Mayor Adrienne. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World

Overlook Books, 2003. — 336 p.Weapons of biological and chemical warfare have been in use for thousands of years, and Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs, Adrienne Mayor's exploration of the origins of controversial weaponry, draws 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.Drawing on sources ancient and modern, Mayor describes ancient recipes for arrow poisons, booby traps rigged with plague, petroleum-based combustibles, choking gases, and the deployment of dangerous animals and venomous snakes and insects. She also explores the ambiguous moral implications inherent in this kind of warfare: Are these nefarious forms of weaponry ingenious or cowardly? Admirable or reprehensible?Adrienne Mayor is the author of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times and The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, which was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2009. She is a research scholar in classics and history of science at Stanford University.