Joanne Ball, University of Liverpool

Conflict in the Treatment of the Battle-Dead in Classical Antiquity

Treatment of the dead?

Post-battle: lack of time and ability to bury the dead individually = mass graves commonly used

Other options:

Repatriation to civilian or military cemetery

Removal to neutral position e.g. allied territory

Abandonment

Ritual and compromise

Towton, AD 1461

Athenian repatriation: Thuc. 2.34

Other poleis: battlefield disposal or removal to neutral territory multiple battlefield graves (Plataea Hdt. 9.85; Marathon Pau. 1.32.3)

Romans: battlefield disposal cremation (Livy 27.2.9; Tac. Ann. 1.49) inhumation (Livy 23.46.5; Caes. BG. 1.26.5 later burial (Plut. Pomp. 39.1; Tac. Ann. 1.61-62)

The battle-dead in antiquity

‘[Greek] soldiers fallen in war were buried or cremated at the site of battle’ (Felton 2007: 88)

Pritchett Greek State at War volume 4 (1985)

Low 2003: ‘this Thespian monument... represents an unusual deviation from the regular Greek practice of burying the dead on the battlefield’ (pp. 108)

Low 2006: ‘the nomoi regulating their [the battle-dead’s] subsequent treatment varied from polis to polis’ (pp. 85)

Scholarship

What did the Greeks and Romans actually do with their battle-dead?

Were the actions pre-decided and governed by ritual, or pragmatic responses to individual circumstance?

How influential were contemporary mortuary attitudes?

Non-burial taboos and ghosts (e.g. Pau. 1.32.4; Tac. Ann. 1.65)

Questions?

Greek : Marathon Chaeronea

Roman : Kalkriese (Varus)

Roman fear of exhumation: Pliny NH 7.54

‘And so, six years after the fatal field, a Roman army, present on the ground, buried the bones of the three legions; and no man knew whether he consigned to earth the remains of a stranger or a kinsman, but all thought of all as friends and members of one family’ (Tac. Ann. 1.62)

On the battlefield

Demographic characteristics: Males aged 18-35Skeletal trauma / embedded projectilesCommunal / spatially-linked burial

RepatriationHimera, Sicily

Spartans in kerameikos

Thespiae: cremation and inhumation polyandrion

Himera: 7 inhumation graves, 65 individuals

Krefeld-Gellep: multiple individual inhumations;Roman and Germanic

Roman tombstones: RIB 3218; RIB 3364;

Maiden Castle: Briton casualties

Repatriation

Archaeological and historical evidence are broadly consistent in identifying battlefield burial

Repatriation did occur outside the Athenian world, but may have been in limited circumstances

Greeks more likely to remove the battle-dead; Roman typically only when the battle occurred in cemetery-proximity

Conclusion