The Trojan War
Scholars disagree on the level of historic truth regarding the Trojan War, immortalized by the Greek poet Homer in his epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. It is accepted by many scholars that the stories related by Homer and since oft-repeated in film and other media are based on historical events, but separating legend from historical truth is a nearly impossible undertaking. What is known is that in Homer’s recounting of the tales of the Trojan War and the siege of Troy, biological weapons were used by the Achaeans against the Trojans.
These weapons were in the form of poisons which were used to treat the tips of arrows and swordpoints, causing death even from relatively minor wounds. The “divine” arrow fired by Paris at the Greek hero Achilles, striking him in the heel, was one such weapon. Odysseus used the poison hellebore – derived from a plant named for the Greek word to injure – to make the arrows shot from his bow more lethal, as Homer relates in The Odyssey.
Another Greek hero of myth, Hercules, killed the Hydra as one of his Twelve Labors and celebrated by dipping his arrows into the venom of the dead beast, increasing his own lethality. Alexander of Macedon is known to have used poisons including hemlock and hellebore in his campaigns in India during the 4th century BCE.
During the First Sacred War, a historical conflict between the ancient Greeks of the Amphyctyonic League of Delphi and City of Kirrha, that city was besieged by their enemy. In order to expedite the reduction of the city the attackers, who had discovered a water pipe leading beneath the city’s walls, cut the flow off to the city. When the inhabitants were suitably craving water, it was restored by the attackers, fortified with quantities of the same hellebore favored by Odysseus.
The poison, which is obtained from the leaves of plants, caused severe gastrointestinal distress in the inhabitants, weakening them to the point that they could no longer effectively repulse the assault.
The entire population of the city was slaughtered. The use of the poison is believed to have been suggested by a doctor named Nebros, whose direct descendant was Hippocrates, author of a famous oath which begins, “first do no harm.”