Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  “In the future,” commented Polyaenus, “Antigonus ordered his Indian suppliers to raise the young war elephants in the company of pigs,” so the beasts would become accustomed to their appearance, smell, and shrill voices.

  The last recorded use of a pig against an elephant occurred at the siege of Edessa, held by the Romans in the time of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century AD). Chosroes, king of the Persians, stormed the city, sending his biggest elephant with many soldiers on top right up to the circuit wall. Just as the Persians were about to clamber over the wall and capture the city, the quick-witted Romans grabbed a pig and suspended it directly in the face of the startled elephant. The dry-witted historian Procopius writes: “As the pig was hanging there, he very naturally gave vent to sundry squeals, and this angered the elephant so that he got out of control.” Confusion swept back in waves through the entire Persian army and, panic-stricken, they fled in great disorder.16

  Fire plus animals was a combination guaranteed to wreak havoc against the enemy, as Frontinus and Appian proved in their description of a Spanish strategy against Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, in 229 BC. The Spanish front lines consisted of steer-drawn carts filled with combustibles: pitch, animal tallow, and sulphur. These carts of fuel were set afire and driven into the Carthaginian lines, causing screaming panic. Nine-year-old Hannibal went along with his father on the conquest of Spain. Perhaps he recalled the combination of steers and fire when he engineered his own rout of the Romans in 218 BC, by means of the cattle-horn torches, described earlier.

  The use of animals as a delivery system to carry flammable materials occurred elsewhere in the ancient world. Chinese and Arabic military manuals, for example, suggested smearing crows and other birds with incendiary substances to set fire to enemy tents, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra recommended attaching incendiary powders to birds, cats, mongooses, and monkeys. The flammable packages were lit and the creatures were dispatched to burn down thatched-roof structures and wooden forts. It’s not clear how these involuntary suicide bombers were persuaded to zero in on the right targets (this is precisely the problem that has now been solved with the creation of remote-controlled rats and other species that can be directed to specific targets, described above). Kautilya anticipated the problem, though: he suggested capturing only vultures, crows, and pigeons that nested in the besieged city walls. They could be trusted to fly back to their nests with the flammable powders.

  Genghis Khan relied on the same “homing” principle on a large scale during his conquest of China in AD 1211. During his siege of several fortified cities, it is said that he offered to lift the siege in exchange for “1,000 cats and 10,000 swallows. “These were duly handed over,” writes the historian David Morgan, and the Mongols tied flammable materials to the tails of the birds and cats and ignited them. When the creatures were released, they fled home, setting each city on fire, and Genghis Khan easily stormed the burning cities.

  In other cases, perhaps intelligent animals were trained beforehand, to offset the potential for serious backfire. In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, it was reported that Morocco offered U.S. military two thousand monkeys from the Atlas Mountains trained to deactivate and detonate land mines. Trained primates also figure in a Chinese account from 1610 claiming that the General Tseh-ki-kwang trained several hundred monkeys from Mount Shi-Chu in Fu Tsing to shoot firearms. When the monkey militia was ordered to fire on Japanese raiders, the marauders were so terror-stricken that the general’s soldiers hiding in ambush were able to slay them all. The animal guerrillas must have been taught not to shoot at their Chinese handlers.

  Friendly fire accidents caused by confused creatures carrying incendiaries would fall into the category of medieval folklore and modern urban legends collectively known as “the revenge of the exploding animal.” These tales recount the ironic consequences of tying dynamite, firecrackers, or other burning material to dogs, cats, or birds, or tossing live grenades at sharks, and so on, who inevitably circle back toward their tormentors. One Indian folktale, for example, about a flaming cat burning down a village, was collected in Kashmir. Another medieval European tale tells of a flock of birds set afire by besiegers to burn down a city. The actual use of such tactics in antiquity may be the origin of these folk motifs.

  Perhaps the last instance of an animal-on-fire weapon was used by Tamerlane, the great conqueror from the East in 1398, to sack Delhi, which was protected by the Indian sultan’s 120 war elephants. Tamerlane’s warriors were usually mounted on war camels, but for this battle, Tamerlane loaded the camels with straw and ignited the bundles. As the flaming camels raced forward, the sultan’s elephants fled in panic.17

  The image of terrified burning pigs or awkward flaming camels may seem amusing in a macabre way, but it only takes a slight shift of perspective to imagine the terror and pain that would be experienced by human beings set afire with unquenchable, corrosive flames. And that brings us to the final chapter, about ancient chemical incendiaries, culminating in some of the most inhumane weapons ever devised.

  7

  INFERNAL FIRE

  Attacked by a terrible stream of consuming fire, her flesh fell from her bones, like resin from a pine-torch, a sight dreadful to behold.

  —EURIPIDES, Medea, 431 BC

  THE PRINCESS DONNED the gown, a gift from the sorceress Medea, and twirled before the looking glass. Suddenly the gown burst into flames. Like Hercules in his envenomed tunic, the princess tried to tear off the flaming dress, but the material stuck to her skin, creating a fire so hot that it melted the flesh from her bones. Engulfed by “clinging streams of unnatural, devouring fire,” she dashed outside and threw herself into a fountain. But water only made the fire burn more intensely. Her father, King Creon, tried to smother the flames, but he too caught fire. Both perished, burned alive. The blaze spread, destroying the entire palace and everyone inside.

  This scene from Euripides’ Medea, based on ancient Greek myth, was performed in Athens in 431 BC. It describes a terrible fire weapon concocted by Medea of Colchis, who had helped her lover Jason, and his Argonauts, find the Golden Fleece. When Jason abandoned Medea, she took revenge on his new love, the Corinthian princess Glauke. She treated a beautiful gown with secret substances that “stored up the powers of fire,” sealed the gift in an airtight casket, and delivered it to the unsuspecting princess.

  How did Medea create such an extraordinary conflagration? The graphic details—and the popularity of the story in Greek and Roman literature and art—suggest that some real but unusual fire phenomenon inspired the legend. The notion that materials could be made to suddenly combust in the presence of water or heat must have been plausible to audiences as early as the fifth century BC.

  Some, like Diodorus of Sicily, speculated that Medea knew of a magical “little root” that, once set afire, was impossible to extinguish. But, according to Euripides, Medea combined special volatile substances which had to be sealed from air, light, moisture, and heat. The violent combustion resulted in flames that were clinging, corrosive, extremely hot, and unquenchable by water—much like modern napalm in its ghastly effects. The myth points to knowledge of chemical weapons more than one thousand years before the invention of Greek Fire in the seventh century AD.1

  Fire itself has been a weapon “from the first time an angry hominid snatched a burning brand from a campfire and threw it at the cause of his wrath,” writes historian Alfred Crosby in Throwing Fire. More than two millennia before Crosby, the Roman philosopher Lucretius had written that fire became a weapon as soon as men learned to kindle sparks. In Greek myth, the hero Hercules used burning arrows and torches to destroy the Hydra monster, and blazing arrows were shot by heroes of the great Indian epics, the “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”

  Fire arrows were a very early invention in human history and Assyrian reliefs from the ninth century BC show attackers and defenders exchanging volleys of burning arrows and firepots, apparently filled with local oil, over fortified walls.
In ancient India, fire weapons were common enough to be forbidden in the Laws of Manu, which proscribed kings from using “weapons made red-hot with fire or tipped with burning materials,” although Kautilya’s Arthashasta and several other Indian treatises of the same era give many recipes for creating chemical fire projectiles and smoke weapons. Meanwhile, in China, during the Warring States period of feudal conflicts (403-221 BC), Sun Tzu’s Art of War and other military treatises advocated ways to deploy fire and smoke to terrify foes.2 The inventory of fire armaments devised in antiquity is impressive in its variety, beginning with burning arrows and progressing to chemical additives and sophisticated incendiary technologies.

  The first incendiary missiles were arrows wrapped with flammable plant fibers (flax, hemp, or straw, often referred to as tow) and set afire. Burning arrows of these materials could be very effective in destroying wooden walls from a safe distance. Indeed, Athens was captured by flaming hemp arrows in 480 BC, when the Persians invaded Greece. Xerxes had already destroyed many Greek cities with fire and, as the grand Persian army approached Athens, the populace was evacuated to the countryside. A few priests and poor and infirm citizens were left behind to defend the Acropolis. These defenders put up barricades of planks and timber around the Temple of Athena and managed to hold off the Persians for a time by rolling boulders down the slopes of the Acropolis. But, in the first recorded use of fire projectiles on Greek soil, the Persians shot fiery arrows to burn down the wooden barricades. The Persians then swarmed over the Acropolis, slaughtering all the Athenians in the temple and burning everything to the ground.

  FIGURE 35 Greek warrior assaulting a city wall with a burning pine-resin torch. Campanian neck-amphora, about 375 BC.

  (The J. Paul Getty Museum)

  But simple flaming missiles of straw were “insufficiently destructive and murderous” to satisfy ancient strategists for long, notes Alfred Crosby. They were not much use against stone walls, and ordinary fires could be doused with water. “What was wanted was something that would burn fiercely, adhere stubbornly, and resist being put out by water.” What kinds of chemical additives would produce fires strong enough to burn walls and machines, capture cities, and destroy enemies?

  The first additive was a plant chemical, pitch, the flammable resin tapped from pine trees. Later, distillations of pitch into crude turpentine were available. Resinous fires burned hotly and the sticky sap resisted water. Arrows could be dipped in pitch and ignited, or one could set fires fueled with pitch to burn the enemy’s equipment. Other mineral accelerants for making hotter and more combustible weapons were discovered, too.3

  The earliest evidence that flaming arrows were used by a Greek army appears in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In 429 BC, the Spartans besieged the city of Plataia, an ally of Athens, and used a full panoply of siege techniques against the stubborn Plataians. We know the Spartans used fire arrows, because the Plataians protected their wooden palisades with what would later become the standard defense against flaming projectiles—they hung curtains of untanned animal skins over the walls. Then, the Plataians lassoed the Spartans’ siege engines, winching them into the air and letting them crash to the ground. With their machines smashed and with their archers unable to ignite the rawhide-covered walls, the Spartans advanced beyond mere flaming arrows, into the as-yet-unexplored world of chemical fuels. This event occurred just two years after Euripides’ play about Medea’s mysterious recipe for “unnatural fire.”

  The Spartans heaped up a massive mound of firewood right next to the city wall. Then they added liberal quantities of pine-tree sap and, in a bold innovation, sulphur. Sulphur is the chemical element found in acrid-smelling, yellow, green and white mineral deposits in volcanic areas, around hot springs, and in limestone and gypsum matrix. Sulphur was also called brimstone, which means “burning stone.” Volcanic eruptions were observed to create flowing rivers and lakes of burning sulphur, scenes that corresponded to ancient visions of Hell with its lakes of fire. In antiquity, clods and liquid forms of sulphur had many uses, from medicine and pesticides to bleaching togas. Sulphur’s highly flammable nature also made it a very attractive incendiary in war. “No other substance is more easily ignited,” wrote Pliny, “which shows that sulphur contains a powerful abundance of fire.”

  When the Spartans ignited the great woodpile at Plataia, the combination of pitch and sulphur “produced such a conflagration as had never been seen before, greater than any fire produced by human agency,” declared Thucydides. Indeed, the blue sulphur flames and the acrid stench must have been sensational, and the fumes also would have been quite destructive, since the combustion of sulphur creates toxic sulphur dioxide gas, which can kill if inhaled in large enough quantities. The Plataians abandoned their posts on the burning palisades. Much of the wall was destroyed, but then the wind reversed and the great fire eventually subsided after a severe thunderstorm. Plataia was saved by what must have seemed to be divine intervention against the Spartans’ technological innovation. Notably, this also happens to be the earliest recorded use of a chemically enhanced incendiary that created a poison gas, although it is not clear that the Spartans were aware of that deadly side effect when they threw sulphur on the flames.

  Defenders quickly learned to use chemically fed fires against besiegers. Writing in about 360 BC, Aeneas the Tactician’s book on how to survive sieges devoted a section to fires supplemented with chemicals. He recommended pouring pitch down on the enemy soldiers or onto their siege machines, followed by bunches of hemp and lumps of sulphur, which would stick to the coating of pitch. Then, one used ropes to immediately let down burning bundles of kindling to ignite the pitch and sulphur. Aeneas also described a kind of spiked wooden “bomb” filled with blazing material that could be dropped onto siege engines. The iron spikes would embed the device into the wooden frame of the machine and both would be consumed by flames. Another defense strategy was to simply “fill bags with pitch, sulphur, tow, powdered frankincense gum, pine shavings, and sawdust.” Set afire, these sacks could be hurled from the walls to burn the men below.

  During the grueling year-long siege of the island of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes (“The Besieger”) in 304 BC, both sides hurled resinous missiles—firepots and flaming arrows. On moonless nights during the siege, wrote Diodorus of Sicily, “the fire-missiles burned bright as they hurtled violently through the air.” The morning after a particularly spectacular night attack, Demetrius Poliorcetes had his men collect and count the fire missiles. He was startled by the vast resources of the city. In a single night, the Rhodians had fired more than eight hundred fiery projectiles of various sizes, and fifteen hundred catapult bolts. Rhodes’ resistance was successful, and Poliorcetes withdrew with his reputation tarnished, abandoning his valuable siege equipment. From the sale of his machines, the Rhodians financed the building of the Colossus of Rhodes astride their harbor, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  Technological advances in fire arrows were reported by the Roman historians Silius Italicus and Tacitus, who describe the large fire-bolt (the falarica), a machine-fired spear with a long iron tip that had been dipped in burning pitch and sulphur. (The opening scene of the 2000 Hollywood film “Gladiator” showed the Roman falarica in action in a night battle in Germany). The burning spears were “like thunderbolts, cleaving the air like meteors,” wrote Silius Italicus. The carnage was appalling. The battlefield was strewn with “severed, smoking limbs” carried through the air by the bolts, and “men and their weapons were buried under the blazing ruins of the siege towers.”

  Machine-fired fire-bolts and catapulted firepots of sulphur and bitumen were used to defend Aquileia (northeastern Italy) when that city managed to hold off the long siege by the hated emperor Maximinus in AD 236 (his own demoralized soldiers slew him in his tent outside the city walls). Later, incendiary mixtures were packed inside the hollow wooden shafts of the bolts. Vegetius, a military engineer of AD 390, gives one recipe for the ammunit
ion: sulphur, resin, tar, and hemp soaked in oil.

  Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century AD) described fire-darts shot from bows. Hollow cane shafts were skillfully reinforced with iron and punctured with many small holes on the underside (to provide oxygen for combustion). The cavity was filled with bituminous materials. (In antiquity, bitumen was a catchall term for petroleum products such as asphalt, tar, naphtha, and natural gas.) These fire-darts had to be shot with a weak bow, however, since high velocity could extinguish the fire in the shaft. Once they hit their target, the fire was ferocious. They flared up upon contact with water, marveled Ammianus, and the flames could only be put out by depriving the blaze of oxygen, by smothering it with sand.4

  The fire-dart sounds similar to the Chinese fire-lance, invented in about AD 900. This was a bamboo (later, metal) tube with one opening, packed with sulphur, charcoal, and small amounts of the “fire chemical” (explosive saltpeter or nitrate salts, a key ingredient of gunpowder). The tube was affixed to a lance with a kind of pump, which Crosby describes as “a sort of five-minute flame thrower.” At first, they “spewed nothing but flame,” but soon the Chinese added sand and other irritants like sharp shards of pottery and metal shrapnel, and many different kinds of poisons, such as toxic plants, arsenic, and excrement, to the saltpeter mixture. As Robert Temple, historian of ancient Chinese science, remarked, “Bizarre and terrible poisons were mixed together” to make bombs and grenades. “Practically every animal, plant, and mineral poison imaginable was combined,” for “there hardly seemed to be a deadly substance unknown to them.”