Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  Just as using poison arrows (originally intended for hunting) to kill humans tended to raise the hackles of classical Greeks and Romans, siccing hunting dogs on human quarry might have seemed brutal and inhumane to many. But Polyaenus, the strategist who advised the Roman emperors on how to beat the barbarian Parthians in the second century AD, recounted with approval how the “monstrous and bestial Cimmerians” were driven out of Asia Minor in the sixth century BC by the vicious hounds of King Alyattes of Lydia (west-central Turkey). The Cimmerians of the steppes had been driven west by the Scythians and subsequently invaded Lydia. King Alyattes set his “strongest dogs upon the barbarians as if they were wild animals”—which is exactly how Polyaenus characterized the invaders. The king’s war dogs, he wrote, “killed many and forced the rest to flee shamefully.”

  FIGURE 30. Assyrian war dog on a sculptural relief from Birs Nimrud, about 600 BC.

  At the glorious Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when the Athenians and their allies defeated the Persian army to the tune of 6,400 dead (only 192 Greeks perished), one Athenian dog received honors “for the dangers it faced,” along with the greatest human heroes of the war. The dog had served as a “fellow-soldier in the battle,” wrote Aelian, and it was featured in the famous paintings of the victory in Athens.

  Dogs continued to participate in battles up to modern times, and the classical vignette of the trusty war-dog hero at ancient Marathon could serve as the original K-9 Corps tale. Many dogs went to war in World War I, but war-dog training in the U.S. armed forces began on a large scale during World War II. By 1945, nearly ten thousand dogs served in K-9 War Dog platoons in Europe and the Pacific. Dogs also worked as sentries, scouts, and pack animals in the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars.

  FIGURE 31. The heroic Athenian war dog at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) during the defeat of the Persians.

  Canines and other mammals fall into the Defense Department’s category of “Controlled Biological Systems” for waging war with the help of animals. The zoological scope of the program far exceeds Cambyses’ military menagerie in the Persians’ front ranks, used to stop the Egyptian artillery 2,500 years ago. Since the Vietnam War, the Pentagon has funded the classified training and deployment of numerous species of mammals, including dogs, skunks, rats, monkeys, sea lions, dolphins, and whales. For example, in the 1980s U.S. Navy-trained dolphins were sent to the Persian Gulf to patrol the harbor for mines and to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers. In 2003, sea lions, trained to pursue and capture enemy divers with leg clamps, were deployed to the Gulf. The Navy claims that no mammals have ever been trained to kill humans, in keeping with the ancient justification of biological weapons for defense only.12

  The Greeks were astounded when they first encountered trained war elephants in action, at the battle on the Hydapses River, where Alexander the Great defeated King Porus in India, in 326 BC. The soldiers were able to rally their spirits and prepared to fight the strange, imposing beasts, but Alexander quickly realized that his cavalry horses were terrified and would not face Porus’s two hundred elephants. He found ways to outmaneuver the elephants with his infantry, by boxing the elephants in and ordering his men to aim their long javelins to kill the mahouts. Hemmed in and without their drivers, Porus’s elephants ran amok and trampled many of their own men. Alexander captured eighty of Porus’s elephants and, seeing how useful they could be, he obtained one hundred more in subsequent campaigns in India.

  According to legends that grew up around the figure of Alexander, he devised another brilliant plan to deflect the ranks of living tanks. As they story goes, Alexander piled up all the bronze statues and armor that he had taken as booty during his conquests so far and heated them over a fire until they were red-hot. (In reality, the Greeks brought very little booty with them over the Khyber Pass.) Then he set up the statues and shields like a wall in front of the elephants. When Porus sent forth his elephants, they made straight for the heated statues, taking them for enemy soldiers. As the beasts smashed into the statues, “their muzzles were badly burnt” and they refused to continue the attack.

  FIGURE 32. Indian war elephant, with tower of warriors and mahout, detail from a coin.

  Alexander’s Hellenistic successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies, made heavy use of war elephants, which became the glamour weapon of the Hellenistic era. The elephants were carefully trained from birth by the traditional suppliers in India and they were very effective, especially against men and horses who had never set eyes on such creatures before. Elephants could also tear down wooden fortifications. Clanging bells were hung on the massive beasts; they were fitted with coats of armor and iron tusk covers, and carried crenellated “castles” with archers on top. An elephant could charge at fifteen miles per hour (but at that momentum, it had difficulty coming to a halt). The stampeding animals could plow through tight phalanxes of men, crushing them or causing them to scatter to avoid being trampled.

  The Romans were first introduced to war elephants when Pyrrhus of Epirus invaded Italy in 280 BC with Indian war elephants. The “bulk and uncommon appearance” of Pyrrhus’s twenty pachyderms, each one carrying a tower with one or two men with bows and javelins, undid the Romans, and their terrified cavalry horses refused to face the beasts. In the panic, many Roman soldiers were impaled by the elephants’ tusks and crushed under their feet. Pyrrhus won, but with such excessive losses of his own men that he remarked that another victory would totally ruin him—thus the phrase “Pyrrhic victory.” By 275 BC, Pyrrhus had lost many of his elephants and two-thirds of his original forces.

  FIGURE 33. War elephants could cause chaos in enemy ranks, but sometimes trampled their own men in the melee.

  Hannibal’s elephants crossed the Alps in the winter of 218 BC, during the Carthaginian’s invasion of Italy. The North African forest elephants were smaller than Indian elephants and carried only a single mahout—the beasts themselves were the weapons. In the alpine winter, however, all but one of the Carthaginian’s thirty seven elephants died in the snow. He sent for more in 215 BC, but by then the Romans and their horses were not as terrified by the sheer sight of elephant phalanxes.

  In the third century BC, the Hellenistic Seleucid king Antiochus routed the Galatians, Gauls who had invaded Anatolia. In the famous non-battle, the Galatians were overwhelmed by the bizarre sight and loud clamor of Antiochus’s sixteen trumpeting elephants with gleaming tusks advancing on the distant plain. The Galatian cavalry horses reared and wheeled in fright, and the foot soldiers were trampled under their hooves. In the first century BC, the Britanni surrendered to the Romans at the sight of just one enormous elephant in gleaming armor. One of the advantages of biological weapons is the element of surprise and horror that can cause the challenged to capitulate without a fight—and elephants were no exception.

  The war elephant could intimidate the enemy, but the cumbersome animal was so unpredictable that after a time it came to be regarded as a liability rather than an asset. The problems of friendly fire and collateral damage were serious. Apparently, drugs were frequently administered before battle to make the beasts more aggressive, and if the elephant’s mahout was killed, or the elephant was badly wounded or disoriented by something untoward, or in rut, the crazed behemoth would crash out of control, squashing its own men. Contemplating such bloody disasters with elephants in the first century BC, the Roman philosopher Lucretius surmised that perhaps other wild animals, such as lions, were “once enlisted in the service of war” in very early times, with similarly catastrophic results. The “experiment of launching savage boars against the enemy failed,” he speculated, as did “advance guards of lions on leashes.” The brute beasts, “enflamed by the gory carnage of battle,” must have slashed their own masters with tusks, talons, and teeth, “just as in our own times war elephants sometimes stampede over their own associates.”

  Safety procedures were developed to deactivate rampaging war elephants. Each mahout had a sharp chisel blade bound to his wrist, so that if his wounded elep
hant suddenly reversed direction he could drive it into the beast’s neck with a mallet, killing it instantly. This expedient was said to have been invented by the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal.

  “Elephants, like prudent men, avoid anything that is harmful,” noted Aelian. Unlike insects, intelligent creatures such as dogs, horses, and elephants are subject to fear and rational instincts for self-preservation, which creates disadvantages and boomerang effects. It’s an old problem that continued in modern times: in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), the Swedish warhorses fled from swarms of stinging bees unloosed by the enemy; and during World War II, British scout dogs, unnerved by heavy artillery fire, lost their sense of direction and failed to smell out the enemy.

  In antiquity, guard dogs barked at the wrong time, and cavalry horses were spooked by elephants, while wounded war elephants panicked and crushed their own armies. Horses stampeded at the exotic scent of camels—who, for their part, “possessed an innate hatred for horses.” What if incompatible species, say camels and horses, actually met on the battlefield? Pandemonium ensued—and that could work to a clever general’s advantage.13

  Some animal species instinctively loathed other species or panicked at the presence of unfamiliar beasts, and an unexpected confrontation of incompatible or hostile animals could cause violent confusion during a skirmish. Drafting various members of the animal kingdom into human warfare, in order to take advantage of the antipathy between, say, horses and elephants, constituted a biological strategy, in the sense of manipulating natural forces against the enemy. These ingenious schemes had devastating consequences for an unprepared army, but animal ruses like these aroused few qualms about fairness in antiquity. An intelligent commander might anticipate, or even prepare for ploys based on the natural anagonism among animals. Nevertheless, a leader who understood which kinds of creatures would immediately send the enemy’s trained war animals into a frenzy could often gain the upper hand. When inter-species conflict suddenly erupted during a military engagement, some spectacular reverses of fortune resulted.

  In 546 BC, for instance, King Cyrus of Persia was about to meet the formidable cavalry of King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, in Lydia. At the sight of the ranks of skilled Lydian cavalrymen armed with long spears massing on the plain, however, the Persian king’s confidence plummeted. Cyrus was sure his cavalry would be bested. Herodotus tells us that one of Cyrus’s advisors came up with an emergency plan based on his knowledge of animal antipathy. Knowing that a horse naturally “shuns the sight and the scent of a camel,” the Persians unloaded their baggage train of camels, and placed them in the front line, keeping their own camel-tolerant cavalry in the rear. Before the battle even began, Croesus’s proud cavalry was “rendered useless.” At the first sight and scent of the dromedaries, the horses turned and galloped away, snorting in disgust and fear. Many of the Lydian foot-soldiers were trampled in the melee. Ever since that battle, most ancient armies kept a few camels among their horses, to acquaint them with their rank odor.

  A couple of generations later, King Darius of Persia was galled and frustrated by the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the mounted Scythian archers, who made raids and then melted away, refusing to meet the Persians face to face. Darius knew that the Scythian cavalry was superior to his own, but felt certain that he could beat the nomads with his infantry, if only he could force them to stay and fight. Herodotus reports that the Persians enjoyed only one small advantage over the Scythians in skirmishes. Donkeys were completely unknown in Scythia, and during the battles the harsh hee-hawing of these Persian pack animals “so upset the nomads’ horses . . . that they would constantly stop short, pricking up their ears in consternation.” Darius, exasperated and running short on supplies, finally used his asses to cover his ignominious retreat from Scythia. As he slunk away by night, he left behind his donkeys, whose braying tricked the nomads into thinking the Persians were still there.

  As noted earlier, the sight, sound, and odor of elephants threw untrained horses into chaos, and ancient military history records several disastrous defeats caused by horses (and men) turning tail at the novel appearance of elephants. The most famous example occurred in Britain in 55 BC, when the Britannis’ chariot-horses fled at the sight of Julius Caesar’s monstrous war elephant covered in iron scales and clanging bells emerging from a river with a tower of archers balanced on its back.

  By the Hellenistic period, when war elephants became all the rage for the Ptolemies and Seleucids, commanders tried to obtain at least some elephants in order to condition their cavalry horses. In the second century BC, however, Perseus, a son of the Macedonian King Philip V, came up with an alternative plan to prepare his cavalry for an invasion by Romans who were bringing African and Indian war elephants. Perseus had artisans build and paint wooden models to resemble elephants, so that their size and shape would not intimidate his horses. Then he had pipers hide inside the huge mock-ups and, as these were rolled toward the horses, the pipers played “harsh, sharp trumpeting sounds” on their pipes. By this means, the Macedonian horses “learned to disdain the sight and sound of elephants.”14

  Over time, elephants became less of a novelty and ever more creative gambits were discovered to neutralize them in battle. Alexander the Great was the first to discover a surefire way to repulse elephants —by making use of elephants’ natural aversion to pigs. Elephants were admired in antiquity as intelligent and tasteful lovers of all things beautiful; they appreciated perfumes, lovely women, flowers, music, and so on. By the same token, these wrinkled, gray, lumbering beasts, capable of ear-piercing trumpeting, abhorred ugly things and were especially agitated by discordant sounds. Their highly developed aesthetic sensibilities could be turned against them in battle.

  Legend has it that Alexander the Great learned this important bit of local knowledge from King Porus, who became Alexander’s ally after Porus’s defeat in 326 BC. Alexander had a chance to test the repellent effect of swine on elephants in India when his scout reported that about one thousand wild elephants were approaching the camp from the forest. On Porus’s advice, Alexander ordered his Thracian horsemen to take some pigs and trumpets and ride out to meet the elephant herd. Porus assured Alexander that if the pigs could be caused to keep squealing they could overcome the elephants. Indeed, as soon as the great beasts heard the harsh sound of the pigs combined with the Thracian trumpets, they fled back into the forest.

  The Romans discovered a similar technique in 280-275 BC, when Pyrrhus was wearily marching the surviving twelve of his original twenty war elephants across Italy. The Romans noticed that the pachyderms were unnerved by the sight of rams with horns and that they could not abide the high-pitched squeals of swine. Aelian says that both of these domestic animals were used to deflect the elephants of Pyrrhus, perhaps helping to account for his heavy losses of men and beasts.

  In antiquity, the use of special sensory effects—sound, smell, and sight—to terrify war animals—or human foes—was considered an unconventional but fair tactic. For example, the Roman historian Tacitus described the psychological effects of the baritus, the hair-raising war-cry of the Germanic tribes intended to demoralize the enemy. The chanting warriors produced a “harsh, intermittent roar,” which rose to a reverberating crescendo as they held their shields in front of their mouths to amplify the thunderous sound. Ways of producing “horrible sounds,” optical illusions, and explosive noises to disorient and frighten enemies were also described in ancient Indian and Chinese war manuals. As we’ve seen, assaults on sensitivity to odors—the stink of unfamiliar or hated species—could send an enemy’s war animals into chaos, but offensive smells could be directed against humans as well. Strabo, for instance, described the overpowering reek of the poison arrows of the Soanes of Colchis as being injurious to victims even if they were not wounded.

  FIGURE 34. A squealing pig was an effective weapon against war elephants. Red-figure kylix, about 490 BC, detail.

  (University of Pennsylvania Museum)


  The ancient experiments with unbearable noise and odors used against enemies and their war animals have been revived with modern research into “non-lethal” weapons directed against humans. Military scientists have created malordorants (repulsive smells to trigger incapacitating nausea) and very loud, low-frequency sounds, like the deafening rock music that was blasted day and night by U.S. Loudspeaker Teams during the siege of Panamanian general Manuel Noriega in 1989, and again, in Iraq, during the Gulf War of 1991. Even more damaging are new infrasound wave transmitters, which induce hallucinations and incapacitating nausea (and possibly internal injury and death).15

  Alexander had used fire—red-hot bronze statues—and, in a separate incident, noisy pigs, against elephants. Not long after Pyrrhus’s retreat from Italy in 275 BC, fire and pigs were combined in a single devilish plan to repel war elephants.

  In about 270 BC, Antigonus Gonatus, the Macedonian ruler of Greece, massed his Indian war elephants to besiege the city of Megara (between Athens and Corinth). The resourceful Megarians knew the folk wisdom that elephants had a terror of squealing hogs but decided to take a further step. They smeared a bunch of pigs with flammable liquid pitch, set them on fire, and released them. These living torpedoes made a beeline for Antigonus’s lines of war-trained elephants. As the shrieking, flaming pigs rushed the elephants, the behemoths panicked. Made frantic by the sight, the noise, and the smell of the desperate burning pigs, the elephants fled trumpeting in all directions, breaking the siege. Antigonus’s confused rout at Megara must have been one of the most spectacular retreats on record. The sticky pitch-fueled flames that tortured the pigs at Megara were intended to maximize their squealing, rather than to burn the enemy forces. But one could say that the Megarian stratagem of setting pigs afire with combustible resin created the first hybrid biological-chemical weapon.