Help!!!

[Maximus]

I recently held a school talk in a local primary school about the Roman Military, when one child popped up with the following question:

 

" What did the Romans do with dead bodies of the enemy that they killed?"

 

Anyone got any ideas.

[Lost_Warrior]

Just a random guess, but they could have burned them. I doubt they buried them because it would take too much manpower and time.

[Hamilcar Barca]

The ancient sources don't always comment on what the Romans did with enemy bodies but when it is mentioned it seems to have been a number of things. When great numbers of the enemy were killed - such as at Chaeronea or Alesia - they were usually left there to rot or to be eaten by animals, this wasn't as bigger problem as it seemed as most large Roman battles following the second Punic war took place outside of Italy, so leaving a bunch of rotten barbarian corpses out in the middle of nowhere wasn't really an issue. However after the Romans left the region, enemy survivors would often return to bury their dead. More often still were unofficial truces where both sides would take the day after battle to collect and bury their own dead. Other times slaves were ordered to bury the enemy dead.

 

But they were also burned, or buried if the number of enemy slain wasn't to large. During some of the civil wars there are also occassional tails of dead Romans been stacked up on boats, taken out into nearby water bodies, weighted, and tossed overboard (there are plenty of stories of this happening to prisoners as well).

[Germanicus]

I often wonder if Europe is literally littered with battle remains yet to be discovered, I would be out looking for the exact location of the Arusio(spelling) disaster now..... if only I didn't live in Australia, not much in the way of ancient Roman sites or artifacts to be found down here.