Poison, suffocate or burn the enemy: the “ weapons “ unconventional Did not miss the Greco-Roman time. This reality undermines our heroic vision of ancient war.
While Europe rediscovers the threat of a nuclear war and the international community denounces the civil losses inherent in modern war methods, antiquity still appears to us as a different era. A bygone time when all the fighters brandished the same weapons, fought as equals, until a heroic death worthy of the verses of Homer. Historian of ancient sciences, Adrienne Mayor proposes to dispel these romantic illusions.
More than a history of war, the author offers a critical inventory of what she describes, at the cost of a necessary anachronism, of “ unconventional weapons »: Chemical weapons and biological weapons, according to our modern criteria. The technological and scientific incapacity of ancient societies to understand the chemistry and the biology of these weapons did not prevent their conception and their use, as shown in Greco-Roman literature in which Adrienne Mayor leads her investigation, enriched with some excursions in ancient India and China.
The beginnings of the chemical war
The first chemical weapons – to be heard like toxic, corrosive or flammable substances used in war – are attested immediately by the Greek myths. As soon as he had killed Lerne’s hydra, Heraclès dipped the points of his arrows in the venom of the monster to poison his future targets. Poison and arrows were also linked to the Greek language. The etymology of the adjective toxikon – which derives our “ toxic ” – Refer to the arrow (toxos), whether coated with animal venom or plant poisons.
Greeks and Romans also poisoned the water and food of the enemy, as in 478 BCE, when the Athenians abandoned the Persian army their city and its tanks of drinking water, filled with poison. The consul Manus Aquilius, sent to Asia Minor against a Greek revolt in 129 BCE, did the same with enemy tanks. But the master-buyer of antiquity was undoubtedly King Mithridate, who himself poisoned in small doses to prevent real poisoning. In 65 BCE, he placed on the road to the Roman armies of hives of bees having Buttered Rhododendrons. Hungry and ignorant all of the properties of this plant, the legionaries entered this toxic honey until death.
Ancient war chemistry was also that of incendiary substances. Even the Spartans, petris of heroic values, bent during the plated seat in 429 BCE: they stacked wood, suffered and pitch at the foot of the enemy wall and set fire to suffocate the defenders. Bish the tactician, author of several military treaties at Ive Century before our era, offered various recipes for incendiary bombs to throw on the enemy. Alexander the Great paid the costs of this incendiary chemistry during the siege of Tire, in 336 BCE: the Phoenicians launched against the Macedonians a ship filled with pitch, sulfur and straw, whose embraces extended to the enemy fleet.
The old -fashioned organic war
Talk about “ biological weapons Ancients supposes to opt – with the author – for a broad definition of these weapons, as resorting to any living being (and not only to microscopic pathogens) to harm the enemy.
Consequently, there is no shortage of examples, from the nests of wasps catapulted into the enemy ranks, to the elephants of Africa brought by Hannibal in Italy during the Second Punic war (218-202 BCE), passing by the jars filled with scorpions, snakes, glows or bugs, or the herds of sheep, lift Dust clouds simulating the arrival of a huge cavalry. Like modern organic weapons, those of the ancients were likely to turn against their designers ; The Romans who tried to launch lions held on a leash against the enemy paid the price.
Adrienne Mayor pushes reasoning – and anachronism – until considering real ancient war use of pathogens, despite the lack of understanding of contagion phenomena. It thus takes in literal sense the ancient testimonies according to which the antonine plague (165-180 of our era)-a devastating epidemic named after at the Imperial dynasty at the time, and which was more of the smallpox than of the plague of Yersin-would have been caused by the opening of a gold box by Roman looters, in a Babylonian sanctuary.
Seeing proof of the conservation, in sanctuaries, of infected materials intended to punish looters and invaders, seems reckless. The majority of historians see it as yet another moral and religious explanation of a disaster that the ancient sciences were powerless to explain. The author is more convincing when she underlines the warrior use of the swamps infested with mosquitoes – whose ancients guessed the links with malaria – to which we tried to repel the enemy in the countryside. The Greeks of Sicily trapped the Athenian invaders there during the disastrous campaign of 415 BCE.
Ancient reactions and modern illusions
Greeks and Romans tried to adorn these low blows, first by a technical counter-offensive. Ancient medicine put its meager knowledge at the service of the fight against war poisons. The myths still bear witness to this, with the misadventure of the Télèphe hero, injured by his own poisoned arrows and treated by the rust of the Achilles lance. Rust that doctors used against purulent wounds.
To animal offensives, ancient strategists responded with amazing countermeasures. From their first meeting with the elephants of war – those of King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 280 BCE, even before Hannibal – the Romans had the idea of frightening these animals by launching inflamed pigs against them, creating a general panic.
But other responses from the ancients challenge even more: a myriad of disapproving discourse condemning the use of these unfair weapons. Greeks and Romans got along to hypocritically attribute the use of such tricks to the barbarians, who would ignore everything from honor and war “ civilized ». The Scythians, inhabitants of the northern Black Sea, were deemed experts in poisoned arrows, thanks to a mixture of blood and human excrement and venom and putrefied flesh.
The Roman authors, who regularly told the use of weapons similar to their own generals, condemned them each time as a dangerous first time. Using these weapons against barbarians was however acceptable, since they had violated the tacit rules the first. The Greek and Roman authors finally joined on a point that recalls our own illusions: all these unconventional weapons and techniques broke with a bygone era, where war was much more “ moral », Frank and free from these treacherous tricks…
Adrienne Mayor offers in her work an impressive catalog of warlike innovations as amazing as it is frightening, which seriously undermines our romantic and sometimes naive vision of ancient war. Even if it is difficult to follow it without nuance on certain anachronistic reasoning, it throws a new light on a subject that the ancients have never managed to decide, and that our news unfortunately requires us to re -examine.