In the intricate drama of real-life politics, where divine intervention is not an option, poison emerges as a clandestine tool to shape power and destiny. From ancient rulers to modern dissidents, poison exploits our primal survival instincts, striking through hunger, thirst, and breath. The art of poisoning, steeped in history, creates a toxic atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue. However, as the powerful wield poison, history reveals that venom may overcome venom, leaving an indelible mark on events but seldom altering the course of destiny.
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By Howard Chua-Eoan
In ancient Greek drama, when the plot got too intractable, playwrights sometimes scripted a crane to swing a god through the action to carry a troublesome character away. The technique was called apò mēkhanês theós in Greek, or, as we still know it from Latin, deus ex machina, the god from the machine. In the theater of real-life politics, you can’t engineer divine intervention to eliminate an intransigent enemy. Other means are messy: Invasion can sink into quagmire; gunmen betray employers; attack drones fall short of the target; lightning fails to strike. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
But then there’s poison. Many poisoners do get found out but, in its many variations, poison can provide ample room for alibi and denial for those wily enough to use it to manage politics and power. Throughout history, key actors from Augustus Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte to Alexey Navalny have abruptly vanished from the scene. Perhaps the gods willed it. But what’s that whiff of bitter almonds?
Poison is so effective and terrifying because it betrays our survival instincts. It attacks us through our need to sate hunger and thirst, to keep the cold away, to learn, be healthy, attractive — or just breathe. Navalny’s widow has accused the Kremlin of poisoning her dissident husband with Novichok, a nerve agent that can infiltrate the human body through the air or the skin. The toxin had been used against him in August 2020 but he was evacuated to a Berlin hospital where he recovered. He returned to Russia in January 2021 and was almost immediately incarcerated.
In 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after applying what she thought was perfume from a bottle that Russian assassins supposedly used to smuggle Novichok to poison an expatriate ex-spy and his daughter (they survived). The men linked to the attack are in Russia and deny the accusations, claiming they’d been in Britain as visiting sports nutritionists. The UK inquest into the cause of Sturgess’ death has yet to be completed. Meanwhile, Navalny’s body — which may still be in the Siberian prison where he died — will not be released to his family for another two weeks. Moscow has called all the Novichok allegations absurd.
As it is, we fret about the venomous effects of microplastics in our drinking water and processed foods, the nefarious amount of carbon in the air, the insidiousness of sun on your skin. That’s the shared toxic atmosphere we all brave every day. But what if you believe you’re the object of rancor, that someone somewhere is slowly applying a drip-drip-drip of toxin against you?
To offset that anxiety, the powerful have often had food tasters at their service. But precautions can tip into paranoia. Mithridates, who was king of Pontus in what is now Turkey in the second century BCE, was so afraid of being poisoned that he proactively tried to inoculate himself with microdoses of toxins. As the legend goes, after he was defeated by the Romans and desperately besieged, he tried to commit suicide by poison but couldn’t because he had become immune to so many.
Reasonable doubt makes murder by poison attractive to villains. The most efficient poisonings are those that can never be proved. Many believe that Catherine de Medici, Catholic queen of France, got rid of a rival — the Protestant queen of Navarre — with a gift of gloves treated with toxic perfume. For a while, the French called arsenic poudre de succession — succession powder. There is no proof that Livia poisoned her husband Augustus Caesar in 14 CE so her son Tiberius (whom he had adopted) could succeed in a more timely manner. Still, she’s been a suspect for more than 2,000 years. The author of a sexually explicit Chinese novel may have eliminated a meddlesome but prurient bureaucrat by gifting him with a manuscript of the book with poisoned pages, which killed the porn addict as he licked his fingers to flip through to the naughty bits. (Umberto Eco had a similar plot twist in The Name of the Rose.) The word can indeed be more powerful than the sword — with a little help from toxicology.
After his death in 1821 on St. Helena as a British prisoner, Napoleon returned to a hero’s funeral in France, where suspicions arose that he’d been poisoned. His body was remarkably well preserved in spite of the long voyage from the island in the south Atlantic. The whispers were of arsenic, which has the effect of slowing the decay of corpses. The chemical also persists in human remains long past death. Recent examinations of the French emperor’s hair have shown high amounts of the substance.
Napoleon’s death ended any possibility of another military comeback (remember Elba). But does that mean he was deliberately poisoned by his captors? There appears to have been a large amount of arsenic in the paint used in his house in St. Helena. But there were also toxins in the medication that doctors prescribed for his stomach distress — treatments containing forms of cyanide, mercury and antimony that were entirely acceptable at the time. Perhaps, the regular course of trying to keep Napoleon alive was enough to kill him. Or not.
There is an antidote for Novichok. It’s a substance with a history as old as Western civilization. Atropine is an alkaloid derived from the roots of the plant atropa belladona, the first word deriving from Atropos, the most inexorable of the three Fates of Greek mythology — she who cuts the thread to mark the length of a human life. The plant’s other name is deadly nightshade. The Greeks who inspired deus ex machina also provided the root for the word pharmaceutical. It’s double-edged: Pharmakon means both remedy and poison.
So, poisoners beware: Venom overcomes venom. You may get away with murder, but more often than not, the crime only takes control of events, not history in the long run, certainly not the twists of fate.
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