Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  FIGURE 42. Licinius Lucullus, the Roman general who pursued Mithridates and encountered biochemical attacks in the Near East in the first century BC.

  (From Harry Thurston Peck, Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, 1898)

  For eight years, in 74-66 BC, Lucullus was one of a series of generals who unsuccessfully pursued King Mithridates, the master of terror tactics and an arch-poisoner whose dream was to create the ultimate personal antidote to biotoxins. Mithridates and his allies invented a stunning array of terror strategies directed at the Romans. He had begun his challenge to Roman power in 88 BC, with a shocking atrocity. He secretly ordered the massacre of every Italian man, woman, and child living in the new Roman Province of Asia, to take place on a specified date. So hated were the imperial colonists that more than eighty thousand Romans were reportedly slaughtered on a single day. Mithridates then swept west through Greece and threatened to invade Italy, while his client princes took control of significant cities in Rome’s Asian Province.

  The Roman army’s first battle with Mithridates in Bithynia ended very badly for the Romans. When Mithridates’ vicious scythe-bearing chariots plowed at high speed through the ranks, the legionaries were overwhelmed by the sight of their companions “chopped in halves but still breathing, and others mangled and cut to pieces” by the whirling blades. It was the “hideousness of the spectacle,” not the losses, that sent the Romans fleeing in horror, commented the historian Appian.

  Next, Mithridates captured the Roman legate Manius Aquillius, the son of the brutal Roman commander who had been criticized for poisoning wells in Asia in an earlier war (chapter 3). Mithridates paraded the official on an ass, and then executed him for bribe-taking in a particularly horrid way—by pouring molten gold down his throat. These acts ushered in the long Mithridatic Wars (90-63 BC), in which a succession of Roman generals achieved victory after victory on land and sea against the monarch and his allies, but failed to capture Mithridates, who eluded their grasp like quicksilver.

  Beginning in 74 BC, Lucullus relentlessly attacked and sacked the monarch’s allied kingdoms from Pontus to Mesopotamia and back again. After difficult sieges of several cities near the Black Sea, where the defenders let loose swarms of bees and rampaging bears to assault the Roman tunnelers, Lucullus tracked Mithridates south, to Armenia. There, Lucullus laid siege to Tigranocerta on the Tigris (in eastern Turkey), where Mithridates had taken refuge with his son-in-law King Tigranes. The new fortifications were only half-built and the city was captured, but the two monarchs slipped out of Lucullus’s hands, and began to gather up new armies.

  Despite his victory at Tigranocerta, “the barbarians did Lucullus serious injury” with a new weapon of unexpected savagery. Dio Cassius described how the Tigranocertans poured streams of fire on the Romans and their siege engines. The extraordinary fire flowed over and consumed everything, wood, leather, metal, horses, and human bodies. “This chemical,” marveled Dio Cassius, “is full of bitumen and is so fiery that burns up whatever it touches, and cannot be extinguished by any liquid.” The weapon was naphtha, from the rich local petroleum deposits. This event and similar attacks on Roman armies in the region counter the suggestion by biochemical warfare historian Eric Croddy that “the combustible properties of naphtha and its utility as a weapon” only came to the Romans’ attention with the invention of Greek Fire in AD 668.27

  In the Armenian countryside, the Romans suffered another kind of bio-attack by Mithridates’ allies. In skirmishes with mounted barbarians, Lucullus lost a great many men to the skilled archers, who shot arrows backwards as they galloped away from the pursuing Romans. The men’s wounds were “dangerous and incurable,” wrote Dio Cassius, for the archers used “double arrow-points of iron and moreover, they poisoned them.” The missiles had a loosely attached second point that broke off deep inside the wound when the shaft was pulled out. With so many dead and dying from the poison arrows, Lucullus retreated.

  After facing these weapons of extraordinary brutality in battles of dubious outcome in 69-68 BC, Lucullus’s legionaries began to revolt. But Lucullus forged on, intending to conquer another ally of Mithridates, the Kingdom of Commagene in the oil fields along the Euphrates (on the border of southeastern Turkey and Syria). Samosata, the wealthy fortified capital of Commagene, guarded the Euphrates river traffic, the strategic crossroads from Damascus to Pontus, and the east-west trade routes.

  When Lucullus stormed the fortified city in 69 BC, he was unaware that the Samosatans had a secret weapon to defend their walls. They had collected “a flammable mud called maltha that exudes from nearby marshy pools,” wrote Pliny, who described the battle. Maltha was apparently a very viscous form of naphtha skimmed from great pools of asphaltum, petroleum tar that oozes from fissures in sandstones in the region.

  When the Samosatans poured the flaming mud over the Roman soldiers, the effect was horrendous. Maltha’s ravenous appetite makes it “cling stubbornly to anyone who tries to flee,” Pliny declared, “and water only makes it burn more fiercely.” Only covering the flames with earth could have extinguished the blaze, a fact discovered by later experiments, noted Pliny. At Samosata, the voracious flames burned up the men in their armor, and the extreme heat even turned the Romans’ own armaments against them. “They were repeatedly burned by their own weapons,” wrote Pliny.

  In later times, other besieged populations in the region would capitalize on the unique ability of high-temperature incendiaries to turn an attacking soldier’s weapons and armor against him. We already saw how the Phoenicians, with a rain of hot sand, had turned the bronze chestplates of Alexander’s Macedonians into red-hot torture devices. And in AD 630, during the siege of Ta’if near Mecca, Muhammad’s army advanced on the walls under a “testudo” (turtle-shell) of interlocking shields held over their heads to deflect the arrows of the defenders. But they were unprepared for the rain of molten metal that heated their shields to intense temperatures. As they dropped the burning shields, the men were cut down by a barrage of arrows.

  The terror of the burning maltha at Samosata forced Lucullus to withdraw again. His army, never very loyal, now began to mutiny and desert in significant numbers. And Samosata, like Hatra, remained an independent desert stronghold for another century. 28

  Mythic parallels were beginning to accumulate for Lucullus, eerie reminders of the old stories of Hercules and Medea. First, the poison arrows of the Armenians caused torturous death and incurable wounds like those suffered by Hercules’ victims, and then the burning mud coated the soldiers, like the corrosive tunic that tormented Hercules. The scene at Samosata also replicated the deaths of Glauke and Creon and the Corinthians in the palace, in the unnatural conflagration engineered by Medea. Pliny was certainly struck by the coincidence, for in his description of the Roman disaster at Samosata, he suggested that some form of maltha must have been Medea’s secret weapon.

  FIGURE 43. Hercules struggling to tear off the burning, poisoned tunic. Bronze sculpture by Pierre Puget, 1680.

  (Jules Bache Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  During his campaign in the region, Lucullus discovered an art treasure with haunting mythical resonance: a large bronze statue of Hercules, showing the mighty hero contorted in pain, trapped in the garment that turned his own weapons against him. Lucullus wrapped the magnificent bronze in a linen shroud and brought it back to Rome. The statue was paraded along with the rich booty he had raided from Mithridates’ kingdoms, and then placed on permanent public display, next to the Temple of the Divine Julius. About a century later, Pliny recorded the layers of inscriptions that had been carved into the base of the “highly valued” art work by the unknown sculptor of Asia Minor. Known as Hercules in the Burning Tunic, it was admired by the Romans as a powerful evocation of the hero’s “final agony.”29

  Yet another event with mythic implications occurred during Lucullus’s campaign. After capturing a string of cities loyal to Mithridates, Lucullus chased Mithridates’ navy�
��led by three of the king’s major allies, Varius, Alexander, and Dionysius—down the coast of Turkey. The historian Appian described how, at the same harbor where the Greeks had landed to attack Troy in Homer’s Iliad, Lucullus captured thirteen of Mithridates’ ships, and overtook the rest of the fleet on a small, barren island near Lemnos. The trio of captains escaped, but Lucullus discovered them hiding in a cave on the small island. Varius, he killed; Alexander, he captured; but Dionysius, a true follower of Mithridates, drank the poison that he always carried with him and died by his own hand.

  As Appian pointed out, the tiny island was none other than Chryse, the desert isle where, according to myth, Philoctetes had suffered an accidental wound from Hercules’ Hydra-venom arrows. Philoctetes was marooned in misery for ten years in a cave on the island, perhaps in the very cave where Mithridates’ allies took refuge. Chryse was a well-known landmark, where many travelers stopped to pay their respects to Philoctetes’ shrine. A learned scholar of Greek mythology, Lucullus would certainly have been aware of the island’s fame, and it was common for Roman commanders to visit mythological landmarks during their campaigns. In 191 BC, for example, after his victory over Antiochus in Greece, Manius Glabrio sought out the sacred site of Hercules’ pyre, where Philoctetes had inherited the poison arrows. Lucullus probably paid a visit to the shrine on the isle of Chryse after his major victory there, to admire Philoctetes’ bow and breastplate and the bronze serpent symbolizing the envenomed arrows.

  Ancient authors describe Lucullus as a compassionate and generous man (early in his campaigns, for example, he had burst into tears at the site of a city he had reduced to ashes). Perhaps his war experiences with poison arrows and all-consuming fire gave a him a unique appreciation for Philoctetes’ and Hercules’ sufferings. On the other hand, maybe the beleaguered commander wished that Philoctetes could miraculously appear with a quiverful of Hydra arrows to turn the tide against Mithridates. Had Lucullus been able to peer into the future, he would have seen his successor Pompey sabotaged by poison honey and his arch-enemy Mithridates done in at last by his own reliance on poisons. Lucullus’s own end came in 57 BC, after a descent into insanity brought about by poison—deadly drugs administered by his freedman.

  There is no evidence that Lucullus or other Roman commanders ever fought “fire with fire,” or retaliated with naphtha in Mesopotamia—probably because their enemies controlled the petroleum resources there. Eventually, however, the Romans found an even more morally repugnant use for the chemical weapon. In the Roman arena, one could witness the spectacle of prisoners condemned to reenact the fiery fate suffered by so many Roman soldiers at Tigranocerta and Samosata, and later at Hatra and other Mesopotamian cities. Perhaps inspired by the celebrated statue of Hercules displayed in Rome after Lucullus’s campaign and by veterans’ tales of burning maltha, public executions by the tunica molesta, a naphtha-soaked “shirt of torture,” became a popular diversion. The gruesome death sentence was first devised by the emperor Nero in AD 64, as one of many inventive execution methods designed to re-create mythic death scenes. Executions “à la Hercules” continued to be staged for the amusement of Roman audiences through the third century AD.30 Meanwhile, in distant Mesopotamia, Rome’s own soldiers, pursuing the imperial agenda demanded by their emperors, were compelled to endure the very real ordeals of poison and hellfire.

  AFTERWORD: THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA

  Chopping off the immortal head of the venomous Hydra, he buried it alive, and placed a heavy rock over it.

  —Myth of Hercules

  LICINIUS LUCULLUS and his Roman soldiers were not the first army to face weapons of poison and hellish fire, nor were they the last. But theirs is a story brimming with mythic parallels. Not only did they encounter biological and chemical weapons on their campaigns, but they discovered the celebrated statue of the dying Hercules and visited the famous desert island of Philoctetes, two mythic warriors who exemplified the unforeseen consequences of toxic weapons. Lucullus’s experiences help show how the ongoing history of biochemical weapons continually harks back to its mythological beginnings.

  From antiquity onward, the annals of toxic weaponry form a widening gyre of myth reflecting history, and history mirroring myth. And just as the Hydra’s heads multiplied at a drastic rate, so human ingenuity in waging biochemical warfare has proliferated at a dreadful pace. “And so,” wrote the philosopher Lucretius, contemplating that murderous progression in his own lifetime (the first century BC), “tragic discord gave birth to one invention after another and added daily increments to the horrors of war.” In the race to develop more and more fearsome weapons to intensify psychological dread and ensure agonizing death, suffering, and destruction on a scale far beyond that wrought by the simple sharp and blunt weapons of old, the terse words of Appian, historian of the Mithridatic Wars, are fitting: “They left nothing untried that was within the compass of human energy.”

  The basic concepts of the diverse biochemical weapons that were wielded in historical battles—from poisons and contagion to animal allies and hellish fire—were first imagined in ancient mythology. The archaic myths even anticipated the moral and practical quandaries that have surrounded biological and chemical armaments since their invention. Far from fading over millennia, the age-old problems of controlling toxic agents of war and avoiding unintended consequences have intensified with the advance of science in the service of war. Hercules thought he could control the poisoned arrows he created from the Hydra’s venom, but they brought death and tragedy to his friends and ultimately destroyed Hercules himself. The poison weapons were inherited by Philoctetes and dealt him great misfortune, too, even though they turned the tide in favor of the Greeks at Troy.

  Once created, toxic weapons take on a life of their own, resistant to destruction and threatening harm over generations. Tons of still-active chemical weapons from World Wars I and II lurk in long-forgotten dumping areas, releasing toxins and posing grave risks to unwitting finders. These weapons, and the countless vials of smallpox, anthrax, and other super-pathogens stored in laboratories around the world, ripe for weaponization, have their antecedents in the “plague demons” imprisoned in jars buried under the temple in Jerusalem, and the pestilence locked inside the golden casket in Babylon. Centuries later, those containers were broken open during wartime, and plague spread over the land.

  Long before the invention of Greek Fire, and two millennia before the invention of napalm and nuclear bombs, the Greeks and Romans confronted new chemical fire weapons whose awesome powers of destruction could not be checked by normal means. Over and over, the ancient historians repeated the refrain: the only hope of quelling such ghastly fire was to cover it with earth. That solution echoed Hercules’ method of getting rid of the monstrous Hydra’s head by burying it under the earth. Now, those desperate attempts to bury poison and fire weapons seem to foreshadow our own efforts to dispose of dangerous weapons underground, out of sight but never completely out of mind.

  As the myths forewarned, a tragic myopia afflicts those who resort to poison weapons. Even as modern adversaries threaten to attack and retaliate with terror weapons that would bring mass destruction of innocents, the United States and other nations are forced to seek safe ways to dispose of the stockpiles of biochemical arms and radioactive nuclear waste they have already brought into being. But every method that has been proposed, from burning to burying, poses contamination hazards for present and future generations. Sites where biochemical and radioactive weapons have been buried, tested, or accidentally released remain deadly to all lifeforms. The menacing situation recalls the ancient dread of places corrupted by miasma, exhalations of deadly vapors.

  The Soviet stores of anthrax and other super-germ weapons that were dumped into pits on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, for example, now poison the air and water of Uzbekistan and Kazakstan. The human cost of this, the world’s largest bioweapons testing ground, is incalculable. But of the environmental disasters in the region that have
been made public, the sudden death of 500,000 steppe antelopes in just one hour in 1988 was one of the most striking. The Aral Sea itself is shrinking at a fast rate, which means that sometime in the future rodents and humans could contract and spread the hyper-virulent plagues buried on what was once an island.1

  In the United States, plans to incinerate tons of obsolete chemical weapons are going forward, in spite of the serious safety hazards and accidents that have already been documented at furnace sites in the Pacific and United States. Meanwhile, the search for other options for the disposal of nuclear weapons—such as chemical neutralization or vitrification (encasement in glass)—continues. “Geological disposal”— entombing lethal, indestructible weapons under mountains of rock—is the most often proposed solution. In 1999, the world’s first underground repository for the “safe and permanent disposal” of radioactive weapons material was dug in a salt bed more than 2,000 feet deep, in the Chihuahuan Desert near Carlsbad, Mexico.2

  FIGURE 44. The Many-Headed Hydra, a symbol of the proliferating dilemmas of biological warfare. Caeretan hydria, about 525 BC.

  ( The J. Paul Getty Museum)

  Hercules hit upon his own “geologic” solution to dispose of the Hydra’s immortal head, after he had created his poison weapons. He buried the evil thing alive in the ground and placed a massive boulder over the spot, to warn away future generations. The serpent’s head with fangs eternally dripping poison into the earth is a perfect symbol for indestructible biochemical and radioactive armaments emitting moral and physical pollution in the world today.