Poisoned wine and poisoned air

They themselves often harm those who come against them. Poisoning of wine. Pharisees once prided themselves on having killed a phalanx of Romans by a pretense of flight. They were feasting, as it seemed, then withdrew when the others came on, leaving the meal ready. But the wine was a plot, poisoned with lime quenched in it. Wine is also poisoned with saltpeter-foam, box, hemlock, and like methods; for these, eaten, are enough to harm and to put enemies in a terrible state.

Since then we have taken foods and drinks as allies, come, let us also use air and wind against them. A man can guard himself from eating and drinking from enemies; how will he guard breath, how shut out air? Through these I come upon them.

Poisoning of air. The thrissos is a Thessalian snake, red in color, like a drakontis in length (and the same is also much in Asia; Syrians call it bathanerathan), which is written next in the third pentagon whose signs are of the parhypate of the high, a defective beta and an inverted gamma; and the lion is another snake, different, for it is both small and large, but the small is more takeable for this (and it too is much born in Syria). Let both be shut together into a vessel, safely very tight; and let the sharpest sun look at the vessel. When then they have been destroyed by one another and by the marsh-air and by time, let the vessel, set toward the wind accustomed to carry continuously toward those men, be opened, so that the exhalation from it may go to the opponents, the breeze ferrying into the breaths of those plotted against. Examples of the working: a horse running by will fall, and a neighboring man, and a bird not flying over comes down from the air murdered, caught by a wind faster than a fleeing wing.

If somewhere also against us, either by art of those from a plot, or also from one of the elements, destruction should happen, I have taken the treatment in advance for escape from the plague, having set it out in the skins before these. Themistocles, generaling, promised the victory against the Medes to himself by the sea-fight coming to be of men who would sail round by sleeplessness — this too being a great advantage over the enemies: to snatch their sleep.