Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  The idea of “manufactured pestilence” has taken on a new, sinister meaning in view of some recent scientific discoveries. One finding, reported by Richard Preston, whose popular books chronicle what he terms “Dark Biology,” showed that scientists could easily create a virulent version of mousepox by adding a mammalian gene to the smallpox-like virus. Much more ominous, however, are the experiments with diseases that attack humans, which were sponsored by the Pentagon in 2002. Scientists at the State University of New York proved that synthetic replicas of epidemic viruses could be created chemically in the laboratory from scratch, without live cells, simply by replicating the published DNA sequence of a natural virus. The laboratory used a blueprint for polio virus downloaded from the Internet and chemical material available by mail order. As one scientist remarked, the findings suggest that terrorists might soon be able to replicate viruses for “evil intent.” Some two thousand years after Seneca coined the phrase pestilentia manu facta to refer to pestilence manipulated by man, actual man-made pestilence has become a scientific reality.11

  The Greek myth of Pandora, who unwittingly opened the jar or box that held plagues and pestilence, is one of the earliest expressions of the ancient notion of confining disease in a sealed container. The related idea of sealing a virulent contagion in a container with the specific intention of inflicting plague on enemies who break open the seal is a widespread folk motif—and one that has scientific and historical plausibility. Some of the traditional stories about such bioattacks may reflect wishful thinking or imaginative worst-case scenarios, but the potential for deliberately spreading epidemics like smallpox or bubonic plague was real, since infectious matter on fomites and aerosols (tiny airborne particles) can retain virulence over long periods of time.

  The story of the Philistines’ problems with the Ark of the Covenant, recounted in 1 Samuel, is a provocative, early example. In the twelfth century BC, when the Philistines were at war with the Israelites, they feared that Yahweh would smite them with plagues as he had done to the Egyptians. Sure enough, when the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites and took the sacred wooden chest to their capital, an epidemic marked by swollen buboes in the groin (a classic sign of bubonic plague) decimated the population. The survivors sent the Ark away to a series of Philistine towns, and each was struck with the same epidemic. The Philistines attributed the plague to Yahweh and also related it to an infestation of rodents in their land (bubonic plague is carried by fleas on rodents).

  FIGURE 16. The Greek myth of Pandora’s box is one of the earliest expressions of the idea that contagion could be “trapped” in a sealed container. Red-figure amphora by the Niobid Painter, 460-450 BC.

  (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore)

  The coincidence of a plague breaking out upon the arrival of a special casket in each town raises interesting questions. It may simply have been that the Philistine escorts of the Ark brought the disease with them. But, given the worldwide occurrence of tales of plague begun by opening sealed containers from enemies and the modern knowledge that such a scenario is plausible, one wonders: Does the story of the Ark suggest that the chest might have contained some object, such as cloth, that harbored aerosolized plague germs, or an insect vector that infected the rodents in Philistine territory? The Ark of the Covenant was recovered and placed in Solomon’s great temple in Jerusalem. Notably, the Ark itself was never to be touched by the Israelites themselves, but was always carried suspended by poles through rings. One Israelite, named Uzzah, accidentally touched the Ark and died instantly.12

  FIGURE 17. The Ark of the Covenant, a wooden chest that the Israelites were forbidden to touch, brought plague to each Philistine town that it visited in the twelfth century BC. James Tissot, The Ark Passes over the Jordan.

  (© De Brunoff 1904)

  Two other narratives about the temple in Jerusalem suggest that material carrying plague could very well have been hidden away, stored in a safe place against the possibility of a military invasion. Consider, for example, the ancient legend about sealing up “plague demons” and placing them in the temple at Jerusalem. This story appears in the Testament of Solomon and other ancient texts of Hebrew, Gnostic, and Greek origins, dating from the first to fourth century AD, but based on earlier traditions. Solomon was a historical king who built the first temple in Jerusalem in the tenth century BC. According to legend, King Solomon summoned a crew of evil spirits of disease and disaster and forced them to help build the magnificent temple of Jerusalem. Then he imprisoned the demons inside copper vessels and sealed them with silver. These vessels were placed inside large jars or casks and buried in the foundations of the temple.

  The legend can be seen as evidence of the belief that evil spirits could be magically imprisoned in containers, like genies or djinns in bottles. But, as the Mari tablets from Sumer showed, people of the ancient Near East also understood that things such as cloth and cups could actually transmit fatal disease. That knowledge, and the Old Testament tale of the Ark accompanied by outbreaks of plague among the enemy, gives the legend about Solomon deeper significance.

  Indeed, the biblical stories of the plagues sent by Yahweh against the Egyptians in the time of Moses, and against the Philistines who stole the Ark, had already planted the idea of contagion as a weapon, and Solomon’s reserves of plague seem to be intended as a weapon. The Testament of Solomon predicted that when the temple of Jerusalem would be destroyed by the king of the Chaldeans, the plague spirits would be released. And in fact, in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar (the cruel king of the Chaldeans, or Neo-Babylonians) sacked and burned Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. “In their plundering,” the invaders found the copper vessels and assumed that they contained treasure. The Babylonians broke open the seals and the pestilential demons flew out and “plagued men again.”

  The ancient legend of Solomon imprisoning the evil spirits in the temple at Jerusalem is well known in Islamic lore. Today, among Muslim fundamentalists who practice “Islamic science”—a hybrid of modern scientific terminology and Islamic mysticism—invisible djinns are identified as the sources of nuclear energy and epidemics. These scientists point to Solomon’s ability to “harness energy from djinns” as evidence that special “spirits” of atomic power and contagion such as anthrax could be manipulated by secret knowledge. In 1988 and 1991, the leading Pakistani nuclear scientist, Bashiruddin Mehmood, spoke of the possibility of “communicating” with the invisible but powerful djinns or spirits that were long ago “harnessed by King Solomon.” In 2001, Mehmood was detained for questioning in Pakistan after plans and diagrams for creating anthrax-spreading devices were found in his offices in Afghanistan.

  Solomon’s temple was rebuilt in the fifth century BC. In 1945, a trove of early Christian writings buried in about AD 400 were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. One of the scrolls contains a different version of the Solomon legend that dates to the first or second century AD. During the siege of Jerusalem by the future Roman emperor Titus in AD 70, the second temple was destroyed and, according to the scrolls, Roman soldiers discovered the ancient jars and broke them open looking for plunder. The plague demons, imprisoned in the foundations since the time of Solomon, escaped. Suetonius, the Latin biographer of Titus, records that “Titus’s reign was marked by a series of dreadful catastrophes,” including “one of the worst outbreaks of plague ever known.”13

  Almost a century later, in the same geographical region, a remarkably similar scenario was played out again, when looting soldiers destroyed a Greek temple in Babylon.

  The terrible Plague of AD 165-180 swept out of Babylonia and raged across the Mideast and Mediterranean, reaching Rome and even Gaul and Germany. The great doctor Galen described the symptoms in enough detail for medical historians to suggest that the disease may have been smallpox. The epidemic is the second most famous in antiquity after the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

  Accusations detailed in two fourth-century Latin accounts of the Parthia
n War in Babylonia—one in the Lives of the Later Caesars and the other in a history by Ammianus Marcellinus—strongly suggest that this plague belongs in the annals of biological sabotage. The epidemic began during the Roman campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia, led by the co-emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius. The Parthians dominated Central Asia from the Indus River to the Euphrates, and constantly threatened Roman power. “The pestilence is reported to have arisen in Babylonia, when a spiritus pestilens, a pestilential vapor, escaped from a golden casket in the temple of Apollo,” wrote Verus’s biographer, “Julius Capitolinus” (one of the pseudonyms used by the anonymous authors of the Lives of the Later Caesars). A Roman soldier had “cut open the casket and from thence [the plague] filled the Parthians’ land and then the world,” extending all the way from Persia to the Rhine.

  FIGURE 18. The Great Plague of AD 165-80 began when a Roman soldier broke open a golden chest in the Temple of Apollo in Babylon, allowing the “spirits of plague” to escape. The “spirits” in this drawing are taken from a Greek vase painting of “spirits” in 460 BC.

  Lucius Verus was accused, by the Syrians and others, of deliberately spreading the plague. But the plague was not really Verus’s fault, claimed Capitolinus, who said that the blame really lay with Verus’s ambitious general, Avidius Cassius. In AD 164, the bloodthirsty Cassius had stormed Seleuceia, a Greek city on the Tigris River in the district of Babylonia (the Parthians had used the city as their summer quarters). Cassius’s army committed atrocities and laid waste to Seleuceia, one of the last bastions of Hellenic culture, despite the fact that the Seleuceians had welcomed the Romans. Cassius thereby violated a generally accepted convention of war not to attack a friendly city or break a truce. It was Cassius’s soldiers who plundered the Greek temple and released the contagion, according to Capitolinus and Ammianus Marcellinus.14

  The idea that plundering a temple or sacred site would be punished by plague was a very old one. The capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines followed by outbreaks of plague is one of the earliest examples. Another example comes from Diodorus of Sicily, who, as we have seen, noted that the Carthaginian army was struck by plague in 396 BC—and that plague began after the Carthaginians had pillaged a Greek temple in Syracuse. Appian told how plague ravaged the Gauls during their attempt to loot Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi in 105 BC. Capitolinus’s account also conveyed the strong implication that Cassius and his men had offended Apollo, who scourged invading armies with plagues. According to inscriptions discovered by archaeologists, the oracle at the Temple of Apollo at Claros (on the coast of Turkey) issued many dire warnings during the pandemic, attributing the plague to the anger of the god and advising cities to erect statues of Long-Haired Apollo wielding his bow to ward off the contagion released by the Roman looters.

  Stories implying that biological weapons were stored in temples raise a flurry of questions. Why would biologically dangerous materials be stored in temples? And were the releases of the plagues accidental or intentional?

  In the Greco-Roman world, temples often served as museums of revered relics, and all sorts of weapons with mythic and historical significance were treasures commonly displayed in temples. Indeed, Hercules’ original bio-weapons—the Hydra-poisoned arrows—were famously stored in a temple in Italy by the archer Philoctetes who dedicated them to Apollo, the god whose arrows carried pestilence.

  But surely items of deadly biological potential were not merely retained for posterity. Evidence from antiquity relates that priests of the temples of Apollo were very knowledgeable about poisons and studied their effects. For example, the celebrated toxicologist Nicander was a priest of Apollo at the Temple of Claros, the same temple that issued oracles about the plague of AD 165, and Nicander compiled an encyclopedia on venomous snakes, plants, and insects. Apollo was also the patron of doctors, and we know that the doctor Nebros used his knowledge of poison to help destroy the town of Kirrha, which had offended Apollo. With these clues in mind, one is tempted to ask whether some temples may have functioned as ancient laboratories for experiments with poisons and antidotes, with diseases and even primitive vaccines.

  In fact, some Greek temples were repositories of real disease vectors. Apollo was the guardian of rodents (in antiquity, no distinction was drawn between mice, rats, and voles). Rodent swarms were a presage of epidemics—and all sorts of rodents can be vectors of bubonic plague, typhus, and other diseases. At least one temple of Apollo—at Hamaxitus near ancient Troy—actually housed a horde of sacred white mice or rats around the altar, which were fed at public expense.

  Another intriguing example of disease vectors associated with temples involves Athena, the Greek goddess of war. Her temple at Rhocca, Crete, was notorious for its rabid dogs, and Athena of Rhocca was invoked to cure human victims of rabies. Aelian described a complicated experiment by an old shaman-like character that took place in the vicinity of Rhocca, in which marine bio-toxins (the stomach acid of sea-horses) were administered to counteract rabies in a group of boys bitten by mad dogs. But, as Aelian acknowledged elsewhere, the bite of a mad dog was always fatal. Notably, in his section on various venoms and arrow poisons, Aelian included a reference to rabid dogs. The saliva of a mad dog could even imbue a piece of cloth bitten by the dog, noted Aelian, causing secondhand, fatal rabies to anyone who came in intimate contact with it. This ominous remark insinuates that mad dog “venom” could have weapon potential, although no evidence survives that the idea of using rabid dog “venom” on arrows was pursued in ancient Greece or Rome. There are two bio-weapon recipes in the Arthashastra of the fourth-century BC, however, that appear to be evidence of such an attempt in India. One describes how to make a poison arrow with a mixture of toxins and “the blood of a musk rat.” Anyone pierced with this arrow will be compelled to bite ten companions, who will in turn bite others, wrote Kautilya. The other weapon, concocted from red alum, plant toxins, and the blood of a goat and a man, induces “biting madness.” These symptoms of biting mania sound suspiciously like rabies. Two thousand years later, in 1650, the possibility of weaponizing rabies in projectiles occurred to an artillery general in Poland. He referred to catapulting “hollow spheres with the slobber from rabid dogs [to] cause epidemics.”

  Going back to the original line of thinking, involving temples as places where toxins or pathogens and antidotes were sometimes stored, and taking the idea a step further, the question arises: Were some priests in temples of Apollo or Athena the keepers of lethal biological material that could be weaponized in times of crisis? One can imagine that a garment or other item contaminated with, say, dried smallpox matter, could have been sealed away from heat, light, and air in a golden casket in the temple of Apollo in Babylon, until a time of need. The items could maintain “weapons-grade” virulence for many years.15

  Besides the literary evidence that temples might serve as emergency arsenals of disease vectors and fomites, there is archaeological evidence that very special weapons were actually stored in temples. For example, in the 370s BC a cache of catapult bolts was kept in the Parthenon, the great temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens. That was just a generation after the invention in Syracuse of the crossbow-style catapult, a terrifying weapon that took warfare to a higher level of destruction. Sacred sites and weapons have been linked in later times, too. During the Crusades, for example, when Greek Fire, the new chemical incendiary weapon based on naphtha inspired terror, Arabic sources reported that great stocks of naphtha were stored in Byzantine churches. Earlier, in the fourth century AD, it was rumored that the “Devil” was responsible for smuggling naphtha into the church of Saint Nicholas in Myra (on the coast of Turkey).” In 2003, there were allegations by the United States that Saddam Hussein had hidden biological and chemical “weapons of mass destruction” in mosques in Iraq.16

  FIGURE 19. A woman placing a cloth in a chest. If the material had belonged to a victim of an epidemic such as smallpox, it could retain virulence for many years. Ter
racotta pinax from Lokri.

  (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Calabria)

  In classical antiquity, the storage of catapult bolts in Athena’s temple suggests that the most deadly, technologically advanced ballistic armaments were watched over by the goddess of war. Likewise, it seems that the most virulent biological ammunition was guarded by the god of plagues, Apollo.

  It is notable how often plague gods like Apollo were “invoked in defensive military contexts [to] bring plague against an invading or besieging army,” remarked Christopher Faraone, a scholar of ancient religion. Like other commentators, he saw the story of the casket of plague in Apollo’s temple in Babylonia as simply another “curious historical anecdote,” further proof that Apollo was worshipped as the source of epidemics, which often coincided with invasions by armies.

  But the story is much more complex, with significant implications for the history of attitudes toward justifiable biological warfare. There are many ancient accounts of people calling on gods who control plague to help them resist an invading enemy or oppressor, which seems to suggest a sense that using biological weapons was acceptable in situations of defense but less permissible as a “first strike.” In Exodus, the Israelites called on Yahweh to send plagues against their Egyptian captors. In Homer’s Iliad, the priest of Apollo called down the god’s plague arrows on the invading Greek army after they destroyed the priest’s city, Chryse, and captured his daughter. Even the bio-warrior-hero Hercules, who was regularly invoked for help by Greek armies, could only offer aid in defensive situations. For example, when the Syracusans sacrificed to Hercules to ask for assistance during the Athenians’ invasion of Sicily, Hercules could only promise to help “provided they did not seek battle, but remained on the defensive.”17