Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  Enraged by the bloodshed achieved through such base bio-sabotage, Tomyris sent a message to Cyrus equating wine with poison. “Glutton that you are for blood, you have no cause to be proud of this day’s work, which has no hint of soldierly courage. Your weapon was red wine, with which you Persians are wont to drink until you are so mad that shameful words float on the fumes. This is the poison you treacherously used to destroy my men and my son.” Leave my country now, she demanded, “or I swear by the Sun to give you more blood than you can drink.” Cyrus ignored the message.

  The battle that ensued was one of the most violent ever recorded, wrote Herodotus. According to his informants, the two sides exchanged volleys of arrows until there were no more, and then there was a long period of vicious hand-to-hand fighting with spears and daggers. By the end of the day, the greater part of the Persian army lay destroyed where it had stood. Tomyris sent her men to search the heaps of dead Persians for Cyrus’s body. Hacking off his head, she plunged it into a kettle of blood drawn from the king’s fallen men, crying, “I fulfill my threat! Here is your fill of blood!”10

  Queen Tomyris’s milk-drinking warriors from the steppes were unfamiliar with the effects of wine, which made Cyrus’s strategy seem especially odious. In other instances, however, taking advantage of an enemy’s careless overindulgence in food or liquor did not seem unfair, since it was assumed that a commander should be able to restrain his men’s behavior, and also because of the element of free choice in the decision to indulge or not. Contaminating wine with poisonous substances was particularly treacherous, however, because it eliminated free choice, and offering poisoned wine as a gift was even more devious because it violated the ancient principles of trust and fair gift exchange. And yet, ever since the Trojan Horse trick took down Troy, vigilant generals and their armies should have been on guard against accepting “gifts” from enemies.

  Two different Carthaginian commanders, Himlico and Maharbal, were credited with defeating barbarian tribes with poisoned wine. According to Polyaenus, Himilco, a “pertinacious soldier” who owed most of his victories to his enemies’ errors (in the judgment of modern historians), had lost several battles when plague swept through his armies in 406 and 400 BC. With his forces severely reduced by this apparently natural disaster, he devised a biological strategy to conquer a rebellious North African tribe in 396 BC. Himilco defeated the Libyans by taking advantage of their fondness for wine. He tainted jugs of wine in his own camp with mandragora or mandrake, and pretended to retreat.

  FIGURE 22. Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae took revenge on King Cyrus of Persia for poisoning her army with wine. Head of Cyrus Brought to Queen Tomyris, oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens, about 1622-23.

  (Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Mandrake, a heavily narcotic root of the deadly nightshade family (which contains strychnine), originated in North Africa and so was a well-known pharmakon in Carthage. Mandrake was a drug surrounded by ancient lore and danger. Like hellebore, there were two kinds of mandrake, white (male) and black (female), and the plant had to be gathered by shamans who knew the proper rituals. With their backs turned to the wind, the diggers first traced three circles around the plant with a sword and then dug it up while facing west. Some believed the root emitted screams as it was pulled from the ground and to hear that terrible sound spelled instant death. To avoid hearing the screams, an herbalist tied the mandrake stem to the leg of a dog, which uprooted the plant when it was later called from a distance. The strong-smelling roots were sliced and sun-dried, and then crushed or boiled and preserved in wine (this practice may have suggested the idea of tainting barrels of wine to Himilco).

  According to Pliny, the mere fumes of mandrake made one drowsy and those who inhaled too deeply were struck dumb. The tactician Frontinus described mandrake as a drug whose “potency lies somewhere between a poison and a soporific.” A minute dose, either inhaled or drunk, could be used as a sleeping draught or anesthetic before surgery, but “those who in ignorance took too copious a draught” fell into a fatal coma. And indeed, the Libyans “greedily drank of the wine” while Himilco feigned his retreat. In what has become a timeworn tactic, the Carthaginians returned and killed the unconscious tribe.

  FIGURE 23. The collection of mandrake, the deadly root used by the Carthaginians and by Julius Caesar to poison wine, required special precautions. This medieval manuscript illustrates one ancient method, tying the root to a dog.

  Hannibal’s hot-headed cavalry officer, Maharbal, also used mandrake against some unnamed “barbarians.” He mixed up a large batch of wine with pulverized mandrake root and left it in his camp. As Frontinus tells it, the barbarians “captured the camp and in a frenzy of delight greedily drank the drugged wine.” Maharbal came back and “slaughtered them as they lay stretched out as if dead.”

  Julius Caesar may have been inspired by these old Carthaginian ruses with mandrake during his tangle with pirates in Asia Minor in about 75 BC. By Caesar’s time, Cilician pirates (from what is now the coast of Turkey and Syria) had become a serious threat in the eastern Mediterranean and the Romans undertook several campaigns to wipe out these “barbarians.” On a sea voyage from Rome to Bithynia (in northwest Turkey), the young Caesar was captured near Cape Malea by the Cilician pirates prowling the treacherous waters around southern Greece. The pirates sailed on to Miletus, a wealthy Roman city on the coast of Turkey, and demanded a large ransom for Caesar’s release.

  Caesar managed to send a secret message to the Milesians requesting that they bring double the ransom money, along with provisions for a “great feast”—actually amphoras or jars of wine well-spiked with mandrake and another huge pot with swords hidden inside. “Overjoyed at the large amount of money,” the unsuspecting pirates celebrated with the wine and collapsed en masse on the deck of the ship. The Milesians returned and stabbed them all to death, and Caesar returned the ransom money. He then coolly proceeded to catch another ship to Bithynia.

  Sometimes the people that the Greeks and Romans called barbarians used this biological tactic against other barbarians. When the Celts and Autariatae were locked in a long war, for instance, the historian Theopompus (fourth century BC) reported that the Celts “drugged their own food and wine with debilitating herbs and left them behind in their tents,” then abandoned camp by night. The Autariatae, thinking the Celts had fled in fear, “seized the tents and freely enjoyed the wine and food.” The effect was immediate: they “lay about powerless, undone by violent diarrhea. The Celts returned and murdered them as they lay helpless.” We can make a good guess at the identity of the toxic herb. The symptoms recall those of hellebore, which we know was employed by the Celtic archers to poison their arrows, and which was used to similar effect by the Greeks when they poisoned the water supply of Kirrha.11

  The ancient practice of poisoning wine or other tempting goodies—turning what the Indian strategist Kautilya had termed the “enemy’s physical enjoyments” into a weapon—turns up regularly in later history, too. The modern examples are vicious enough to make the ancient incidents seem almost quaint. The humanist physician Andrea Cesalpino reported that during the Naples Campaign of 1494-95, the Spanish abandoned a village to the French, leaving behind caskets of wine that had been mixed with tainted blood drawn from leprosy and syphilis patients at Saint-Lazare Hospital and, during World War II, Dr. Shiro Ishii, the Japanese master of biological weapons, reportedly handed out anthrax-laced candies to Chinese children in Nanking. A CIA plot to create exploding cigars for Fidel Castro in the 1960s is another example, and as recently as the 1980s, South African government agents poisoned beer, whiskey, cigarettes, chocolates, sugar, and peppermints to murder anti-apartheid dissidents.12

  FIGURE 24. One could secretly mix poisons, such as mandrake, hellebore, or aconite, into wine and leave it for the enemy to find. Detail of an Attic red-figure kylix, about 520 BC.

  (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.)

 
In our reconstruction of the murky world of ancient biochemical warfare, many of the insidious weapons and stratagems were developed by experts in natural toxins who remained anonymous, with the credit going to the commanders they worked for, such as Himilco. The arrow poisons concocted from plants and vipers, and the hellebore and mandrake used to contaminate water and wine, for example, were gathered and prepared by shamans, witches, Druids, magicians, and other skilled practitioners of clandestine arts. “Those who possessed knowledge guarded it with jealous care” and encouraged ordinary people to believe “that it was obtained by supernatural means,” remarks Vaman Kokatnur, in his article on chemical warfare in ancient India.13 They usually worked covertly, behind the scenes, and their successes could be described as “revenge of the gods” or magic, to maximize the psychological terror of biochemical warfare. These specialists in early botany, zoology, pharmacology, toxicology—and magic—were actually the first bio-war scientists, but their role has remained obscure to historians because of the secrecy that surrounded their arcane professions. As a result, the identities of only a few of the ancient bio-war professionals can be pinpointed—such as the Psylli of Africa and the Agari snake-venom specialists of Scythia, hired by the military leaders Cato and Mithridates, respectively. Mithridates stands out as a unique example of a famous military commander who was himself learned in toxicology, and Kautilya, the advisor to King Chandragupta, is another military toxicology expert whose name has been passed down.

  One extremely early example of rare notoriety for a bio-weapons maker was Chrysame, a witch of Thessaly who devised a brilliant stratagem based on trickery and drugging the enemy with tainted comestibles. The legendary account, told by Polyaenus, is very old, dating to about 1000 BC. It was the time of the Greek colonization of Ionia (now western Turkey) and Cnopus, son of Codrus, the king of Athens in the eleventh century BC, was waging war with the Ionians who held Erythrae, a wealthy city on the Aegean coast. Cnopus consulted an oracle about how to achieve victory. The oracle advised him to send for Chrysame, a priestess of the goddess Hecate in Thessaly, to be his “general.”

  Thessaly, in northern Greece, was the center of ancient witchcraft, and Thessalian witches like Chrysame were renowned for their black magic spells, poison potions, and drugs. Their dark powers were believed to come from Hecate, the sorceress-goddess of the Underworld, mistress of crossroads and the Hounds of Hell whose worship involved little cakes illuminated with burning candles and the sacrifice of puppies. Cnopus sent an ambassador to Thessaly and Chrysame agreed to sail to Ionia to direct his battle strategies against Erythrae.

  As a priestess of Hecate, Chrysame was an expert in poisonous herbs and deadly pharmaka, and once in Erythrae, she surveyed the situation and devised a complex plot based on her special knowledge. She selected the largest and finest bull from Cnopus’s herds, decked it out in a purple robe embroidered with golden thread, gilded its horns with beaten gold, and hung garlands of flowers around its neck. Then she mixed madness-inducing drugs into its food. Meanwhile, in full view of the enemy encamped in the fields, Chrysame set up a great altar and all the regalia for an important sacrifice. Her plan was to stage a fake botched sacrifice.

  Chrysame led the magnificently decorated bull toward the altar. “Crazy from the drug’s influence and in a frenzy,” wrote Polyaenus, “the bull leaped away and escaped,” bellowing and bucking like rodeo rough stock. Pretending dismay, Chrysame watched with hidden satisfaction as the bull barreled into the enemy camp. Polyaenus described with glee the success of her ruse: “When the enemy saw the garlanded bull with golden horns charging from Cnopus’s camp into their own camp, they welcomed it as a lucky sign and an auspicious omen.”

  FIGURE 25. The witch-priestess Chrysame of Thessaly devised a successful military strategy to defeat the Ionians. She drugged a sacrificial bull to deliver incapacitating intoxicants to the enemy. Priestess leading a cow to sacrifice, Athenian lekythos, 520-510 BC.

  (Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912 © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  Thinking that the gods had rejected Cnopus’s sacrifice, the Erythraeans captured the bull and sacrificed it to their own gods. Then, they feasted on the meat as though partaking of a “divine and miraculous omen” of their own victory. But as soon as they devoured the drugged flesh, they too were seized by madness. “Everyone began to jump up and down, to run in different directions, to skip with joy.” In this case, we can rule out the strong purgative hellebore. Rather, Chrysame’s drug apparently had hallucinogenic properties; perhaps it was strychnine from deadly nightshade, known in antiquity for causing “playful insanity” in certain doses. Whatever the pharmakon that Chrysame administered to the bull, it evidently retained enough potency after slaughter and cooking to affect the men who ate the meat.

  As soon as Chrysame saw that the giddy guards had abandoned their posts and the whole camp was disordered and deranged, she ordered Cnopus and his army to take up their weapons and “speedily attack the defenseless enemy. Thus Cnopus destroyed them all and became master of the great and prosperous city of Erythrae.”14

  “We need something . . . like calmatives, anaesthetic agents, that would put people to sleep or in a good mood.” “I would like a magic dust that would put everyone in a building to sleep, combatants and noncombatants.” “In an age of terrorism, it would surely be desirable to develop a mist that could put people to sleep quickly.” These recent quotes from U.S. military personnel and a major newspaper editorial echo the ancient desire to disable adversaries with pacifying, sedating, or disorienting agents. The “magic dust” and calmative mists they describe would be the modern versions of the barrels of drugged wine and Chrysame’s bull, as well as the scores of chemical projectiles that were developed in ancient India with the express purpose of producing “stupor, enchantment, or hypnosis” and even “prolonged yawning” in the enemy.15

  Modern efforts to find “nonlethal” ways of pacifying or disorienting a foe began during World War II, with a bizarre initiative by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), whose agents attempted to find a way of chemically pacifying Adolf Hitler. One plan—apparently never carried out—was to surreptitiously inject his vegetables with female hormones. In 1965-67, during experiments with LSD-like agents, the Pentagon secretly tested a hallucinogen that was being developed as a chemical weapon, on U.S. citizens in Hawaii. And in 2002, it was reported that the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate and the U.S. Department of Justice were developing what they call “calmatives or chemical peacemakers.” These “counter-personnel” weapons in the form of sedatives or mind-altering agents could be placed in water supplies, sprayed as aerosol mists, or packed into rubber bullets. The idea is to use the weapons indiscriminately on large populations, such as dissidents, refugees, or “hostile mobs.” U.S. troops would then sort through the mass of incapacitated people to identify enemies.

  It’s worth noting that in all of the ancient incidents of narcotizing or incapacitating enemies with intoxicants like wine or other drugs, wholesale slaughter of the unconscious victims, often including noncombatants, was invariably carried out. The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has acknowledged the need for “training soldiers to refrain from killing persons unable to defend themselves.” It’s also worth recalling that in Greek myth, even the master of devious ruses, Odysseus, rejected the morally ambiguous option of drugging the enemies who had taken his family hostage, preferring to trick them into meeting him face-to-face.16

  The potential for lethal collateral damage with such agents in modern situations was vividly demonstrated in October 2002, when Russian troops pumped a powerful narcotic mist into a Moscow theater where more than seven hundred hostages were held by forty Chechen rebels. The plan was to neutralize everyone in the building with the gas, so that special forces could enter and shoot the unconscious rebels at close range, and then save the hostages. As with the drug hellebore in the water supply of Kirrha in the sixth century BC, however, the effect of the gas proved
impossible to control. In the Moscow theater, the gas was responsible for the deaths of 127 innocent hostages and impaired the health of hundreds more.

  In defending the Pyrrhic victory over the Chechen rebels, the Russian health minister, Dr. Shevchenko, sounded like the apologists for the Greek doctor Nebros who indiscriminately poisoned all the citizens of Kirrha, and Winston Churchill’s defense of the use of allegedly “nonlethal” gas on Kurdish villagers. Despite the high death toll, Dr. Shevchenko argued that the gas “cannot in itself be called lethal.”

  “There is no such thing as nonlethal weapons,” countered Mark Wheelis, an expert on biochemical arms, in the aftermath of the Moscow crisis. The military’s attraction to such armaments may be understandable, he said, but one must consider the “grave risks and costs.” Besides generating “unrealistic expectations of bloodless battles” and the problems of overkill and friendly fire, Wheelis pointed out another drawback: the possibility of enemies obtaining and using the same technologies. That issue echoes a statement attributed to King Eumenes of Pergamum, defeated in a naval battle (second century BC) by Hannibal, who catapulted live snakes onto Eumenes’ ships. Eumenes remarked that he “did not think that any general would want to obtain a victory by the use of means which might in turn be directed against himself.”17

  6

  ANIMAL ALLIES AND SCORPION BOMBS

  The elephant dreads a squealing pig.

  —AELIAN, On Animals

  THE PHARAOH OF EGYPT, deluded by visions of grandeur, had treated his warrior class with contempt, thinking he would never need their services. Now, he was in deep trouble. The invincible Assyrian army, led by King Sennacherib, had just invaded Egypt’s borders (in 700 BC). And now the Pharaoh’s warriors refused to fight for him. “The situation was grave,” wrote the historian Herodotus.