proposed a “scientific expedient” to quell the “turbulent tribes” of Kurdistan. He suggested using poison gas as a preliminary measure in bombing operations against the villages. Some British authorities protested that the villagers were defenseless and had no medical knowledge of antidotes. Discounting the protestors’ “squeamishness about the use of gas . . . against uncivilised tribes,” Churchill claimed that the chemical gas—which had only recently caused such devastation and moral rev
ulsion in the First World War—would inflict “only discomfort or illness, but not death,” and would be a good way to demoralize the enemy.

  In reality, however, the gas caused blindness, and killed children, the infirm, and the old. Like Kirrha, the Kurdish villages were easily wiped out after the poison was administered. And in keeping with the timeless tendency to further violate codes of war once a rule of fair war has been transgressed, several newly developed inhumane weapons were first tested in Kurdistan with devastating effects.4

  Mirko Grmek, the Croatian historian of science who devoted his career to medical ethics, has given some thought to the story of Kirrha. He points out that it was in the interest of Thessalos, a practitioner of the healing arts and a son of Hippocrates, to try to exonerate Nebros, a fellow physician and an ancestor of Hippocrates, for devising a plan that so obviously violated the Hippocratic ideal that a doctor should do no harm. The famous Hippocratic Oath was not formally written down until the time of Thessalos in the fifth century, but earlier doctors in the tradition of Asclepius, like Nebros, were still supposed to heal, not injure. The poisoning of Kirrha is a classic example of using specialized natural knowledge to harm humanity rather than to do good. The incident makes one wonder: Was the unscrupulous role of his ancestor Nebros at Kirrha what moved Hippocrates to write the oath?

  We can’t know that, of course, but it is fascinating to find a doctor implicated in the oldest version of the first recorded incident of poisoning a civilian population in war. This is the earliest report of a medical professional helping to wage biological warfare, but it is certainly not the last. Nebros’s actions have been repeated down through history, and around the globe. For example, an Italian physician was responsible for deploying contagion against French forces in 1495, and French doctors carried out similar acts during the Franco-Prussian War. An American surgeon was court-martialed for deliberately spreading yellow fever during the Civil War and medical horrors on a vast scale were perpetrated by Nazi and Japanese doctors during World War II. In South Africa, revelations during the 1999 trial of Dr. Wouter Basson, the eminent cardiologist who founded the government biochemical program in the 1980s to create an arsenal of poisons to be used against anti-apartheid activists, led to his sobriquet “Dr. Death.”5

  The oracle and the curse against Kirrha were used to justify the unusual ferocity of the First Sacred War in 590 BC. A few scholars have suggested that the destruction of Kirrha may have been a legendary event, but the fact that it is mentioned in a recorded speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates and so many other credible writers has convinced most historians that it really took place. As Grmek concluded, whether the defeat of Kirrha by hellebore was legend or fact, the story of the poisoned water—and the attention it received from historians of the age —reveals the deep ambivalence over using biological measures in antiquity. Even the fact that four different men were implicated implies that people were uneasy about assigning blame or taking credit for the act.

  Was there a debate outside the walls of Kirrha among the League allies about the morality of using hellebore, just as some British authorities protested Churchill’s plan to gas the Kurds in 1920? That, we’ll never know, but we do know that remorse about the method of the destruction of Kirrha was acted upon in the aftermath of the destruction. In an ancient forerunner to the 1924 Geneva Convention (in response to the bio-terror of gassing in World War I), after the battle of Kirrha the defenders of the sacred site of Delphi agreed that poisoning water was unacceptable in a religious war, or among the allies of Delphi should they ever find themselves at war with one another. According to the Amphictionic League’s new rule of war, articulated by the Athenian orator Aeschines, contaminating drinking water was to be forbidden in conflicts of a special, sacred nature.

  As military historians note, rules against using biological weapons are nearly “as old as the weapons themselves,” but their effect has always been fleeting and inconsistent. For example, the Laws of Manu, the code of conduct for high-caste Hindus dating to about 500 BC, is considered the earliest attempt to prohibit biological and chemical strategies in a culture where poisons and subterfuges were pervasive and widely accepted. As described in chapter 2, however, the Harmatelians of India attacked Alexander the Great’s army with deadly snake-venom arrows, even though the Laws prohibited them. When one “fights foes in battle,” stated the Laws, “let him not strike with concealed [or treacherous] weapons, nor with weapons that are barbed or poisoned or blazing with fire.” Yet the Laws also advised “spoiling the enemy’s water,” and the military treatise of the same era, the Arthashastra, urged rulers to use a vast arsenal of biochemical weapons.6

  Despite the good intention of the rule against tampering with water, drawn up after the First Sacred War, many incidents and rumors of poisoning besieged towns and enemy troops were recorded after Kirrha. Not all instances evoked criticism, however. Purely defensive biological tactics seemed justified. For example, in 478 BC the Athenians deliberately fouled their own cisterns as they abandoned their city to the Persian invaders led by Xerxes. They were following an accepted, age-old defensive practice—known as the “scorched earth” policy—of burning one’s own crops and spoiling foodstuffs and water and other resources in order to leave nothing of use to conquering armies.

  The defensive principle legitimated biological strategies against aggressors. But the idea of an aggressor surreptitiously poisoning the water supplies of unsuspecting people trapped inside a city, as happened to Kirrha, was more troubling. Evidence that such practices were suspected in antiquity appeared in The History of the Peloponnesian War, by the Athenian historian Thucydides. While the Athenians were trapped in their city by the Spartans in 430 BC, a devastating plague broke out suddenly in the harbor of Athens, and—perhaps recalling the famous story of Kirrha—the Athenians’ first reaction was to accuse the Spartans of poisoning their wells.

  After the Peloponnesian War, the general known as Aeneas the Tactician drew on his own and others’ wartime experiences to write (in about 350 BC) a siege-craft manual for military commanders. Aeneas recommended several biological tactics. One was to “make water undrinkable” by polluting rivers, lakes, springs, wells, and cisterns. In 1927, the British commentators on Aeneas were shocked, and declared that “this horrible practice was against the spirit of Greek warfare.” But as the Kirrha episode showed, the expedient has appealed to ruthless war leaders from early antiquity onward. Examples can be found around the world, from ancient India and China to the New World. In North America, for example, more than one thousand French soldiers were decimated by illness after Iroquois Indians deliberately polluted their drinking water with flayed animal skins in 1710. Tossing animal carcasses into wells was a standard practice during the American Civil War, and in countless conflicts before and since.7

  FIGURE 14. Women drawing water at a fountain house. During a siege, a city’s water supply could be poisoned. Hydria, 520-510 BC.

  (Toledo Museum of Art, Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey)

  Interfering with water by diverting rivers was another age-old environmental ploy in war. Frontinus, the Roman commander and author of Stratagems, had campaigned against the savage Silures of Wales, the Chatti of Germany, and “other troublesome people” at the fringes of the Roman Empire. His book, written in a popular style accessible to military leaders, presents numerous examples of clever and successful war strategies from Greek and Roman history, including the poisoning incident at Kirrha. Frontinus’s interests in quelling bellicose tribes, and later his office as Manager of Aqueducts at Rome, were combined in a section of his book titled “On Diverting Streams and Contaminating Waters.”

  On diverting rivers, he wrote of Semiramis, the legendary queen of Assyria (seventh century BC), who boasted in an inscription that she had extended her borders with courageous and cunning conquests: “I compelled rivers to run where I wanted, and I wanted them to run where it was advantageous.” According to Frontinus, Semiram
is conquered Babylon with a brilliant water trick. The Euphrates River flowed through the city, dividing it in two. Semiramis, who undertook many waterworks projects in her reign, had her engineers divert the river, so that her army could march right into the city in the dry riverbed. The very same feat was attributed by other authors to the mythical witch Medea and to two historical conquerors of Babylon, the Persian king Cyrus and Alexander the Great.

  A stream was diverted to literally flush out an enemy by the Roman commander Lucius Metellus, fighting in Spain in 143 BC. The Spaniards had foolishly camped in an easily flooded plain alongside a stream. The Roman legionaries damned the stream and waited in ambush to slaughter the panicked men as they ran for high ground. Some years later, in 78-74 BC, Rome began a difficult campaign in a rugged region of Asia Minor called Isaura (in eastern Turkey). The Isaurians were fiercely independent mountaineers, labeled as “brigands and bandits” by the Romans. Publius Servilius, leader of the campaign, finally reduced the fortified towns of Isauria by diverting the mountain streams where the Isaurians drew their water, “and he thus forced them to surrender in consequence of thirst.” A couple of decades later, Julius Caesar, on his campaign in Gaul (now France), diverted the water of the city of Cadurci. Because the town was surrounded by a river and many springs, this took a lot of labor, digging extensive networks of underground channels. Then Caesar stationed his archers to cut down any Gauls who attempted to reach the river. The stratagem was successful: Cadurci surrendered in 51 BC.