Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  (Courtesy of Pfizer Inc)

  Early in his life, Mithridates had devised a remarkable personal poison-survival plan. His program was based on the concept of ingesting a minute amount of a toxin or contagion, just enough to confer immunity when the body encounters the toxin again (the same principle of modern vaccines). The king dined on smidgens of poisons and antidotes every day. Extremely erudite, Mithridates studied texts in many languages. Indian medicine was much admired, and disseminated as far as Rome by his day. The king may have known that in ancient India fears of assassination by poisoning were addressed in the Laws of Manu, the Hindu sacred code of conduct dating to about 500 BC. Perhaps the idea for his special regimen was influenced by the verse that instructed: “Let the king mix all his food with medicines that are antidotes against poisons.” 2

  Searching for the fabled theriac, a so-called universal antidote to all poisons, Mithridates also tested various pharmaka on prisoners whom he caused to be poisoned or bitten by venomous snakes and scorpions. Eventually he created an elaborate compound of the fifty-four best antidotes mixed with honey—possibly the toxic honey of his native land—into a single drug for his own protection. His special theriac became known as mithridatium. Over the years after his death, the formula was improved on by various Roman toxicologists, including the personal physician to the emperor Nero (in about AD 60), who added ten more ingredients, including chopped viper flesh and opium. The imperial physician Galen prepared daily doses of this new, improved mithridatium for three emperors who feared biological attack, including Marcus Aurelius.

  Complex concoctions thought to have panantidotal powers were also created in ancient India and China. The Indian medical writers Charaka and Sushruta (about 400 BC) mention two universal antidotes to poisons, one called Mahagandhahasti, with sixty ingredients, and another with eighty-five. Vials of theriac continued to be very popular in Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—and they were still dispensed by French and German apothecaries up to the late nineteenth century.3

  Commanders who used poison weapons were especially sensitive to the need for antidotes or immunities. In his Indian military manual, the Arthashastra, Kautilya included a chapter on preparations to be administered to an army (and its animals) “before the commencement of battles and the assailing of forts,” to protect them against the enemies’ biological weapons and the potential backfire of their own biochemicals. The ingredients included known poisons, such as aconite, along with numerous plant, animal, and mineral substances of varying medicinal effects, such as jackal blood, mongoose and crocodile bile, gold, turmeric, and charcoal (these last three are effective agents in modern medicine). In a modern echo of Kautilya’s plans, in 2002, as the United States threatened invasion of Iraq (ancient Babylonia) to destroy its stores of bio-weapons, Saddam Hussein attempted to obtain antidotes for nerve gases in vast quantities, in an effort to protect his army from their own weapons.

  Mithridates’ and Kautilya’s efforts to ensure immunity to poison weapons are mirrored in other crude—and sophisticated—methods carried out today. For example, in 2002 it was reported in the New York Times and other news media that Indonesian military training included drinking the blood of venomous snakes and undergoing snakebites to boost soldiers’ immunity to venom and poison arrows. In the United States, the ancient dream of a mithridatium that would protect civilians against modern germ warfare is promoted by a New Age organization called Tetrahedron. In 2001, the company began selling “Essential Oils for Biological Warfare Preparedness” via the Internet. One oil is said to have been originally compounded by Moses to protect the Israelites from the plagues called down on the Egyptians. Other oils are claimed to protect against bio-terrorist attacks with anthrax and bubonic plague.

  But in a variation on the perils of accidental self-contamination with poison arrows or bottled plague, ancient and modern methods of seeking immunity to poison weapons can also have boomerang effects. In World War II, a complex example of the unanticipated results of attempting to protect against one’s own biological weapons occurred after the Germans had polluted a large reservoir with sewage, which caused outbreaks of highly contagious typhus. The Nazis themselves relied on taking blood tests of local people to avoid going into areas with typhus. In Poland, however, their defense was turned against them when local doctors secretly injected the Poles with a vaccine that gave false-positive readings for typhus in the Nazis’ blood tests, leading the Germans to stay away from the region.

  More deleterious problems with attempts to protect an army from biochemical attack occurred in the Gulf War of 1991. The U.S. military vaccinated American soldiers against biochemical weapons expected to be unleashed in Iraq. In the years after the war, however, the vaccinated veterans have been afflicted by serious health problems, referred to as Gulf War Syndrome, attributed in part to the vaccinations that were intended to protect them. Since the terrorist attacks with anthrax in the United States in 2001 and the decision to vaccinate the U.S. armed forces and American citizens against smallpox in 2003, the public health hazards of mass vaccinations against anthrax and smallpox have been widely discussed in medical journals and the popular media.

  In antiquity, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, fearing assassination by poison and plague, ingested a dose of Galen’s opium-fortified mithridatium every day. (The emperor himself was not immune to accusations of poisoning—it was rumored that he had murdered his co-emperor Lucius Verus with poison.) In a prime example of the backfiring of an antidote, not only did Marcus Aurelius become an opium addict, but he died of the great plague that was brought back to Rome from Babylon by his own army, commanded by Verus.4

  Even King Mithridates fell victim to his search for immunity to poisons. Having escaped from Pompey, he was hiding out in his Crimean kingdom planning his invasion of Italy, when his fifth son led a revolt against him. Cornered in his castle tower, Mithridates was forced to commit suicide in 63 BC. He took poison, which he always kept at hand. But his attempt to die peacefully was ironically thwarted by his life-long regimen of toxins and antidotes. In desperation, Mithridates tried to stab himself. In the end, he had to order his bodyguard from Gaul to run him through with a sword.

  Mithridates’ traitorous son sent his father’s corpse to Pompey, who interred his formidable foe with honors in the Mithridatic family sepulcher at Sinope on the Black Sea. Meanwhile, Pompey had seized the king’s headquarters and royal possessions, including an extensive library of toxicology treatises in various languages (the king spoke twenty-two tongues). There was also a treasure trove of Mithridates’ handwritten notes on his experiments with poisons and antidotes. Recognizing their value, Pompey sent the books and notes to Rome with orders that they be translated into Latin.

  Pliny, writing a century later, consulted Mithridates’ personal toxicology library and cited several antidotes written out in Greek in the king’s own hand. Antidotes discovered by Mithridates in his bio-toxins research laboratory included the blood of Pontic ducks, who lived on poisonous plants; a pink flower he called mithridatia; and polemonia, “the plant of a thousand powers.” Pliny was deeply impressed by the “untiring research into every possible experiment in compelling poisons to be useful remedies.”5

  As king of Pontus and a scholar of toxicology, Mithridates was well aware of the deadly properties of the rhododendron honey of his kingdom. He would have kept some in his royal laboratory of pharmaka and, as noted earlier, he may have included it in his mithridatium. He would also have been familiar with the arrow poisons concocted by the Soanes and Scythians of his territory. As a philhellene and scholar of Greek literature, Mithridates knew all about Medea, the legendary witch of Colchis who was the archetype of the scheming barbarian in Greek mythology. Medea, niece of the sorceress Circe, had poisoned the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece and devised potions to protect Jason and the Argonauts from pursuing enemies. Mithridates would also have known of Xenophon’s misadventure with the poisonous honey. With Medea as his model and wi
th his historical knowledge of the effects of local rhododendron honey, Mithridates had a great advantage over Pompey and his Roman army, who were unaware of the dangerous honey as they pursued Mithridates north.

  Mithridates, like Medea, had eluded his pursuing enemies by a series of ingenious tricks, and what subsequently happened to Pompey has the hallmark of Mithridates’ schemes. In about 65 BC, Pompey’s army was approaching Colchis. Mithridates’ allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as “utterly savage” mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on “the flesh of wild animals and nuts.” The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers—suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses. The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army. What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey’s route. The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses. Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea, and lay on the ground unable to move. The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey’s men.

  Raw honey and its fermented product, mead, were the only natural sweets in antiquity, as irresistible as candy. The Heptakometes simply used a natural resource of their landscape, the delicious honey that also happened to be a deadly intoxicant, as a biological agent to incapacitate the Romans so they could be easily slaughtered. The same effect could be gained with mead, set out as alluring bait to entrap enemies. Later in the same region, for example, the Russian foes of Olga of Kiev fell for a ruse in AD 946, when they accepted several tons of mead from Olga’s allies. Was the mead fortified with deli bal? That is not known, but all five thousand Russians were massacred as they lay in a stupor. Several centuries later in 1489, in the same area, the Russian army slaughtered some ten thousand Tatar soldiers after they had gulped down great casks of mead purposely left by the Russians in their abandoned camp.6

  Aelian noted that soldiers on campaign were especially vulnerable to plots involving food and drink. The simplest biological ploy, other than denying an enemy drinking water, was to take advantage of their hunger or their overindulgence in eating and drinking. As Pliny lamented, “Most of man’s trouble is caused by the belly . . . it is chiefly through his food that a man dies.” Aeneas the Tactician advised commanders in the fourth century BC to wait until the enemy grows reckless and begins “looting to satisfy their greed.” They will “fill themselves with food and drink and, once drunk [will] become careless . . . and impaired in performance.” Writing in the same era in India, Kautilya told how to administer poisons “in the diet and other physical enjoyments” of the enemy.

  Hannibal the Carthaginian relied on this tactic during his invasion of Italy in the third century BC. Noticing the lack of firewood in the district and aware of the dietary habits of the Roman army—they were used to eating cereals rather than meat—he devised a cunning plan. Hannibal abandoned his camp, leaving herds of cattle behind, and waited until the Romans eagerly took possession of the cows as booty. Then, when they could find no wood for cooking fires, they stuffed themselves with the “raw and indigestible” beef. Unused to such heavy, uncooked fare, the soldiers became severely bilious and lethargic from their steak tartare feast. Returning in the night when the indisposed Romans were “off their guard and gorged with raw meat,” wrote the military tactician Frontinus, the Carthaginians “inflicted great losses upon them.”

  In his first victory, in northern Italy in December 218 BC, Hannibal had used another simple ploy based on biological vulnerability. Drawing up his forces at first light, he tricked the Romans into fighting in the freezing snow before they had eaten breakfast. Hungry and numb with cold, they were easily annihilated by the well-fed Carthaginian troops. Some decades later, Tiberius Gracchus, the Roman commander fighting the Celtiberians in Spain in 178 BC, also used hunger as a weapon. He learned through spies that the enemy was suffering from a lack of provisions. Like Hannibal, he abandoned his camp, leaving behind “an elaborate supply of all kinds of foods.” After the Celtiberians “had gorged themselves to repletion with the food they found,” says Frontinus, “Gracchus brought back his army and suddenly crushed them.”7

  If setting out tempting food worked to trick enemies, plying them with inebriating liquor was even more effective. Barrels of alcohol could be left for them to find, or they could be sent gifts of wine. Many Greek myths tell how semi-human creatures—Centaurs, Satyrs, and Tritons—were captured or killed after being lured with wine, and this simple bio-subterfuge also figured in many ancient military engagements, especially those fought against “barbarians,” who were thought to be especially susceptible to liquor.

  A historical example occurred when the ruthless emperor Domitian (AD 81-96), vexed by the revolt by the Nasamonian nomads of Numidia (North Africa), declared “I forbid the Nasamonians to exist!” When Flaccus, Domitian’s governor in Numidia, learned that the tribe had discovered barrels of wine and were lying helplessly unconscious, he sent troops to “attack and annihilate them, even destroying all the noncombatants.” 8

  FIGURE 21. Jugs of wine could be sent to enemies or left in an abandoned camp. Foes who fell into a drunken stupor were easily wiped out. Apulian red-figure amphora, about 400 BC, detail Perseus 1991.07.1066.

  (University of Pennsylvania Museum)

  Polyaenus, who compiled the “Stratagems of War” for the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, offered advice on how to defeat barbarians in Asia in the second century AD. He began his book with an “archaeology” of mythical examples of successful trickery, assuring the emperors that courage and strength in battle were all very fine and well, but the wisest generals should know how to achieve victory without risk, by cunning arts and subterfuges. When the god Dionysus marched against India, declared Polyaenus, he concealed his spears in ivy and distracted the enemies with wine, then attacked while they partied under the influence.

  Polyaenus also shrewdly twisted the ancient myth of Hercules and the Centaurs. Although the myth says Hercules was forced to fight the Centaurs when an unruly mob of them crashed a party to get wine, Polyaenus claimed that Hercules had planned to wipe out the entire Centaur race all along, and lured them to their death by poison arrows by setting out jugs of wine.

  Turning to real-life battles, Polyaenus cited the Celts as an example. Like all barbarians, he wrote, the Celtic race was “by nature immoderately fond of wine.” He reminded his readers that during treaty negotiations with them, the Romans sent many gifts, including “a large amount of wine as if to friends.” After the Celts “consumed a great deal of the wine and lay drunk,” wrote Polyaenus, “the Romans attacked and cut them all to pieces.”

  It is notable that in the historical accounts of using wine in warfare, the victims were identified as barbarians, considered inferior to the civilized cultures of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Carthaginians. (Similar justifications were expressed in British decisions to use chemical poisons against ignorant and uncivilized tribespeople in Asia and Africa in the early twentieth century.) The Greek and Roman tacticians who recounted the stories consistently stressed the barbarians’ inordinate passion for alcohol, as though to justify a biological treachery that would not be employed against more cultured, noble enemies. For example, Polyaenus advised the emperors on how to defeat Asian barbarians by turning their “propensity” for trickery and terrorism and love of intoxicants against them.9

  Polyaenus, it seems, was rather enamored of the method of defeating enemies with intoxicants. He also described how Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae (a tribe of Scythians), was said to have lured the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, to an ignominious death in 530 BC. But Polyaenus, writing nearly seven hundred years after the event, garbled the story. In his version, Tomyris pretended to flee in fear from the Persians, leaving casks of wine in her camp. The Persians consumed the wine all night long, celebrating as if they had won a victory. Whe
n they lay sleeping off their wine and wantonness, Tomyris attacked the Persians, who were scarcely able to move, and killed them all, including the king.

  In fact, Cyrus did die an ignoble death during the conflict with Tomyris, but according to the Greek historian Herodotus, it was Cyrus who had tricked the milk-drinking nomads with strong wine. Herodotus’s version was based on information he gained from personal interviews with Scythians about one hundred years after the event, so his story is considered more credible.

  According to Herodotus, the Massagetae were a tribe of nomadic Scythians living east of the Caspian Sea. These formidable warriors were unfamiliar with wine—their favored intoxicants were hashish and fermented mare’s milk. When Cyrus began a war to annex their territory to his empire, his advisors recommended a clever stratagem. Since the Massagetae “have no experience with luxuries [and] know nothing of the pleasures of life,” they could be easily liquidated by setting out a tempting banquet for them, complete with “strong wine in liberal quantities.”

  The Greek historian Strabo, who also discussed the event, made the important point that Cyrus was in retreat after losing a battle with the nomads and therefore had to resort to underhanded trickery. Herodotus also stressed the moral aspect of the story, that Cyrus used biological treachery because his men lacked the skill and bravery necessary for a fair fight.

  Cyrus ordered a fancy banquet to be set out under the Persian tents and withdrew, leaving behind a contingent of his most feeble, expendable soldiers. Tomyris’s army arrived and in quick order killed the weak men that were sacrificed to the ruse by Cyrus. Congratulating themselves, the nomads then took their seats at the splendid feast laid out for them and drank so much wine that they fell into a stupor. Cyrus returned and slew the drunken Massagetae. He also captured Tomyris’s son, but the youth killed himself as soon as he sobered up the next morning.