Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World

Adrienne Mayor

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691211091
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

A gripping and groundbreaking history of how ancient cultures developed and used biological, chemical, and other unconventional weapons of war Flamethrowers, poison gases, incendiary bombs, the large-scale spreading of disease: are these terrifying agents of warfare modern inventions? Not by a long shot. In this riveting history of the origins of unconventional war, Adrienne Mayor shows that cultures around the world have used biological and chemical weapons for thousands of years—and debated the morality of doing so. Drawing extraordinary connections between the mythical worlds of Hercules and the Trojan War, the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides, and modern methods of war and terrorism, this richly illustrated history catapults readers into the dark and fascinating realm of ancient war and mythic treachery.

CHAPTER 1

HERACLES AND THE HYDRA

THE INVENTION OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

The poison, heated by fire, coursed through his limbs. His blood, saturated by the burning poison, hissed and boiled. There was no end to his agony as flames attacked his heart and the hidden pestilence melted his bones.

—DEATH OF HERACLES, OVID, METAMORPHOSES

IT WAS HERACLES, the greatest hero of Greek mythology, who invented the first biological weapon described in classical literature. When Heracles dipped his arrows in serpent venom, he opened up a world not only of toxic warfare, but also of unanticipated consequences. In fact, the deepest roots of the concept of biological weapons extend even further back in time, before the Greek myths were first written down by Homer in the eighth century BC. Poison and arrows were deeply intertwined in the ancient Greek language itself. The word for poison in ancient Greek, toxicon, derived from toxon, bow. And in Latin, the word for poison, toxica, was said to derive from taxus, yew, because the first poison arrows had been daubed with deadly yew-berry juice. In antiquity, then, a “toxic” substance meant “something for the bow and arrow.”¹

The great first-century AD Greek physician Dioscorides was one of the first to remark on the derivation of the word “toxic” from “arrow.” But Dioscorides insisted that only “barbarian” foreigners—never the Greeks themselves—resorted to poison weapons. His assumption was widely expressed in antiquity and still holds sway today, as is evident in the declaration about poison arrows by Guido Majno, the medical historian whose specialty is war wounds in the ancient world: “This kind of treachery never occurs in the tales about Troy.”²

Since antiquity, the Greek legends about great heroes and the Trojan War have been celebrated for their thrilling battles and heroic deaths in the realm of myth. To be sure, the typical weapons of Bronze Age warfare glorified in the myths—bow and arrow, javelin, spear, sword, and axe—unleashed enough gory mayhem and violent death on the battlefield to satisfy the most bloodthirsty audience. But most people today assume that the very idea of poisoning weapons was a barbaric practice abhorred by the ancient Greeks. Like the historian Majno, most take it for granted that heroes like Heracles and the warriors of the Trojan War must have engaged in the noblest forms of ancient combat, fighting fairly and face-to-face. They killed enemies but remained honorable in their behavior.

But not always. A deeper look uncovers compelling evidence of less noble, decidedly unheroic forms of warfare in these epic tales of classical culture. Mythical conflicts teem with treachery, and secretly poisoned arrows and spears were wielded by some of the greatest champions of classical mythology. This picture of morally unsettling ways of dispatching enemies is usually overshadowed by the larger-than-life figures and their exciting adventures. But once we begin to peer into the darker reaches of the mythic tapestry, scenes of nefarious trickery and ghastly suffering from poison weapons emerge from the shadows.

Upon closer inspection, two of the most famous Greek myths—the story of Heracles and the Hydra, and the Trojan War—turn out to have crucial information about the origins of biological weapons and ancient attitudes toward their use.

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Heracles (Hercules), the superhero of Greek myth, was renowned for his Twelve Labors. In his first labor, he slaughtered the fearsome Lion of Nemea. He then donned its skin and set out on his second task. His mission was to destroy an even more daunting monster, the Many-Headed Hydra. This gigantic, poisonous water-serpent lurked in the swamps of Lerna, terrorizing the people of southern Greece. The Hydra was said to have nine, ten, fifty, even a hundred heads—and, worse yet, the central head was immortal (fig. 2).

Heracles forced the Hydra to emerge from its lair by shooting fiery arrows coated with pitch—the sticky sap from pine trees.³ The mighty hero then seized the giant snake with his bare hands, thinking he could strangle it as he had the Nemean Lion. Heracles was strong but no match for the Hydra. It coiled its huge body around his legs and poised its multiple heads to strike. Heracles began to smash the horrid snake heads with his club. When this proved futile, he drew his sword to chop them off.

The most diabolical thing about the Hydra was that it actually “thrived on its wounds,” in the words of the Roman poet Ovid. Each time Heracles cut off one head, two more instantly regenerated. Soon the monster was bristling with heads whose fangs dripped with venom. What to do? His ordinary weapons—hands, club, sword, arrows—were useless. So Heracles resorted to fire. Taking up a burning torch, he cauterized each bloody neck as he chopped off a head, to prevent it from sprouting new ones. But the middle head was immortal. This head Heracles hacked off and quickly buried alive in the ground. Then he placed a heavy rock over the spot. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to point out a colossal boulder on the road to Lerna, marking the place where Heracles had entombed the Hydra’s living head.

FIG. 2. Heracles and the Hydra. Heracles (left) chops off the heads, while his companion (right) cauterizes the necks with torches. Attic red-figure volute krater, 480–470 BC, attributed to the Kleophrades Painter, 84.AE.974. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.

Heracles was a hunter who took trophies. He had fashioned his signature hooded cape from the skin of the Nemean Lion. After slaying the Hydra, Heracles slashed open the body and dipped his arrows in the potent venom of the monstrous serpent (fig. 3). Ever after, Heracles’s oversized quiver carried a seemingly endless supply of arrows made superdeadly by Hydra venom.⁴

FIG. 3. Heracles killing the Hydra; Athena holds out a small vial to collect the venom for poisoning his arrows. Corinthian aryballos, about 590 BC, 92.AE.4. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.

By steeping his arrows in the monster’s venom, Heracles created the first biological weapon. The inspiration flowed naturally from his previous idea for magnifying the power of his arrows, by coating them in pine resin to create noxious fire and fumes (in essence, a chemical weapon). Heracles appropriated the Hydra’s natural weapon of deadly venom to enhance his own weapons. Since myths often coalesced around a core of historical and scientific realities, the ancient story of the Hydra arrows suggests that projectile weapons tipped with combustible and toxic substances must have been known very early in Greek history.

Notably, the descriptions of poisoned wounds in the myths of Heracles—and the Trojan War—accurately depict the very real effects of snake venom and other known arrow toxins. In historical accounts of the ancient use of poison projectiles, archers concocted effective arrow poisons from a variety of pernicious ingredients, including viper venom. It is interesting that, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, Heracles was the cultural founder of the Scythians, real-life nomadic horse archers of the steppes who were feared for their snake-poison arrows.⁵

The mythical lore that grew up around Heracles’s invention of snake-venom arrows reveals the complex attitudes of the ancient Greeks toward weapons that delivered hidden poisons. Deep misgivings were expressed in the earliest myths about warriors who destroyed their enemies with toxic weapons. Many mythological characters succumbed to Heracles’s arrows. Almost as soon as they were created, however, the poison weapons set in motion a relentless train of tragedies for Heracles and the Greeks—not to mention the Greeks’ enemies, the Trojans. With the very first deployment of his newly discovered biological weapons, Heracles proved powerless to avoid hurting his own friends and innocent bystanders.

The first victims included some of Heracles’s oldest friends. On his way to another labor—killing the gigantic Erymanthian Boar—Heracles attended a party hosted by his Centaur friend, the half-man, half-horse Pholus. When Pholus opened a jug of wine, a gang of violent Centaurs invaded the party. Heracles leaped up to repel them, and in the ensuing clash many Centaurs were felled by Heracles’s poison arrows as he pursued them over the landscape. The fleeing horde of horse-men took refuge in the cave of Chiron, a peaceful Centaur who had taught humankind the arts of medicine.

As the Centaurs cowered around Chiron, Heracles let fly a host of Hydra-venom arrows. By mischance, one struck Chiron in the knee. Heracles rushed to his old friend’s side, deeply distressed. He drew the shaft out from Chiron’s leg and quickly applied a special poultice, as Chiron directed. And here the mythographers explain just how terrible a wound from a venom-tipped arrow was: the pain was so horrendous that you would sell your eternal soul for a swift death. According to myth, Chiron was immortal, but the agony was so excruciating that he begged the gods to relieve him of immortality and allow him to die.

Chiron’s plea was answered when the Titan Prometheus volunteered to take on Chiron’s eternal life. The Centaur was released from endless pain, and expired. Prometheus was destined to regret his act, however. When he later stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind, Prometheus’s punishment was particularly horrifying because he could not die. As every Greek knew, every day for the rest of time, Zeus’s eagle came to torture the immortal Prometheus.

While Heracles was tending the grievously wounded Chiron, his other Centaur friend, Pholus, became another unintended victim. Pholus removed an arrow from one of the Centaur corpses and wondered how such a little thing could have killed such strong creatures. As he curiously examined the arrow, it slipped from his hand and dropped on his leg (see plate 2). He was mortally wounded, and Heracles sorrowfully buried yet another victim of “collateral damage.”

The danger of self-inflicted wounds or accidents with poison projectiles is always present, since even a mere scratch could be devastating. Legendary “friendly fire” incidents, like the tragic deaths of Chiron and Pholus, were favorite subjects of Greek and Roman painters and sculptors. Another innocent victim was Heracles’s own son, Telephus. During the preparations for the Trojan War, the youth tripped on a vine and fell against a spear carried by Achilles, the great Greek warrior. The point struck Telephus’s thigh, causing an incurable, festering wound. The unhealing wound implies that Achilles had smeared his spearpoint with some sort of poison. And as fate would have it, a poison arrow would bring about Achilles’s own demise on the battlefield at Troy.⁶

In the most ironic twist of fate, Heracles himself ultimately succumbed to the Hydra venom that he had daubed on his own arrows. A wily Centaur named Nessus had abducted Heracles’s wife, Deianeira. Enraged, Heracles shot Nessus in the back with a Hydra arrow that pierced his heart. As the Roman poet Ovid stressed in his version of the myth, it is not fair to shoot even a rogue in the back with a poison arrow. As in most mythic tales, treachery bred more treachery, and the venom multiplied in power, just like the Hydra’s heads. The dying Centaur tricked Deianeira into collecting the toxic blood flowing from his wound. Advising her to keep it in an airtight container, away from heat and light, Nessus promised that if she smeared this substance on a tunic for Heracles someday, it would work as a love charm.

Years later, Deianeira, unaware of the potential for secondhand poisoning, secretly treated a beautiful tunic with the Centaur’s contaminated blood and gave it as a gift to her husband. What happened next was the subject of a famous tragedy, written about 430 BC, by the Athenian playwright Sophocles. Heracles put on the tunic to make a special sacrifice. As he approached the fire, the heat activated the Hydra poison. The envenomed tunic caused Heracles such fiery torture that he ran amok, bellowing like a wounded bull and uprooting trees. In desperation, he plunged into a stream. But the water only increased the poison’s burning power, and that stream ran scalding-hot forever after. Heracles struggled to tear off the garment, but it adhered to his flesh and corroded his skin like acid or some unnatural fire.

Unable to bear the pain of the burning poison, Heracles shouted for his companions to light a large funeral pyre. His arms-bearer and friend, the young archer Philoctetes, was the only one courageous enough to obey. In gratitude, Heracles bequeathed his special bow (originally a gift from Apollo, the archer-god whose arrows brought plague) and his quiver of Hydra arrows to his friend Philoctetes. Then the mighty hero threw himself onto the flaming pyre and was burned alive (see plate 1).⁷

Heracles’s agony is a poetic representation of painful death by viper venom, which was often compared to burning alive. Indeed, fire motifs pervade the early mythology of biological weapons. Flaming arrows and searing torches had destroyed the Hydra, and now the Hydra venom was activated by heat and took on the nature of unquenchable fire. The bite of a real viper, called dipsas in antiquity, brought intolerable thirst and, according to ancient writers, caused sensations of burning and corrosion, mak...

Índice

• Cover Page
• More Praise for Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Historical Time Line
• Maps
• Introduction. War outside the Rules
• 1. Heracles and the Hydra: The Invention of Biological Weapons
• 2. Arrows of Doom
• 3. Poison Waters, Deadly Vapors
• 4. A Casket of Plague in the Temple of Babylon
• 5. Sweet Sabotage
• 6. Animal Allies
• Color Plates
• 7. Infernal Fire
• Afterword. The Many-Headed Hydra
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Also by Adrienne Mayor