- After the mythic Greek hero Hercules slew the multiheaded
Hydra, he developed a technology at the heart of today's most pressing
international crisis. In her illuminating history of warfare, Adrienne
Mayor argues that "by steeping his arrows in the monster's venom,
Hercules created the first biological weapon."
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- Mayor, a folklorist specializing in the early history
of science, is intrigued with the often fantastic devices the ancients
used in war, but "Greek Fire" also excavates ancient attitudes
toward biological and chemical arms that are startlingly relevant today.
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- Toxic arrows were the Bronze Age's terror weapons. "Almost
as soon as they were created," Mayor writes, "poison weapons
set in motion a relentless train of tragedies for Hercules and the Greeks
- not to mention the Greeks' enemies, the Trojans."
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- Most of the ancient world liked to believe it fought
with a code of honor. According to Homer, "Archers were disdained
because they shot safely from afar: long range missiles implied unwillingness
to face the enemy at close range. And long range missiles daubed with poisons
seemed even more cowardly." Yet Odysseus, hardly a coward, returns
home to kill his wife's suitors with poison arrows.
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- Here's the rub that still bedevils us. The rulers of
ancient India were no less conflicted than the Greeks about arrows "barbed,
poisoned or blazing with flame." These instruments violated the "traditional
Hindu laws of conduct for Brahmans and high castes, the Laws of Manu."
But in the Arthashastra, the Brahman military strategist Kautilya advised
his king to use whatever means necessary to attain his military goals -
including poisons.
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- Mayor is comprehensive about the history, ethics, and
science of early biological and chemical weapons. Skillfully combing ancient
texts, she describes cultures as varied as the Scythians and the Chinese
with their chemical fire lances and poison "vapors." Mayor shows
most cultures devised exotic weaponry - and debated their use.
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- Arrows and flamethrowers were battlefield weapons, but
the ancient world also contained examples of biological warfare against
general populations stretching back to 1500 BC when the Hittites sent plague
victims into the lands of their enemies. The ancient world made an important
distinction between using disease weapons for purely defensive purposes
as opposed to "first strikes." While this constraint was rooted
partially in ethics, Mayor argues it also reflected a shrewd understanding
of epidemiology: "The principle of summoning plague for self-defense
may be related to the reality that invaders are 'immunologically naïve'
and therefore more vulnerable to epidemic diseases in foreign lands than
the local population."
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- While the ancient world's arsenal of biological and chemical
weapons was trivial compared with the horrors of the modern world, those
weapons raised the same terrifying moral and political dilemmas then as
now. Is a bunker-buster bomb dropped from the sky more civilized than a
clay pot filled with scorpions thrown into an enemy's cave?
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- Mayor quotes a king in Asia Minor of the 2nd century
BC who was defeated when Hannibal "catapulted live snakes onto his
ships." The king remarked that "he did not think any general
would want to obtain a victory by the use of means which might in turn
be directed against himself."
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- Jay Currie is a freelance writer in Vancouver.
- Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor.
All rights reserved.
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- http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1009/p17s01-bogn.html
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