For more than a week, Achilles sulks while the Trojan War carries on without him. By just the third day of his absence, momentum has shifted decisively toward the Trojans, whose onslaught has repelled the invading Greeks back to their ships. As night falls, a Greek delegation, led by Odysseus, rushes to Achilles’ encampment in hopes of luring him back into the scrum. The emissaries arrive to find the great hero listlessly strumming a lyre, warbling to no one in particular about the great deeds of warriors past. He is excited to have visitors. “Mix us stronger drink,” he tells his henchman.
Libations poured, Odysseus lays out the Greeks’ predicament. Their drubbing that day was accomplished almost entirely by one man, the Trojan hero Hector. Unlike Achilles, whose reputation in battle preceded him to the plain of Scamander, Hector has discovered his talent for killing more recently—“I have learned to be valiant,” he remarks to his terrified wife. In this day’s fighting he was particularly brilliant. When a Greek archer, aiming for Hector, killed instead his chariot driver, he leaped from the chariot, picked up a rock, and smashed the archer’s collarbone, even as another arrow lay poised in his bow. Then Hector roused his army to drive the invaders back, his wild yet determined aspect in the chase resembling, in the words of the poet, “a hunting hound in the speed of his feet pursuing a wild boar or a lion.”
In his pitch to Achilles, Odysseus describes Hector’s battlefield ragings as “irresistible.” And he attributes them, somewhat mysteriously, to a sort of possession, to a “strong fury” that has entered the Trojan hero. Hector has threatened to descend upon the Greek camp at dawn, to dismantle and burn their ships, and then, his quarry blinded by smoke, to dismantle the Greeks as well. Without Achilles, Odysseus warns, the Trojan might very well make good on the promise. If, however, Achilles returns, he will almost certainly slay Hector himself—for the very same “fury” has blinded Hector into believing that no man, not even Achilles, is his equal on the battlefield.
What is this peculiar fury that, in Odysseus’s view, has possessed Hector, spurring him to unstoppable acts of martial courage but also to a mortal vulnerability? It is no ordinary anger. Homer’s epics are awash in anger, with no fewer than nine terms employed to describe all the subtle flavors of fury. In The Iliad, this litany begins with the poem’s very first word, menin, which so famously frames the entire epic around the “rage” of Achilles. But here in Odysseus’s presentation to Achilles, the term for what has provoked Hector to such frenzy—lyssa—is something rather more primal. It has not been invoked anywhere in the poem before this scene, and with one notable exception the term will not appear again during the tale. It is a term closely linked to the word lykos, or “wolf,” and is used to connote an animal state beyond anger: an insensate madness, a wolfish rage. Later, in tragedies, Lyssa is sometimes personified, goading Heracles to slay his family and Pentheus’s own mother and aunt to dismember him. Vase paintings occasionally depict her as a feminine form wearing a dog’s head as a cap.
In the realm of epic and myth, lyssa is impossible to properly define. In the factual prose of Attic Greece, however, the word had a quite literal meaning: rabies. As much as we hesitate (obeying the injunction of Susan Sontag) to deploy illnesses as metaphors, such links can hardly be resisted even in the present day, when the emergence of new diseases—usually originating in animal populations—threatens us with unforeseen manners of death. Consider how inconceivable it would have been to disentangle such links at a time before men knew of viruses, a time when diseases spread by means the keenest eye could not discern nor the keenest mind divine. With this particular convergence, the twinning of rabies with notions of savage possession, it is hard even to say which member of the pair took precedence, chronologically or otherwise. Both were there from the beginning. To link the two states, medical and metaphorical, was natural in both senses of that word. Lyssa was rare, terrifying; violent, and animalistically destructive of others; ultimately (and pathetically) destructive of self. It made creatures maim and kill those closest to them. It hollowed out reason and left nothing but frenzy.
After Odysseus’s speech to Achilles, lyssa makes one last, dramatic entrance in The Iliad. Though he resists the entreaty at first, Achilles does eventually return to the fight. He leads the Greeks to the gates of Troy, which open to shelter the Trojan warriors in their desperate retreat. Odysseus’s prediction is destined to come true: Hector, unmoved by the pleas of his parents, will wait outside the city gates the next day—“as a snake waits for a man by his hole, in the mountains, glutted with evil poisons”—intent on doing combat against the Greek hero alone. On the eve of this fateful encounter, as the king of Troy opens the gates of his doomed city, Achilles pursues the fleeing Trojans with spear aloft, and the “powerful lyssa unrelentingly possesses his heart.”
Rabies has always been with us. For as long as there has been writing, we have written about it. For as long, even, as we have kept company with dogs, this menace inside them has sometimes emerged to show its face to us. But perhaps the most impressive sign of its longevity is this: rabies serves as the setup for one of humanity’s first recorded jokes. (Stop us if you’ve heard it before.)
A Babylonian fellow gets bitten by a dog. He travels to Isin, renowned city of the goddess of health. There, a high priest recites an incantation upon him, and the patient is very pleased with the quality of care.
“May you be blessed for the healing you have done!” the visitor cries. “You must come to Nippur, where I live. I’ll bring you a coat, carve off the choicest cuts for you, and give you barley beer to drink—two jugfuls!”
Perhaps to his surprise, the priest takes him up on the offer. “Where in Nippur shall I come?” he asks.
“Well,” the patient continues, his voice betraying some hesitation, “enter by Grand Gate…keep Broad Avenue, the boulevard, and Right Street on your left. A woman named Beltiya-sharrat-Apsî, who tends a garden there, will be sitting at a plot selling vegetables. Ask her and she will show you.”
Despite these suspiciously difficult directions (keep Right Street on the left!), the old doctor somehow arrives at the garden in question. But it turns out that Beltiya-sharrat-Apsî is the most unhelpful woman alive. And because she speaks such a thick Nippurian dialect, she and the holy man from Isin can hardly communicate. After a tortured exchange, the old woman gives up on the priest in exasperation, and the patient (we are left to presume) is never forced to make good on his promised co-pay.
No doubt this gag, found inscribed on a clay tablet, was funnier in the original Akkadian. But baked into its premise is an obvious question: Why, over an injury as straightforward as a dog bite, would a patient venture all the way from Nippur to Isin, a distance of nearly twenty miles, in order to see a healer? And not just any healer: the cuneiform text indicates the high priest to be none other than the main administrator (šangû) of the foremost temple of Isin—which, again, was the city of the goddess of medicine. Having been bitten by a dog, this Babylonian has rushed off to the equivalent of the Mayo Clinic.
This could very well be part of the joke. Yet ample evidence exists in the records of early Mesopotamia that dog bites were feared for a very rational and very terrifying reason. Nearly two thousand years before Christ, the Laws of Eshnunna—a precursor to the Code of Hammurabi—stipulate punishment for the owner of a kalbum šegûm, or “rabid dog”: “If a dog becomes rabid and the ward authority makes that known to its owner, but he does not watch over his dog so that it bites a man and causes his death, the owner of the dog shall pay forty shekels of silver; if it bites a slave and causes his death, he shall pay fifteen shekels of silver.”
Contemporary Assyriologists have found references to rabies in private letters (“Like a rabid dog, he does not know where he will bite next”); in the omens of entrails readers (a hole in a particular section of the animal’s liver indicated that a man would contract rabies); in astrology (lunar eclipses in particular months were said to portend outbreaks among dogs); and in the Marduk Prophecy, an apocalyptic text from the first millennium B.C. in which Marduk, then the preeminent deity, threatens to abandon Babylon and thereby unleash a series of plagues, the last of these being rabies:
I will send the gods of cattle and grain off to the heavens. The god of beer will make ill the heart of the land. The corpses of people will clog the gates. Brother will eat brother. Friend will kill friend with a weapon…. Lions will cut off the roads. Dogs will become rabid and bite people. All the persons whom they bite will not survive but will die.
Rabies also figures in some of the incantations that were used, as by the high priest of Isin, in attempts to cure disease. One Babylonian list of maladies, in grouping the dog bite together with the scorpion sting and the snakebite, describes the canine affliction as “the bite that grows up.” The surviving incantations against this bite use a curious metaphor to describe what the dog’s jaws have left in the wound: the dog’s “semen is carried in his mouth,” and “where it has bitten, it has left its child.” (Another incantation expresses this with great pith: “May the bite of the dog not produce puppies!”) Given how many contingencies exist in the transmission of the rabies virus—whether the animal is actually rabid and not merely vicious, whether its bite has actually punctured the skin, whether the virus takes root in the nervous system and begins its climb to the brain—Mesopotamian doctors would often have had reason to believe their spells had cured the patient. “Remove the madness from his face and fear from his lips!” one spell exhorted. “Let the dog die and the man survive!” cried another.
One Sumerian incantation against rabies tells the priest to work magic on purified water, which the patient is then compelled to drink: “Cast the spell into the water! Feed the water to the patient, so that the venom itself can go out!” Given that hydrophobia has presented throughout history as the defining symptom of the disease, this prescribed treatment is a bit ironic.
Western histories of medicine tend to favor the Greeks—and understandably so, given the legacy of Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C.) and the generations of medical authors who expanded on his wisdom in the centuries that followed. But arguably the most impressive description of rabies from the ancient world appears in the Sus´ruta samhita, a classic text of Ayurveda, the Indian system of traditional medicine. By and large, authorship of this tome is attributed to its namesake, Sus´ruta, who practiced medicine in the city of Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges. Most contemporary historians place Sus´ruta in the first or second century A.D., though some put him far earlier, and that is merely the beginning of our complications in affixing a date to the work. On the one hand, the text was edited, apparently heavily, by a later disciple named Nāgārjuna, who lived sometime between the fifth and the tenth centuries A.D. On the other hand, the Samhita is said to collect wisdom from Sus´ruta’s hallowed ancestor, Divodāsa Dhanvantari, who by all accounts lived in 1000 B.C. or earlier.
Regardless, the Samhita is a stunning medical compendium for its time. Sus´ruta is best known to medical historians as the father of surgery, and indeed the Samhita documents a staggering array of procedures, from the nose job to the cesarean section. For the eye alone, Sus´ruta’s text includes eighteen chapters laying out some fifty-one different operations, many of them quite sophisticated in the details.
The Samhita devotes nearly a thousand words to rabies, and based on the versions of the text that have been handed down, it correctly identifies many aspects of the disease. It recognizes that humans contract the disease and can be said to display comparable symptoms: “A person bitten by a rabid animal barks and howls like the animal by which he is bitten,” causing him to lose the “functions and faculties of a human subject.” The ancient Ayurvedans also claim the honor of being the first early medical scholars to isolate the phenomenon of hydrophobia itself and to recognize that a human illness progressing to that phase is invariably fatal: “If the patient in such a case becomes exceedingly frightened at the sight or mention of the very name of water, he should be understood to have been afflicted with Jala-trása [water-scare] and be deemed to have been doomed.” (The Samhita goes a bit too far, however, by claiming that Jala-trása is fatal even in patients who are merely frightened by reports of Jala-trása.)
Although the disease is presented as an interaction of the “wind” of the human and the “phlegm” of the animal—Vāyu and Kapha, respectively, concepts that live on today in the practice of Ayurveda—the Samhita recognizes that rabies is fundamentally neurological in nature, and it also provides a fairly reliable description of rabies as it manifests in animals:
The bodily Vāyu, in conjunction with the Kapha of a jackal, dog, wolf, bear, tiger or of any other such ferocious beast, affects the sensory nerves of these animals and overwhelms their instinct and consciousness. The tails, jaw-bones, and shoulders of such infuriated animals naturally droop down, attended with a copious flow of saliva from their mouths. The beasts in such a state of frenzy, blinded and deafened by rage, roam about and bite each other.
Among the vaunted Greeks, the medical understanding of lyssa was not nearly so sophisticated. Reference to the disease does not appear explicitly in Hippocrates. Aristotle does address rabies directly in his treatise History of Animals, though he flubs it in nearly every respect. Dogs, he wrote with an odd confidence, suffer from only three diseases: lyssa, or rabies; cynanche, severe sore throat or tonsillitis; and podagra, or gout.* The philosopher also held the belief that rabies could not be contracted by humans: “Rabies drives the animal mad, and any animal whatever, excepting man, will take the disease if bitten by a dog so afflicted; the disease is fatal to the dog itself, and to any animal it may bite, man excepted.” (Aristotle added that the elephant, generally thought then to be immune to disease, “is occasionally subject to flatulency.”)
In the first two centuries A.D., during roughly the same period that Sus´ruta (if the consensus estimates are true) was practicing his surgical wonders, the Greco-Roman tradition of medicine did begin to develop a comparably sophisticated understanding of rabies. This awareness begins with Aulus Cornelius Celsus, believed to have been born in around 25 B.C. and to have written during the early part of the first century. Almost nothing is known of Celsus’s life, in a civilization that took great pains to document the lives of men it considered sufficiently worthy. Pliny the Elder, the first-century historian and naturalist, believed that Celsus lived in the southern part of France, based on his reference to a vine that was native to that region. Celsus seems to have been not a physician but an encyclopedist who compiled his De medicina largely from the Greeks. But while his notes on hydrophobia go well beyond the silence of Hippocrates and the complete misapprehension of Aristotle, they are hardly more incisive. He does recognize the existence of hydrophobia (“a most distressing disease, in which the patient is tortured simultaneously by thirst and by dread of water”) and pays at least lip service to the fact that “in these cases there is very little help for the sufferer.” His description of the malady ends there, though, and the balance of his account is given over to an elaborate and darkly amusing series of treatments—more on which later.
It was a hundred years or so after Celsus that a school of scientific thought emerged to spur the classical tradition toward a better understanding not just of rabies but of medicine as a whole. Hoping to escape the intellectual strictures of the empiricists—who rejected not only experimentation but all theoretical approaches to medicine, holding that physicians should work based only on what they could perceive with the naked eye—these scholars called themselves the methodists, and they put forward a positive theory of how the human body functioned. That their theory (which involved conceiving of diseases as “affections” and considering their effects holistically) strikes the contemporary mind as largely nonsensical seems to have been beside the point. The methodists’ focus on improving therapy invigorated the whole enterprise of writing and thinking about human health.
The founder of the methodist school, Themison (first century B.C.), and one of his disciples, Eudemus, were both said to have survived attacks by rabid dogs; and either might have been the original author of an anonymous methodist text, usually dated to the first century A.D., that touches on rabies at length. More impressive still are the notes on hydrophobia made by Soranus, a methodist physician (first or second century A.D.) from Ephesus, on the western shore of what is now Turkey. Best known today for his prescient thoughts on gynecology, Soranus also left behind—in his treatises on acute and chronic diseases, which survive in a full Latin translation made by Caelius Aurelianus during the fifth century—a few fairly lengthy sections on hydrophobia and its treatment. Unlike most of his predecessors, Soranus recognized that contact with rabid animals is the only means by which hydrophobia spreads. He even gives a seemingly far-fetched example that in fact might be possible, given what we know today about the disease:
And once when a seamstress was preparing to patch a cloak rent by the bites of a rabid animal, she adjusted the threads along the end, using her tongue, and then as she sewed she licked the edges that were being joined, in order to make the passage of the needle easier. It is reported that two days later she was stricken by rabies.
One gathers that Soranus is drawing upon close observation of quite a few rabies sufferers, given his thorough and plausible list of symptoms, which includes not just revulsion at water but rapid and irregular pulse, fever, incontinence, shaking, and—noted for the first time—involuntary ejaculation. He correctly rebukes an earlier writer for having claimed the disease can sometimes progress over the course of years. He even rebuffs Eudemus, Themison’s successor, for his idea that melancholy and hydrophobia were one and the same. “The victims of hydrophobia die quickly,” Soranus writes, “for it is not only an acute disease but one that is unremitting.”
Throughout this vast expanse of history, the constant threat of rabies—rare yet tinged with horror—served as merely another wrinkle in early civilization’s intimate, complex relationship with the dog. By this point dogs had been domesticated (or had domesticated themselves, as most scholars now believe) for at least ten thousand years, and yet their role in society was profoundly dissonant. Based on findings of teeth and bones around Mesopotamian sites, archaeologists have concluded that semi-feral dogs roamed cities as scavengers, feeding on trash. Yet many dogs were companions, for whose actions a human was responsible, as the Laws of Eshnunna attest. Alongside the other attendant advances of civilization, such as the city and the written word, reliable breeding of dogs first emerged during this period: remains of sight hounds—a purebred line of dogs that persists to this day in such graceful runners as greyhounds, whippets, and salukis—have been found in the region dating back as far as 3500 B.C. Dogs also figured prominently in the spiritual symbology of early Mesopotamia. In a curious connection to our joke, the dog seems to have been most invoked as the symbol of Gula, the spirit of healing; when archaeologists excavated her temple at Isin, the very same one over which the high priest is said to have presided, they found it studded with dog figurines. Later, King Nebuchadnezzar II, writing in roughly 600 B.C., records that dog statuettes made of precious metals were left at Gula’s temple in Babylon.
And so dogs occupied the lowest and yet also the highest rungs in the bestiary of early man: pitiful scavenger of garbage but also huntmate, totem, friend. It is a dual nature that persists into the present day, as one can vividly witness on the streets of any developing-world city, where the collared and the bathed uneasily coexist with the unkept and the unkempt. It is also a bifurcation that dates all the way back to the beginning of dog history, to the very first creatures to earn the name Canis familiaris. Scientists theorize that the indispensable hearth of domestication was the human garbage pile, with the wolves that scavenged there some fifteen thousand years ago becoming gradually more tame. By studying the mitochondrial DNA of various dogs from around the world, geneticists have tracked the site of this domestication to southern China—which means that, based on local traditions and archaeological records, the first dogs may have been bred for use as food. Dog bones found by archaeologists in that region are often scarred with knife marks.
Nevertheless, the dog almost immediately became something more. The uncanny ability of dogs to pick up on human moods and needs is almost certainly instinctive rather than bred, so we can imagine the slow courtship of human and beast as it would have played out over centuries. Without even having to be captured or trained, some tamed dogs would have begun to function as guard animals, alerting humans to potential intrusion, protecting food and other possessions from outside assault. Soon, with training, these ur-pets would have been hunting, pulling sleds, and, eventually, herding livestock—man and dog, creating civilization as one.
Yet the hand that feeds the dog has forever been not merely bitten by it but, on occasion, devoured. In rabies, after all, every dog has a dark side lurking behind the soulful eyes; and even a healthy dog seldom hesitates to feast on the corpse of a dead human, even that of a former friend or master. In ancient India, the ambivalence toward dogs was eloquently expressed in one sacred text called the NisīhaCuū, which says that gods “come to the world of men in the shape of yaksas, dogs, that is. They are worshipped when they do good, and not, when they do not.” Indian literature itself is rife with images of dogs as battlefield scavengers; in one sacred text, hell is portrayed as a place where malign rulers are devoured by 720 dogs with fangs of steel. And yet dogs were kept as pets and bred by the elite, and the favors of a dog were sometimes auspicious. “If a dog comes face-to-face with [a man] in a joyous mood,” noted one ancient work, “frolicking and rolling on the ground in front of him, then…there will be a great gain of wealth [when he] starts on a journey.”
Nowhere was the dichotomy in the dog starker than among the ancient Egyptians, whose highest god was the dog god Anubis and who bred graceful sight hounds—the lithe form of which is believed by some to survive to the present day in our pharaoh hounds. An excavated tomb at Abydos, dating to 3300 B.C., built during the pre-pharaonic Upper Kingdom for an unknown ruler, shows evidence of the ritual burial of dogs, which would become a common practice in Egypt. A tomb at Hierakonpolis from approximately the same time (discovered during the late nineteenth century but then lost) was illustrated in full color with a hunting scene, complete with hounds, and contained the remains of multiple domesticated dogs; excavation of the tomb of Queen Herneith, who ruled a few hundred years later, found the skeleton of her dog stretched across the entrance to her tomb, guarding her home in the afterlife. In art, hounds were often depicted on leashes and as widely present in human society; ancient Egypt was a dog’s paradise, a place where (if we are to believe Herodotus) the death of a pet dog would prompt its owner to shave not just his head but his entire body.
And yet even in Egypt, semi-feral dogs posed a constant threat in the streets of towns and villages; in The Book of the Dead, dogs are alluded to in one appeal by the deceased narrator to Ra, the sun deity, against a force that “carries off souls, who gulps down decayed matter, who lives on carrion, who is attached to darkness and dwells in gloom, of whom the feeble are afraid.” References to dogs as scavengers in Egypt are found not just in the Hebrew Bible’s accounts but in papyri documenting the Roman era there.
Like the Egyptians, the Greeks loved their graceful hunting hounds and considered them loyal friends and companions. A new literary genre, the cynegeticon, sprang up in ancient Greece to extol the hound and to prescribe its proper breeding and care. The most prominent (and likely first) of these guidebooks was penned by the soldier-historian Xenophon, who himself had witnessed the power of lyssa during a military campaign: of a fleeing enemy he wrote, with a hint of boast, “They were afraid that some lyssa, like that of dogs, had seized our men.” After he was exiled from Athens to the Peloponnesian town of Scillus, Xenophon spent his postmilitary years in a happy reverie of hunting and writing, pursuits that converged in his Cynegeticus. He describes his ideal hounds in sumptuous detail: flat and muscular head, small thin ears, long straight tail, sparkling black eyes; the forelegs “short, straight, round and firm”; the hips “round and fleshy at the back, not close at the top, and smooth on the inside”; the hind legs “much longer than the forelegs and slightly bent.” Profound respect suffuses every line of the Cynegeticus. Xenophon chastens the hunter not to employ collars that might chafe the dog’s coat. He prescribes the praise that should be showered upon the hounds while they chase the hare. “Now, hounds, now!” one is enjoined to shout. “Well done! Bravo, hounds! Well done, hounds!”*
Nevertheless, scavenging dogs also roamed Greek fields and towns, carrying upon them the stench of death. The Iliad invokes the dog perhaps twenty times as a devourer of corpse flesh, the first instance occurring in the second sentence of the epic’s very first stanza: “Many a brave soul did [the anger of Achilles] send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield as prey to dogs and vultures.” Hector’s father, the old king Priam, captures the sad irony of the fate that lies in store for him as he contemplates his imminent death at the hand of Achilles. “My dogs in front of my doorway,” he foretells,
will rip me raw, after some man with stroke of the sharp bronze
spear, or with spearcast, has torn the life out of my body;
those dogs I raised in my halls to be at my table, to guard my
gates, who will lap my blood in the savagery of their anger
and then lie down in my courts. For a young man all is decorous
when he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there
dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful;
but when an old man is dead and down, and the dogs mutilate
the grey head and the grey beard and the parts that are secret,
this, for all sad mortality, is the sight most pitiful.
The word “dog” was also hurled as an epithet to decry the shameless man or woman; The Iliad finds Iris slinging it at Athena and Helen of Troy applying it ruefully to herself.
Beyond the dog’s fondness for corpse flesh, it also could succumb at any time (literally or metaphorically) to the frenzied madness of lyssa. One need look no further than the mythic fate of Actaeon, the hunter whose severe misfortune it is to stumble across Diana, goddess of the hunt, as she bathes in the woods. To punish him, she turns him into a stag, prompting a second, bestial transformation that causes his death: his own beloved hounds, seized by lyssa at the sight of his new form, set upon him and tear him limb from limb.
Ovid, in the Metamorphoses—an all-encompassing volume about human-to-animal transformations—renders both transitions with awful acuity, allowing us to experience both from inside the hunter’s still-human consciousness. Actaeon realizes he has become a stag only when he witnesses his reflection in a pool. “Poor me!” he tries to exclaim at the sight but manages only to emit a groan, and thereby learns that groaning, for him, “was now speech.” His body has become alien to him—“tears streamed down cheeks that were no longer his”—even as his mind is left untouched, permitting him to grasp the full horror of his situation.
Almost immediately thereafter come the hounds, formerly his charges but now his pursuers, “rushing at him like a storm.” His conscious mind lingers on each of them, one by one, noting their names and, at times, an endearing bit of detail that only an owner could know: Speedy and Wolf are siblings, while Shepherdess leads two puppies from a recent litter; Sylvia has “lately been gored by a boar.” Some thirty-five dogs are noted by name, with “many more too numerous to mention,” all dogs he has raised and fed; now they charge toward him in a slavering mob, “out to taste his blood.” It is hard to know which of these twinned faces of lyssa is more horrible, in either Ovid’s reckoning or ours: the human becoming animal, or the hunter being hunted by his own treasured dogs.
Perhaps the most enduring ancient symbol of the dog’s two warring natures is Cerberus, that terrifying watchdog whose vigilant gaze and fearsome jaws kept the dead from escaping Hades and returning to the world of the living. Descriptions of his physiology vary significantly in the different retellings—his heads number two, sometimes three, sometimes fifty, or even a hundred; his tail is that of a snake, or not; snake heads sometimes sprout from his head and neck like a gruesome mane. But despite all these monstrous innovations he is consistently described as a dog. A “cursed” or “dreaded” or “savage” dog he may be, but he remains a dog nonetheless, the unmistakable kin of those that walk the earth and lick its inhabitants. He could even be a good dog, at times. As described by Hesiod, Cerberus was quite friendly to the dying, at least when they arrived; he positively welcomed them, in fact, “with actions of his tail and both ears.” It was only when they attempted to pass back into life that he would set upon them savagely, even devour them. Death is a boundary that can be freely crossed in only one direction, and so guarding that boundary is a perfect role for a dog: natural friend on the one hand—or head; savage attacker and corpse devourer on the other; both natures cohabiting inside one vexing four-footed form.
It was more than just the power of Cerberus’s many jaws that was to be feared. In the Metamorphoses, a list of poisonous substances includes “slaver from Cerberus,” along with a creation myth whereby that rabid saliva, sprayed from the hellhound’s lips and flecking a field of battle, gave rise to a notoriously poisonous plant called aconite—also known, tellingly, as wolfsbane. As the veterinary historian John Blaisdell has noted, symptoms of aconite poisoning in humans bear some passing similarity to those of rabies: they can include frothy saliva, impaired vision, vertigo, and finally a coma. It is not improbable that some ancient Greeks would have believed that this poison, mythically born of Cerberus’s lips, was literally the same as that to be found inside the mouth of a rabid dog.
Until just the past century—and even then only in the developed world—rabies has been experienced by humans as a disease of the dog, a peculiarly canine madness that could reproduce a similar, fatal madness in humans. But all the while, the disease also lurked inside another, far more shadowy species: the bat. Indeed, recent research has indicated that bats harbored the disease even earlier than dogs, going back at least seven thousand years and as far as twelve thousand years, far before the first written languages and perhaps even before dogs were domesticated from wolves.
How was this calculation made? The answer flows from two simple facts about how viruses evolve over time. The first is that most mutations in a virus are neither beneficial nor harmful to its propagation; instead, they’re neutral, trivially altering the genetic sequence without changing the virus’s overall fitness in any way. The second fact is that these mutations tend, over large populations and long periods of time, to happen on a predictable schedule. So given a set of related viral strains, a computer can analyze the patterns of genetic difference and arrange them into a rough phylogenetic tree, showing which strain evolved from which and how long ago the divergences occurred. In 2001, two researchers at France’s Institut Pasteur used this technique to investigate a large set of rabies virus strains—thirty-six from dogs and seventeen from bats—and the results were fairly clear: the enigmatic bat, a distant presence for most of the cultural history of rabies, was probably responsible for infecting the dog, rather than the other way around.
This so-called molecular clock research has led to many other insights about the origins of disease. In particular, it’s shown us how many of our worst killers, pathogens that have racked humanity since the earliest civilizations, evolved out of animal populations. Measles, we now know, evolved from a disease in cattle; similarly, the various strains of influenza, as we still see today in our annual flu scares, readily pass back and forth between us and our livestock (for more on this, see Chapter 6). Some of these zoonotic leaps from animal to man have been understood fully only during the past decade or so, as genome sequencing has allowed scientists to trace more precisely the genetic lineage of pathogens. For example, a team led by the Stanford epidemiologist Nathan Wolfe announced in 2009 that it had isolated the origins of malaria in a parasite of chimpanzees, which presumably spread to humans through mosquito bites.
New sleuthing has yielded particularly intriguing details about smallpox, arguably the deadliest disease in history. A 2007 study, headed up by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traced the notorious killer back to a virus in rodents, estimating that it made the leap to humans at least sixteen thousand years ago. What is especially satisfying is the team’s identification of two separate human strains, an earlier and milder version that cropped up in west Africa and the Americas, and a more severe version—the progenitor of the strain that slew untold millions over the past millennium before its eradication in the late 1970s—that emerged from Asia a bit later. This helps explain why the literature, medical and otherwise, of the Greeks and Romans provides little evidence that highly fatal smallpox was common, even though archaeological evidence shows the clear presence of a smallpox-like condition in ancient Egypt. The most spectacular example of this is the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V, on whose shriveled skin can clearly be seen the pustular pattern typical of the disease. (This possibly answers the vexing Egyptological question of why Ramses V was not buried for almost two years after his death, when other pharaohs were interred just seventy days after mummification; either fear of infection from his corpse or a paucity of healthy embalmers might account for the lag.)
Smallpox was far from the only ancient epidemic with its origins in the rodent. Both plague and typhus ravaged by way of the rat, whose fleas would transmit the deadly bugs to unsuspecting humans. For all the emphasis placed on livestock in the development of civilization, the case can be made—and indeed has been made, most elegantly by the biologist Hans Zinsser in his 1935 book Rats, Lice, and History—that human affairs have been stirred far more vigorously by the rat, whose companionship with people has tended to be involuntary on our part but whose omnipresence among us, like that of the stray dog, became more or less inevitable with the emergence of the city. With most zoonotic leaps in disease, animal contact is the spark, but urbanization is the bone-dry tinder; a newly evolved pathogen can’t spread from person to person, after all, unless people run across one another in the first place.
How to treat the rabies patient or the dog-bite victim? Consider the predicament of an ancient physician on this terrible question. The cause of hydrophobia (the bite of a rabid animal) was often separated by many weeks from its effect (the onset of neurological symptoms), and only a fraction of bites—even assuming an animal that is actually rabid and not merely vicious—progressed to the fatal infection. Meanwhile, it was hard to distinguish real cases of hydrophobia from hysterical ones, which were common right up to the twentieth century. Worse, because of the relative paucity of cases, ancient medical scholars often compiled alleged cures from second- and thirdhand reports.
For all of these reasons we should forgive, at least to a point, the extraordinary nonsense that passed for rabies treatment in the ancient world. Let’s begin with bite treatment. Here again the Sus´ruta samhita deserves the most respect. Not only does it acknowledge, without wavering, the fatality of hydrophobia, but it prescribes a treatment for rabid bites—bleeding and cauterization of the wound—that is as sensible as any. (Also as delicious as any: the Samhita recommends cauterizing with clarified butter, which the patient is then invited to drink. It also prescribes a sesame paste for the wound and advises that the patient be fed a special fire-baked cake made of rice, roots, and leaves. The Varanasian patient did not face death on an empty stomach.)
In ancient China, where mentions of rabies in extant texts are relatively spare, the disease does appear in Ge Hong’s “Handy Therapies for Emergencies,” from the third century A.D. Ge prescribes “moxibustion” for the wound, a process that involved burning mugwort, a species of wormwood, and applying it to the bitten region. This was likely to have been more effective, or at least to do less harm, than another of his recommendations: to kill the offending dog, remove its brain, and rub that on the wound.
Among the Greco-Romans, perhaps we should not be surprised that Celsus, the encyclopedist, drawing as he did on many different sources, some of uncertain provenance, should supply us with a far more varied list of dog-bite treatments. These include bleeding and cauterization, but also the application of salt, or even a brine pickle, to the wound. Some physicians, he says, send their patients to a steam bath, “there to sweat as much as their bodily strength allows, the wound being kept open in order that the poison may drop out freely from it.” After that, the doctors pour wine into the bite. “When this has been carried out for three days,” Celsus says, “the patient is deemed to be out of danger.”
Things totter off the rails with Pliny the Elder. As with Ge Hong, Pliny’s thoughts tend to involve using the animal to treat the man. His best-known cure—to “insert in the wound ashes of hairs from the tail of the dog that inflicted the bite”—lives on today in our expression “hair of the dog,” referring to a not-quite-so-dubious hangover remedy. But Pliny thought that a maggot from any dead dog’s carcass would do the trick, as would a linen cloth soaked with the menstrual blood of a female dog. Or the rabid dog’s head could be burned to ashes, and the ashes applied to the wound; or the head could just be eaten outright.
Still not see a treatment that works for you? Let Dr. Pliny lay out some more options:
There is a small worm in a dog’s tongue…: if this is removed from the animal while a pup, it will never become mad or lose its appetite. This worm, after being carried thrice round a fire, is given to persons who have been bitten by a mad dog, to prevent them from becoming mad. This madness, too, is prevented by eating a cock’s brains; but the virtue of these brains lasts for one year only, and no more. They say, too, that a cock’s comb, pounded, is highly efficacious as an application to the wound; as also, goose-grease, mixed with honey. The flesh also of a mad dog is sometimes salted, and taken with the food, as a remedy for this disease. In addition to this, young puppies of the same sex as the dog that has inflicted the injury, are drowned in water, and the person who has been bitten eats their liver raw. The dung of poultry, provided it is of a red colour, is very useful, applied with vinegar; the ashes, too, of the tail of a shrew-mouse, if the animal has survived and been set at liberty; a clod from a swallow’s nest, applied with vinegar; the young of a swallow, reduced to ashes; or the skin or old slough of a serpent that has been cast in spring, beaten up with a male crab in wine.
“This slough,” Pliny adds, “put away by itself in chests and drawers, destroys moths.”
To the credit of Pliny, and of Celsus (with one exception, below), all these proffered treatments address the rabid dog or its bite, not hydrophobia itself. But even the fatal manifestation of the disease occasioned some elaborate and entirely chimerical cures. Oddly, the methodists, whose observations about hydrophobic symptoms became increasingly admirable over the centuries, seem to get more addled when the subject is treatment. Both the anonymous Greek text and, later, Soranus himself wrote of treatment as if recovery were more likely than not. They recommended creating a spa-like atmosphere. “Have patients suffering from hydrophobia lie in rooms with good air well tempered,” remarked the anonymous author. “Massage his limbs,” added Soranus, and “cover with warm, clean wool or cloths those parts that are affected by spasm.” Both authors presented hydrophobia as an acute attack that would often recede in time—a bewildering judgment that flies in the face of observable facts. They prescribed various poultices made from dates crushed with quinces, or olive oil, or ripe melon, or vine tendrils, or coriander. Some unnamed physicians, cited by Soranus, recommend that a plaster be made from hellebores—the flowering perennials—and applied to the anus.
The most remarkable, and perhaps fitting, prescription for hydrophobia is the one offered by Celsus, who, as noted previously, had the good sense to admit that there was “little help” for the hydrophobic patient at all. Yet he apparently could not refrain from offering just one little cure: that is, “to throw the patient unawares into a water tank which he has not seen beforehand.” He explains this method to be, as we might say today, win-win:
If he cannot swim, let him sink under and drink, then lift him out; if he can swim, push him under at intervals so that he drinks his fill of water even against his will; for so his thirst and dread of water are removed at the same time.
If this proto-waterboarding happens to spur muscle spasms in the subject, Celsus recommends he be “taken straight from the tank and plunged into a bath of hot oil.” A patient could be forgiven for preferring hydrophobia to that particular fate.
* In the philosopher’s defense, R. H. A. Merlen, author of a fine volume entitled De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity, surmises that cynanche was actually itself a form of rabies—so-called dumb rabies, in which the afflicted dog, rather than raging, stands mute with its mouth agape. Merlen points out that Aristotle characterizes cynanche as fatal in dogs, unlike any commonly presenting throat malady.
* Xenophon even enumerates, at humorous length, a list of ideal names for hounds: Psyche, Pluck, Buckler, Spigot, Lance, Lurcher, Watch, Keeper, Brigade, Fencer, Butcher, Blazer, Prowess, Craftsman, Forester, Counsellor, Spoiler, Hurry, Fury, Growler, Riot, Bloomer, Rome, Blossom, Hebe, Hilary, Jolity, Gazer, Eyebright, Much, Force, Trooper, Bustle, Bubbler, Rockdove, Stubborn, Yelp, Killer, Pêle-mêle, Strongboy, Sky, Sunbeam, Bodkin, Wistful, Gnome, Tracks, Dash—“short names,” he reasons, “which will be easy to call out.”