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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MAP 1. Italy, Greece, and the Aegean. (Map by Michele Angel)
MAP 2. The ancient world. (Map by Michele Angel)
MAP 3. Asia Minor, Near East, Mesopotamia, and Parthia. (Map by Michele Angel)
Introduction
FIGURE 1. Heroic hoplite combat, face-to-face fighting between equally matched Greek warriors using conventional weapons of spear and shield, 500-480 BC, amphora. (The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Chapter 1
FIGURE 2. Hercules and the Hydra. Hercules (left) chops off the heads, while his companion (right) cauterizes the necks with torches. Hercules will later dip his arrows in the Hydra’s venom; meanwhile, Athena, Greek goddess of war (far right), holds the conventional weapons of a hoplite warrior, eschewed by Hercules. Krater, about 525 BC, attributed to the Kleophrades Painter. (The J. Paul Getty Museum)
FIGURE 3. Hercules shoots the Centaur Nessus with a Hydra-venom arrow, as he carries away Deianeira. It was the Centaur’s venom-poisoned blood that ultimately destroyed Hercules himself.
FIGURE 4. Hercules on his funeral pyre entrusting the quiver of Hydra-venom arrows to the young archer, Philoctetes. Red-figure psykter, 475-425 BC. (Private collection, New York)
FIGURE 5. Archer testing shaft and point of arrow; any archer who tipped his projectiles with poison had to avoid all contact with the sharp point. Red-figure wine cup, Athens, 520-510 BC. (Henry Lillie Pierce Fund © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
FIGURE 6. On the way to Troy, Philoctetes was abandoned on a desert island after his accident with a poison arrow. This Athenian vase (about 420 BC) shows him with a bandaged foot and the quiver of poison arrows. (Fletcher Fund, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Chapter 2
FIGURE 7. Black hellebore (Christmas rose), a toxic plant used to poison arrows and water supplies in antiquity. (Curtis Botanical Magazine, 1787)
FIGURE 8. Poisonous snakes were deeply feared in antiquity, but some ancients were adept in handling snakes and using their venom to make arrow poisons and antidotes. Amphora, detail, Perseus 1991.07.0133. (University of Pennsylvania Museum)
FIGURE 9. Battle between Greek hoplites and Scythian archers. The fallen warrior had decorated his shield with the image of a snake, perhaps to frighten enemies or to magically deflect snake venom arrows. Red-figure kylix. (University of Pennsylvania Museum)
FIGURE 10. Right, Scythian archer shooting poison arrows at Greek hoplites. Red-figure vase. Left, running Scythian archer with bow, arrow, and quiver, red-figure vase, about 500 BC. (© The British Museum)
FIGURE 11. Top, wooden arrow shafts for snake-venom arrows, painted with red and black designs, found in fifth-century BC Scythian tombs. After Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia. Bottom, the venom of the poisonous European adder, Vipera berus, may have been used by the Scythians to treat their arrows.
FIGURE 12. The dreaded Purple Snake of India, as described by Aelian and Ctesias, had a distincti
ve white head. It may have been the poisonous Azemiops feae, discovered by scientists in the late 1800s. (Photo © R. W. Murphy)
FIGURE 13. Achilles treating Telephus’s poison wound by scraping rust from his spear. Roman bas relief sculpture, found at Herculaneum. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples)
Chapter 3
FIGURE 14. Women drawing water at a fountain house. During a siege, a city’s water supply could be poisoned. Hydria, 520-510 BC. (Toledo Museum of Art, Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey)
Chapter 4
FIGURE 15. It was realized early in human history that contact with corpses of victims of epidemics, or their possessions, could spread disease. Roman skeleton mosaic, Via Appia, Italy.
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 460-450 BC. (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore)
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)
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.
FIGURE 19. Woman placing cloth in chest. If the material had belonged to a victim of an epidemic such as smallpox, it could retain virulence for many years. Terracotta pinax from Lokri. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Calabria)
Chapter 5
FIGURE 20. King Mithridates VI of Pontus, arch-enemy of Rome, was a toxicologist searching for the most effective poisons and their antidotes. Here, he tests a poison on a prisoner, while his royal pharmacists display aconite and other toxic plants. Painting by Robert Thom. (Courtesy of Pfizer Inc)
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. Amphora, about 400 BC, detail Perseus 1991.07.1066. (University of Pennsylvania Musem)
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)
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.
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 kylix, about 520 BC. (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.)
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)
Chapter 6
FIGURE 26. Rodents carry flea-borne bubonic plague and other epidemic diseases. (Dover Pictorial Archives)
FIGURE 27. Wasp nests and beehives were hurled at enemies from Neolithic times onward. (Dover Pictorial Archives)
FIGURE 28. A swarm of bees or hornets attacking men. Amphora from Vulci, about 550 BC. (© The British Museum)
FIGURE 29. Scorpions abound in the desert around Hatra, and they were used as live ammunition against Roman besiegers. (Dover Pictorial Archives)
FIGURE 30. Assyrian war dog on a sculptural relief from Birs Nimrud, about 600 BC.
FIGURE 31. The heroic Athenian war dog at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) during the defeat of the Persians.
FIGURE 32. Indian war elephant, with tower of warriors and mahout.
FIGURE 33. War elephants could cause chaos in enemy ranks, but sometimes trampled their own men in the melee.
FIGURE 34. A squealing pig was an effective weapon against war elephants. Red-figure kylix, about 490 BC, detail. (University of Pennsylvania Museum)
Chapter 7
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)
FIGURE 36. Noxious substances could be burned to create toxic smoke. Here two men make a smoky fire. Attic vase painting, 510 BC. (Toledo Museum of Art, Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey)
FIGURE 37. This burning petroleum fountain at Baba Gurgur (in modern Iraq) has been worshipped since 600 BC.
FIGURE 38. In antiquity the deposits of seeping, gushing, and flaming oil deposits from Baku to Persia were known as the “lands of the naphtha fountains.” Here, Alexander’s Greek soldiers watch local people gathering naphtha in Babylonia. (Painting by Bob Lapsley/Aramco Services/PADIA)
FIGURE 39. According to legend, Alexander the Great created a naphtha-spewing iron cavalry, to rout King Porus of India and his war elephants. This illustration is from the Great Il-Khanid Shahnama manuscript, AD 1330-40. (Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Edward W. Forbes)
FIGURE 40. Naphtha grenades. These ceramic pots were filled with volatile naphtha, lit with a fuse, and hurled at the enemy. (Painting by Bob Lapsley/Aramco Services/ PADIA)
FIGURE 41. An artist’s conception of naval battle with Greek Fire. (Painting by Bob Lapsley/Aramco Services/PADIA)
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)
FIGURE 43. Hercules struggling to tear off the burning, poisoned tunic. Bronze sculpture by Pierre Puget, 1680. (Jules S. Bache Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Afterword
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)
FIGURE 45. Landscape of Thorns, one of the designs intended to warn future civilizations away from nuclear materials burial sites like Yucca Mountain. (Concept by architect Michael Brill, art by Safdar Abidi, SAND92-1382. Sandia National Laboratories)
INDEX
Achilles
Aconite
Aelian
Aeneas the Tactician
Aeschines
Africa . See also South Africa.
Agari
Akamba
Akatharti
Alexander the Great
Alyattes
Ambracia
Ambrose, John
Ammianus Marcellinus
Animals, in war
Anthrax
Antidotes
Antigonus Gonatus
Antiochus
Apollo
Apollonius of Damascus
Apollonius of Tyana
Appian
Aquileia
Aquillius
Archaeology
Archimedes
Aristotle; Ps-Aristotle
Ark of the Covenant
Armenia
Arrian
Arrows, flaming ; poison ; Scythian ; Indian
Arsenic
Arthashastra . See also Kautilya.
Asbestos
Assyrians
Athena
Athens
Avidius Cassius
Babylon, Babylonia
Baghdad
Baku
Bauer, Aaron
Bees. See also Insects.
Belladonna
Berossus
Biological weapons, definitions
Birds; Dikairon
Boeotians
Britain
Caesar, Julius
Cairo
Calmatives
Cambyse
s
Camels
Carlsbad, New Mexico
Carthage . See also Hannibal.
Catapults
Cato,
Cedrenus
Celsus
Celts. See also Gauls.
Centaurs
Chandragupta, King
Characitani
Chemical weapons, definitions
China
Chrysame
Chryse, desert island; town near Troy
Churchill, Winston
CIA
Cicero
Cimmerians
Circe
Claudius Marcellus
Clearchus
Cnopus
Colchis
Collateral damage. See Friendly fire.
Combustible chemicals. See Fire; Napalm; Petroleum; Pitch; Quicklime; Sulphur
Commodus
Constantine
Constantinople
Contagion. See Disease; Plague.
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