Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  A geologic solution on a massive scale was proposed in 2002, when plans were developed to bury a huge cache of radioactive material deep under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, in the desert about one hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas. The seventy-seven thousand tons of nuclear material are expected to remain dangerously radioactive for one hundred thousand years. The government hopes to make the toxic sepulchre impregnable for at least ten thousand years, until the year AD 12,000.

  Scientists who oppose the plan point out that the man-made containers, seals, and barriers buried under the rock cannot safeguard the material against seismic faulting, volcanic activity, erosion, ground water seepage, and climate changes over ten thousand years. Ominous evidence at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado, where chemical weapons were disposed of in deep wells in the mid-twentieth century, suggested that the deep dispersal of toxic fluids actually caused earthquakes in the area.

  But beyond the grave problems of trying to imprison perilous materials of mass destruction under rock for one hundred centuries, there is also the necessity of preventing “inadvertent human intrusion” into such storage sites. Most obvious are the immediate problems of keeping uninformed people or terrorists away from deadly weapons burial grounds.

  Since the Russians abandoned the biochemically contaminated Vozrozhdeniye Island in 1992, for example, people living around the Aral Sea continue to salvage tons of military equipment and valuable scrap materials despite the health risks. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is contaminated with napalm, mustard gas, sarin, and other biochemical weapons dumped in the 1940s and ’50s. Public access to the popular wildlife refuge had to be suspended in 2000, while ways to deal with the pernicious miasma are investigated.

  Since 1993, several caches of live munitions containing viable mustard gas were unearthed in a luxury housing development in Washington, DC, and in 2003, an archaeological discovery with disquieting echoes of the vessels of plague in ancient temples occurred in San Francisco when, during excavations of the historic fort at the Presidio, archaeologists unearthed a cache of glass vials. The strange “artifacts” turned out to contain still-toxic mustard gas buried by the U.S. military during World War II. These examples are only the tip of the iceberg: it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of deteriorating chemical munitions lie in unmarked burial sites around the world.3

  But at sites like that proposed for Yucca Mountain and already in existence in New Mexico, the enormity of the geologic scale and vast time frame of toxicity take on cosmic proportions. In other words, the authorities must face the ramifications of their act on future generations in mythic terms. To that end, the government has turned to mythic solutions. Panels of folklorists, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other scholars and scientists were convened to figure out how to ensure that the buried Hydra’s head of radioactive doom will remain undisturbed by human beings over time measured in many thousands of years.

  What if, over the ages, Yucca Mountain takes on a mysterious allure? What if the site comes to be seen as a place where treasure was hidden in the deep past, like the Pyramids of Egypt or the secret tomb of Genghis Khan? How can future treasure hunters, archaeologists, scientists, prospectors, and other explorers, be prevented from breaking the seals of the Pandora’s box inside the mountain and unwittingly releasing the “spirits of death,” as occurred in the ancient temples where plague was once stored?

  Some experts have suggested that frightening legends be disseminated about the doomsday weapons, in the hope that these tales will become long-lasting oral traditions, like Homer’s Iliad or biblical stories. Inspired by Babylonian inscriptions carved on stone in the eighteenth century BC, archaeologists proposed that stone tablets inscribed with warnings in seven languages be randomly buried in the surrounding desert. These messages would explain what is under Yucca Mountain and why it should never be disturbed. But it is doubtful that present-day languages and cultures will exist ten thousand years from now.

  To back up verbal warnings in what will surely become dead languages, other consultants suggest surrounding such places with “menacing earthworks,” such as gigantic concrete thorns or jagged lightning bolts emerging from the ground to convey a sense of menace. Another plan calls for a “spike field,” tall towers of polished granite, engraved with ominous symbols. Human faces expressing horror and nausea (along the lines of Edvard Munch’s The Scream) and pictographs indicating mass death and destruction have been proposed. Backfiring potentials loom, however. And with the tombs of the pharaohs, grandiose warnings, elaborate boobytraps, and terrifying curses could attract adventurers. As with the golden casket in the ancient Babylonian temple, valuable materials like titanium or marble would lure looters.

  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)

  As an anthropologist on the team remarked, the essential concept is to identify the place itself as an urgent message for future civilizations. “We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. But this place is not a place of honor.” What lies buried here “was dangerous and repulsive to us.”4 Such a message would have struck a chord with ancient Greeks and Romans who visited the shrine where Philoctetes had dedicated his poison arrows, or with those who marveled at the tragic statue of Hercules in the burning cloak, listened in awe to the story of Glauke’s death, or pointed out the rock marking the place where Hercules had entombed the Hydra’s head.

  If only it were so easy to extinguish the poisonous miasma of bio-toxic weapons, invented so long ago, by hiding them under mountains of solid rock. If only mythology really does possess the power to warn against the relentless advance of the dark sciences of war. Perhaps there is a ray of hope in the myth of Philoctetes, in his decision to dedicate the dreadful bow and arrows to a memorial of divine healing rather than pass the weapons on to a new generation of warriors. His act anticipates modern efforts to forge treaties in which nations could agree to halt the proliferation and deployment of biochemical and nuclear arms, and turn technological efforts to alleviating human suffering.

  One can only hope that a deeper understanding of toxic warfare’s mythic origins and earliest historic realities might help divert the drive to transform all nature into a deadly arsenal into the search for better ways to heal. Then Appian’s sorrowful words about war, “They left nothing untried that was within the compass of human energy,” could refer to human ingenuity striving to turn nature’s forces to good.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 The chimerical adjective “biochemical” is often used as a catchall term to denote biological and chemical agents in general. Poupard and Miller 1992, 9. Other historians of biochemical warfare accept the common assumption that there is very little ancient evidence for biological and chemical strategies. “Given the potential advantage that could accrue from biological weapons,” comments the historian of biological and chemical warfare Mark Wheelis (1999, 8), “it is surprising that there are so few recorded instances of their use.” The noted biological and chemical warfare authority Julian Perry Robinson (2002) remarks that “the exploitation of disease as a weapon of war is exceedingly rare in the historical record,” as were the uses of poison and chemicals. In her study of smallpox in Colonial America, Fenn 2000, 1573, is typical in claiming that ancient Greeks lacked technical knowledge for carrying out bio-war. According to biological and chemical warfare scholar Cole, 1996, the frequency of poison weapon use antiquity was “minimized” because of ancient taboos.

  2 It is asserted in some histories of biological warfare (e.g., Miller 1998) that the ancient Assyrians (whose civilization began around 2400 BC in modern Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq) poisoned enemies’ wells with LSD-LIKE ergot, a fungus of rye, wheat, and other grains. It appears that ergot is referred to in Assy
rian texts, but there is no basis for the notion that the hallucinogen was deliberately used against foes.

  3 Definitions of biological and chemical warfare: The 1972 bioweapons convention bans “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types or quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” This includes living agents such as insects, and toxins produced from them. For a comprehensive definition of biological weapons, see Federation of American Scientists “Special Weapons Primer,” www.fas.org. Definitions of chemical weapons: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 1971 and 1975, 202-6. See also history and definitions of biological and chemical weapons at www.cbwinfo.com. Robertson and Robertson 1995, 369, exclude forcing enemies into “unsanitary” areas and bio-terrorism from their definition of bio-war. Poupard and Miller 1992, 9, separate biological weaponry which uses “viable organisms,” from “bacterial toxins and related chemical derivatives of microorganisms,” which they believe should be categorized as chemical weapons (CW). Biological warfare is defined as “the use of pathogens, . . . disease-causing bacterial and viral agents, or biologically derived toxins against humans, animals, and crops,” according to Croddy 2002, 219; on 130 Croddy notes that “while purists would not consider Greek Fire” and ancient incendiaries as “true CW, these early flame- and smoke-producing techniques have direct [and indirect] connections with the modern use of toxic substances on the battlefield.”

  4 Every arms innovation in antiquity was regarded as inhumane and dishonorable at first. When the new catapult technology of the fourth century BC was demonstrated to the Spartan general Archidamus, for example, he exclaimed, “Now what will become of valor?” Plutarch, Moralia “Sayings of Spartans” 219. In the 1100s, the crossbow was singled out as inhumane; gunpowder raised similar criticism in the 1300s. But “today’s secret weapons had the nasty habit of becoming tomorrow’s universal threat,” notes O’Connell, “Secret Weapons” in Cowley and Parker 1996, 417-19.

  5 Criteria for evaluating attempts to deploy disease as a weapon since the Middle Ages are discussed by Wheelis 1999, 9, who restricts his discussion of biological warfare before 1914 to the intent to transmit contagion, leaving out the use of toxins and pollution of wells.

  6 Poison weapons have “long been regarded as peculiarly reprehensible [and] subject to express prohibition since ancient times,” in Greece, Rome, India, and in the Koran, remarks Robinson 2002. He suggests that this “ancient taboo” reflects a “human impulse against the hostile use” of disease and chemicals that is “multicultural, multiethnic, and longstanding.” Banning biochemical arsenals today “goes to the roots of what humankind finds acceptable and unacceptable.” Indeed, the ancient “taboo may be our one remaining hope” as science and commerce push biotechnology still more deeply into developing “immensely threatening new weapons.” Leonard Cole, discussing the ancient “poison taboo,” proposed that the “moral repugnance [and] deep-seated aversion” to such weapons going back thousands of years helps explain their rarity in the past. But Cole’s claim that “the Greeks and Romans condemned the use of poison in war as a violation of . . . the law of nations,” projects a seventeenth century concept (“law of nations”) into antiquity (see note 9, below). “Poisons and other weapons considered inhumane were forbidden [in] India around 500 BC and among the Saracens 1,000 years later,” continues Cole 1996, 64, 65. Neufeld 1980, 46-47.

  7 Creveld 1991, 23, points out that what is “considered acceptable behavior in war is historically determined, neither self-evident nor unalterable.” See also Fenn 2000, 1573-74. Strabo, 10.1.12-13. For differing views of the development of Greek conventions of war and military protocols from Homeric epic to the Peloponnesian War, see Ober 1994 and Krentz 2002.

  8 Krentz 2002, 25. Nostalgic notions of the ancient “poison taboo” were evident in the late Middle Ages. A pledge taken in about 1650 by German artillery gunners vowed never to employ poison projectiles on the grounds that “the first inventors of our art thought such actions as unjust . . . as unworthy of a man of heart and a true soldier.” From the SIPRI Web site, www.projects.sipri.se/cbw/docs/cbw-hist-pledge.html. Ober 1994, 14; on hoplite battle, 14-17. Hansen 1989. Sallust, Jugurthine War, chapter 11, 101.

  9 Creveld 1991, 27, points out that “war by definition consists of killing, of deliberately shedding the blood of fellow creatures.” Killing cannot be tolerated unless it is “carefully circumscribed by rules” defining what is permissible and what is not. The line between murder and war is essential but never precise. Hugo Grotius, considered the originator of international law (1625-31), condemned the use of poison in warfare as a violation of what he called the Laws of Nations and Natural Law. He argued, citing various ancient Greek and Roman writers (Livy, Claudian, Cicero, Gellius, Valerius, Florus, and Tacitus), that by general consent war is murderous enough without making it more so by poisons. On Grotius and ancient rules of war, see Penzer 1952, 5-6. Drummond 1989 notes that “laws of war are currently recognized as customary practices which are intended to reduce the amount of suffering in wartime to a minimum and to facilitate the restoration of peace.” There is a modern sense that the level of destruction in wartime should be limited to “minimum necessary force.” On Western laws of war from ancient Greece to the late twentieth century, see Howard et al. 1994; SIPRI 1975, 18-20. On ethics of war, see Nardin 1996.

  10 Righteous warfare, dharmayuddha, was opposed to kutayuddha, crafty, ruthless strategies. Laws of Manu 7.90; 92; and 195. Arthashastra: Kautilya 1951, 436-37; Kautilya 1992. Ishii: Lesho et al. 1998, 516. China: Cowley and Parker 1996, s.v. “Sun Tzu” and see review by Sienho Yee, of Zhu Wen-Qi, Outline of International Humanitarian Law (Shanghai: International Committee of the Red Cross, 1997, in Chinese, with an English abstract).

  11 Deuteronomy 19-20. Jericho: Joshua 6.21, 24. On ancient Jewish rules of war, see Nardin 1996, 95, 97-98, 106-9. The ten plagues in Exodus are discussed in chapter 4.

  12 Koran 2.11-12; 2.190-94; 3.172; 22.19-22; 22.39-40; and later Islamic traditions in the Hadith. John Kelsay, personal correspondence, February 2, 2003. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf interviewed by Goldstein 2001. See also Nardin 1996, 129-33, 161-64, 166 notes 25 and 26. Hashmi forthcoming. History of Muslim fire weapons: Bilkadi 1995.

  13 Polybius 13.3.2-6. Krentz 2002, 25. Strabo 10.1.12-13. See chapter 3 for the story of the destruction of Kirrha by poison. Ober 1994, 12, 14. Drummond 1989, introduction. Herodotus on Queen Tomyris, see chapter 5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.49; 3.82-83, atrocities against noncombatants and children, e.g., 3.81-82; 7.29-30. For Aeneas, see chapters 3 and 7.

  14 Cicero discussed just war in On Duties 1.34-6, esp. 21-25, and in his Republic, which only survives in paraphrases in later sources. According to Cicero, war was justified for self-defense, defense of allies, and vengeance. Ovid and Silius Italicus, see chapter 2; Florus, chapter 3. Tacitus, Germania 43. Vegetius, On Military Matters 3. On changing rules of war in the Roman Empire, see Drummond 1989, a case study of the period AD 353 to 378.

  15 Self-defense in extremity and last resorts: Nardin 1996, 28-29, 86-88. Roman Stoic commanders idealized Odysseus: Krentz and Wheeler introduction to Polyaenus, 1:vi-xxiv, esp. vii, xii. On use of inhumane weapons against “cultural others,” see Mayor 1995b; Fenn 2000, 1574. On challenges to rules of war through history, and situations that encourage violations, see chapter 12 of Howard et al. 1994.

  16 “Greek mythology, always a good source of insight,” depicted warriors punished for breaking conventions of war or committing excessive brutalities, notes Creveld in his article on changing rules of war since the Gulf War of 1991 (1991, 27). Whirlwind: O’Connell, “Secret Weapons,” in Cowley and Parker 1996, 419.

  Chapter 1

  1 Dioscorides’ statement appears in book 6 of the Materia Medica, an extensive collection of medical and pharmacology texts attributed to the physician Dioscorides. Majno 1991, 145, 147 and note 38.
Pliny the Elder 16.51 gives the folk etymology associating yew and poison: see Harrison 1994. See also Reinach 1909, 70. Thanks to Joshua Katz for linguistic advice.

  2 Hercules’ struggle with the Hydra is one of earliest myths depicted in Greek art, appearing as early as the eighth century BC. The Hydra myth is recounted in Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.62-75; Apollodorus, Library 2.5.2; Diodorus of Sicily 4.11, and other sources. For a full discussion of the myth in ancient literature and art, see Gantz 1993, 1:23, 384-86. On pitch from trees in antiquity, see Pliny 16.52-61.

  3 The deaths of Chiron and Pholus, and wounding of Telephus: Apollodorus, Library 2.5.4; Epitome 3.17-20, and see Frazer’s notes 1 and 2, 2:186-89. Centaurs dying of Hercules’ poison arrows were featured in many famous sculptures and paintings in antiquity. Places where they had died, polluting waters with the poison, were also pointed out. Telephus’s wounding was the subject of several ancient plays and paintings. Pliny 25.42; 34.152. Gantz 1993, 1:147, 390-92, see also 2:579. Telephus’s infected wound was healed by rust scrapings from Achilles’ spear; see chapter 2.

  4 Death of Hercules: Apollodorus, Library 2.7.7, with Frazer’s note 1, 1:270-71; Sophocles, Trachinian Women 756ff.; Diodorus of Sicily 4.38; Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.100-238. See Gantz 1993, 1:458. For the burning, corrosive symptoms of the bite of the dipsas viper, see Scarborough 1977, 6, quoting Lucan, Civil War.

  5 On Troy, and the cycle of stories about the Trojan War, see Oxford Classical Dictionary, entries for “Troy” and “Homer”; Gantz 1993, 2:576-657; Rose 1959, 230-53.

  6 Homer, Iliad 1.50-70, 376-86; 2.731-33; 4.138-219; 11.812-48. Reinach 1909, 70, points out other linguistic hints of empoisoned arrows in Homer, who often uses words that evoke the imagery of snakebites to describe arrows, such as “biting, burning, and bitter.” See Majno 1991, 145-47 and note 35, on “sucking out of snakebite wounds” in antiquity; see also 271, on black blood indicating poisoned arrows; for ancient treatment of snakebite by sucking out the venom and cautery, see 280. See Scarborough 1977, 6, 8-9, for vivid and accurate ancient descriptions of the sequelae of snake envenomation.