In 184 BCE, Hannibal led the Bithynian fleet in a naval battle against the Pergamenian King, Eumenes II. Despite being heavily outnumbered, Hannibal had ordered his ships to focus their attack on Eumenes’ vessel. To defend themselves against the many enemy ships, Hannibal’s fleet catapulted clay pots full of poisonous snakes at them. However, whether Hannibal could have collected a “vast number” of poisonous snakes in ancient western Turkey has been questioned.
According to Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos, a few days before the battle, Hannibal ordered his men to collect as many poisonous serpents as possible to fill a large number of clay pots. Emin Bozkurt, a herpetologist at Çankiri Karatekin University, believes that collecting that many poisonous snakes would have been impossible. However, Konrad Mebert, a herpetologist at Global Biology, suggests that Hannibal’s men could have collected a large number of harmless dice snakes if they were particularly dense in the habitat. Mebert believes that if Hannibal had 30-50 men on the job in a habitat where this species was particularly dense, he could have gathered a lot of dice snakes together in a week. While these harmless snakes may not have been as deadly as true viper ordnance, they could have been just as disconcerting to the sailors on the receiving end.
