COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

• 600 BC: Assyrians poisoned the wells of their enemies with rye ergot, which affected those ingesting it with sickness or death. The fungus that causes ergot produces ergotamine, a hallucinogen similar in chemistry and effects to LSD. Ergot poisoning causes delusions, paranoia, myoclonic twitches, seizures, and cardiovascular problems that can lead to death. Those affected seemed to go mad, which added the terror element and served to demoralize their comrades.

• 590 BC: During the siege of Cirrha, Solon of Athens is said to have used hellebore roots (a purgative) to poison the water in an aqueduct leading from the Pleistrus River. In that same era and area, Sparta used toxic smoke generated by burning wood dipped in a mixture of tar and sulfur during one of its wars with Athens.

• 400 BC: Sythian warriors reportedly dipped their arrows into decomposing bodies or in blood mixed with feces from diseased persons in the attempt to make even glancing wounds fester.

• 400 BC: Writings of the Mohist sect in China tell of the use of ox-hide bellows to pump smoke from furnaces in which balls of mustard and other toxic vegetable matter were being burnt into tunnels to discourage the besieging army from digging. The use of a toxic cacodyl (arsenic trioxide) smoke is also mentioned in early Chinese manuscripts. The Chinese may have developed smoke-type weapons for use in war as a result of their practice of fumigation of dwellings to eliminate fleas (know to have been practiced by the Chinese as long ago as the Seventh Century BC); or, according to other speculations, from the Chinese philosophy that all matter faded into an insubstantial form, which may have led them to study the effects and properties of vapors. Chinese writings contain hundreds of recipes for the production of poisonous or irritating smokes for use in wars, and many reports of their actual use. For example, they created and used an irritating "five-league fog" made out of slow-burning gunpowder to which a variety of ingredients –including, notably, the excrement of wolves – was added.

• 300-100 BC: The Romans used bees and hornets as weapons by catapulting them at their enemies. Some historians blame this practice for a shortage of hives during the waning years of the Roman Empire.

• 190 BC: In the Battle of Eurymedon, the Carthaginian General Hannibal won a naval victory over King Eumenes II of Pergamum by catapulting pottery jars containing poisonous snakes onto the decks of his enemy's ships. This imaginative tactic apparently actually worked. According to a Roman historian:

"At first these projectiles excited the laughter of the combatants [King Eumenes' sailors], and they could not understand what it meant. But as soon as they saw their ships filled with snakes, terrified by the strange weapons and not knowing how to avoid them, they turned their ships about and retreated to their naval camp. Thus Hannibal overcame the arms of Pergamum by strategy." [From "Hannibal," a section of Vitae Excellentium Imperatorum ("Lives of Excellent Men") by Cornelius Nepos]