Dan Snow's History Hit - Roman Prisoners of War

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

We know all about the battles of the Roman Empire: the opposing sides, their weapons and incentives. But if history is written by the winners, what happened if you lost? In this episode, Dr Jo Ball, battlefield archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, helps to fill in this gap. Jo takes us through the options of the victorious army; to release, kill or capture; and then discusses the treatment of those who fell into this last category. Listen as in this episode from our sibling podcast The Ancients Tristan and Jo explore the experiences of prisoners of war in Ancient Rome, how this might differ if those taken were also Roman, and how we know anything about them at all.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that joyful time of the week when I celebrate one of the other podcasts from the History Hit Stable. This time it's the ancients with the Tristorian, the legend that is Tristan Hughes. We know all about winning battles. Everyone knows about winning battles in the ancient world. Generals went through Rome, had their triumph, all sorts of nice things like that. What happens if you lost? What happened to the prisoners? That is the question asked by Dr. Joe Ball, a battlefield archaeologist at the University of Liverpool. And Joe and Tristan talk to each other all about the losers, the losers of the ancient world. Winners write the history books, folks,

and this is what they wrote about the losers. Enjoy this pod. And if you want to see Tristan in action, he went into action. He went up into the north of Britannia to look for the Ninth Legion, the lost Ninth Legion. His documentary is currently storming the charts on History Hit TV. History Hit TV is a digital history channel. It is where you can get hundreds of hours of documentaries about all sorts of wonderful historical moments. And you get all the audio too on all these podcasts. They're all up there as well with no ads. So just head over to historyhit.tv for a very small subscription. You get the world's best history channel. It's a sweet deal. So head over there and do that after listening to this episode of The Ancients. Enjoy. Jo, it's great to have you back on the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Jo, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Not a problem. This is a remarkable topic. Prisoners of war in the Roman world. And Jo, you do not want to be a prisoner of war in antiquity. Absolutely not. I mean, we think in all different contexts of all of the unlucky people that there were in the Roman world and you know we focus on people who were born into slavery or other people who suffer in the civilian context but absolutely I

think that you could give me a huge range of different things that I wouldn't want to be in the Roman world and I think a prisoner of war whether I was a man a woman or a child that's absolutely right up there in terms of what you wouldn't want to be. I think some of the unluckiest people in the Roman world are the prisoners of war. Well, as a podcast topic, that's music to my ears. It's really interesting. So let's get into the background context straight away, because in this topic about prisoners of war, we're going to be focusing on people who are captured in an open battle. And so Jo, to start it all off, the word combatant, what do we mean by a combatant? Well, in some ways, we're applying our own terminology,

as we so often have to do with ancient military subjects, because certainly in the Roman world, whilst they would have technically seen a division between combatants and other peoples involved in war, our understanding of the difference is probably a little bit more profound and it would have been in antiquity. So when I'm talking about combatants I'm kind of talking about enlisted soldiers, people who went onto a battlefield or went on campaign with the express intention of fighting. So they were armed and they were the ones who expected to be sent into battle or into siege and to take part in warfare now the Romans much like the Greeks they don't particularly make any

distinction between armed soldiers and civilians as such in terms of that one group is fair game in terms of capturing them or killing them and that you know civilians should be left out of these things they're all really just the enemy in ancient warfare but I think the competence it is an important subcategory because we're talking about you know fit armed men able to fight you know They're not in the same way as women and children and older members of the population. There's a bit of a distinction because you're talking about a group that's very dangerous people as opposed to the more civilian side who do get caught up in all of this, but we're not going to talk about that particularly today. But yes, so combatants, we're talking about armed

men within the army who are going out with the expectation to fight. So if we're talking about these combatant figures in this discussion and they're captured on the open field, I mean, what are the main types of combatant captives in the Roman period? I mean, really, we get three major types that kind of come through. So we see the men who were taken captured because they've been wounded on the battlefield and so they're unable to resist anymore, you know, they've lost their ability to fight because of the wounds they sustained and they can be taken alive on the battlefield in some

cases. We can be talking about groups and individuals who surrender voluntarily, so people who have decided right that's it this isn't going well at all I'm out of this I'm going to ask to tab myself out and hopefully get a good outcome, or then we also have ones that are taken unwillingly by force, so soldiers who are attempting to flee a defeat on the battlefield but who were run down and captured usually by Roman soldiers while they're trying to escape from the battlefield and the latter is very much our most dangerous group because they're the ones that haven't given up then usually not particularly incapacitated they'll sometimes have their weapons

with them and if they are being clever and they band together they're still quite dangerous and we do sort of see skirmishing activity after battle between these groups who are trying to flee the battlefield and those people who are trying to capture them and run them down slight tangent then on joe quite quickly because you mentioned how the second group were people who voluntarily gave themselves up now you see if you see world war ii movies or archive footage you see people with their hands up above their heads that's like the common idea we normally get if people are surrendering do we have any idea in ancient history of is that how people would voluntarily surrender on the battlefield they have their

hands above their heads or do we have any idea what they would do we know that one of the basic requirements is that you drop your arms so that you drop all of your weapons and your shield and you go to them so i imagine that hand gestures or arm gestures to show that you are no longer resisting is probably one of the ways that you would indicate it yes you have to get rid of all of your weapons we're fairly sure about that definitely fair enough yeah that makes a lot of sense so let's talk about then the treatment of captives in the aftermath of a pitched battle because joe this isn't the only post-battle activity for the victors of an open pitched battle. No, absolutely. And I think that's one of the

important things to remember when we're thinking about the treatment of prisoners that you've managed to take from the opposition. There's a danger of seeing it in isolation and judging this as if this is the only thing the armies are dealing with in the aftermath of battle but at the same time they've also got to treat their own wounded they've got to collect up and bury the dead if they are so inclined to do that and there's a little hint that possibly they used some of the prisoners that they've taken to help them bury the dead certainly in terms of digging big pits to put the bodies in but as well as those you've also got to tidy up the fields to go and loot weapons and armor from the field or any other valuables as well as sort of physically recover from the battle as

well. So you're talking about this being a very intensive period of activity. There's a lot going on, there's probably quite a lot of chaos, you'll have soldiers that are on kind of an adrenaline high as well from the battle and in a lot of chaos you'll have soldiers that are on kind of an adrenaline high as well from the battle and in a lot of cases we know that the Roman army may only stay camped where it is for a day maybe two after the battle it's an awful lot of activity to pack into an awfully short space of time which is quite a contrast to when we look at say the treatment of prisoners that are taken after a city or something falls after a siege where they have typically a much longer period of time to carry out these activities so that's something to remember as we're talking about something that's got to be happening very very quickly amidst a lot of other activity as well and making room for

prisoners of war particularly if you're out in the open field let's say you're on campaign, maybe you're in hostile territory, and then you realise you've got all these prisoners to look after as well. In the ancient Roman world, was it sometimes very problematic, perhaps logistically, to maintain prisoners of war following a battle? I think very much so. And part of it will kind of depend on the attitude of the prisoners themselves. So if they're quite happy to sit and await their fate, maybe they're hoping that they're going to part of it will kind of depend on the attitudes of the prisoners themselves so if they're quite happy to sit and await their fate maybe they're hoping that they're going to be ransomed or swapped for some other prisoners that's one matter but if you've got thousands and thousands of angry Gauls or angry

Britons who really don't want to be taken prisoner you've taken their weapons off them but all they have to do is get those weapons back and then you have another army within your lines now within your camp or wherever you're keeping them that can be quite a problem so they seem at certain periods when they can they almost seem to outsource the treatment of prisoners sometimes to merchants and other camp followers they're accompanying the army and they sort of say right well we're going to give them to you we'll sell them to you. And then you can deal with them rather than us having to take them into our area.

That is really interesting then. Because we normally think of Roman legion on campaign. You think of the soldiers, you think of the legion. But you've just mentioned there the merchants, the baggage train. It sounds really interesting in regards to prisoners of war, this interconnectivity between the legions and the baggage train and the merchants with regards to the moving on of prisoners of war. Absolutely. So in cases where you have prisoners of war being enslaved and sold into the system, the Roman army will sell them to these merchants. and you do get some accounts particularly in Polybius and some other authors of around that time that you get indications that people are specifically following the army to the battlefields

in the hope of being able to acquire slaves and they go with them and they already have iron fetters and things that they're carrying with them to the battlefield evidently in the hopes of being able to take slaves and transporting them onwards pretty quickly to the slave market. And we do find odd archaeological evidences of this. So there's a hoard of iron material that was found in Germany, I think it was in the Rhine river, and it's got iron fetters with it and they think that those ones were probably taken by the Romans in hopes of enslaving Germans and then it got recaptured by the Germans and then deposited in a river. Wow there you go battlefield

archaeology in there as well in a river that's amazing and you say we will go on to the enslavement of these captured combatants in a second but let's just focus on before we go on to that when prisoners aren't taken because do we sometimes see no captives being taken in an open pitched battle by the Romans? You do and that sort of depends on the scenario as to when this is going to happen or not so in theory either executing or massacring some people prefer as a terminology in reality that's probably the easiest and the safest option for the Roman army in terms of what to do with these captured combatants because as we've said these are men who are still a viable army if they can get themselves

together and if they can get armed again so the easiest and safest thing to do is just to kill them but we do find that you know that has an economic cost and so that's not always what they would theoretically choose to do but we do see situations where they say just no prisoners we're not taking any prisoners at all so it seems to be more common when you're talking about wars rather than wars of conquest it's more wars whether it's a rebellion or where it's an invasion of Roman territory as we see later in the Marcomannic Wars and things. Or alternatively in long-running difficult wars, so where there's been ongoing like Tacferinus' rebellion in Africa or during the first Roman-Jewish war, wars that are associated with a lot of

irregular warfare, reasonably heavy losses unexpectedly to the Roman army, you tend to find they just can't calm themselves down enough on the battlefield to even, even if soldiers tried to surrender, you get the impression that they wouldn't be taken prisoners, they're just massacred on the field. And sometimes sources suggest that they're told take no prisoners, just kill every single person that you can get hold of. But it's difficult because, say, take the battle in Britain against Boudicca. In theory, one of the sources, so Tacitus, says that no prisoners were taken at all, that they were just all massacred, all the Britons that were on the field. But then Cassius Dio says that they did take prisoners.

So it's one of those delightful contradictions that we get sometimes. So do we have any idea how the Romans viewed this horrible action that we sometimes see the Romans taking when they don't take any prisoners at all? They don't seem to have any problems with it at all. I mean, there's no real international law or even domestic law in the Roman world that would prescribe them from doing this. You know, they are allowed to do whatever they can do and whatever they want to do to the people that they take prisoner it's very much the roman sources frame it that it's just the rules of war and whatever happens to you happens to you and they almost frame it as if you are stupid enough to

resist us rather than just giving us what we want and lying down then it's your own problem what happens to you if we enslave you if we massacre you it's your own fault you brought it on yourself and there's certainly no punishment that anybody will get for doing this unless you've been told not to do it by your general but that's a different matter okay well then you mentioned there there was no sense of an international law for a prisoner of war. So say, oh, let's talk about Cassiberlaunus of the Brigantes tribe or Antiochus from the Seleucid Empire who'd been a pikeman and hadn't done well against the Romans. He'd lost in Bassan, he's now a prisoner of war. Would Antiochus or Cassiberlaunus, would he have retained any rights in Roman eyes now that he was a prisoner of them?

Absolutely not. And in fact fact if you are kind of a resistance leader or somebody that they think they can get a bit of mileage out of you're almost going to do worse. So in some cases they will take you in and they will try and use you as a political pawn however they want to but in other cases when you have leaders of resistance campaigns they will treat you even worse. So they'll take you prisoner just to execute you later in a public and humiliating way. Goodness, we'll get onto those high profile prisoners in a second, absolutely. But if they have no rights at all, but I'd like to bring in one figure at the moment. And that's that famous orator Cicero, because Cicero, he has

an opinion on all this. He does. so Cicero is one of the few people who kind of discusses the morality of war in a wider context a lot of other writers just go is it a just war in our case I will we benefit from it and they see that as being sufficient but Cicero actually tries to work out some of the whether they're whether prisoners should be accorded with particular respect or whether you know you can just do whatever you want to them and he argues that prisoners of war and captives taken in war they should be treated with at least a reasonable amount of respect and they shouldn't be punished just for the fact that they've resisted the Romans so even though you may have called on them to surrender, that you can't take the

facts that they said no at first as being reason to enslave or slaughter them all. But he does make a slight caveat of saying that this only applies if your opponent hasn't conducted themselves in a barbaric way. So he leaves that little exception of being able to say, well, they were being barbaric and bloodthirsty so it doesn't apply to them. Okay fair enough well you mentioned earlier high-profile prisoners of war caught on the battlefield so what could happen to let's say like an enemy leader who is unfortunate enough to be caught alive by the Romans? Unfortunate is definitely the word for enemy leaders that are caught by the Romans. The Roman army they do like to capture these people if they can. Ideally

what they will do is that they will capture the leader alive, they will take them back to Rome and they will display them in public so in a triumphal parade they'll try to humiliate them, it's degrading, they'll often be stripped naked, surrounded by other prisoners of war as well, paraded through the city and then they're probably executed straight afterwards, probably in public if not in some horrible subterranean jail cell somewhere and thrown in a river. So you see this with say Vercingetorix, the leader of the Gallic resistance against Caesar, they capture him alive, they take

him back to Rome, he's in prison for about six years, he's put on display in Caesar's first Gallic triumph when he gets back to Rome and then he's executed soon afterwards. We see the same kind of thing with Salomon Bar-Giora, one of the leaders of the first Roman Jewish war, again he's taken back to Rome, he's imprisoned, paraded in a triumphal display and then he's executed soon afterwards so you do find increasingly that leaders do everything that they can to avoid falling into Roman hands if at all possible so as soon as it becomes clear in the battle or the campaign that they are not going to avoid falling into captivity, they often kill themselves. So we see this say with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, he seems to take poison so that he can avoid

captivity. Same with Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra in particular is well aware that she's going to be paraded in a triumph, one of the reasons that she kills herself. Boudicca seems to commit suicide as well according to Tacitus, although Cassius Dio says she dies of illness so we're not 100% sure or Tacferinus the auxiliary rebel in northern Africa he's in battle so his is a quite a dramatic one where all of his men are being slaughtered around him he realizes that the game is up and he's going to be captured and as he's being surrounded by Roman troops he hurls himself and impales himself on the spears of soldiers just because he doesn't want to end up in the hands of the Romans and given how much they hated him so this is mainly under the reign of Tiberius and

they absolutely hate Tequerenus and you see in the accounts of the war you get hints of just Roman soldiers suffer so much through ambushes and little skirmishes and little attacks that when they finally do manage to get into battle against Tecferinus and his men they go crazy they slaughter everybody and what they would have done to Tecferinus I do not know I think he was quite sensible to impale himself on a spear. I mean Tecferinus I do not know I think he was quite sensible to impale himself on a spear. I mean Tacferinus is an extraordinary individual and I have to do a separate podcast on him in due course because he said that is a remarkable revolts in North Africa and they seem like it's a gruesome fate for those high profile leaders of opposition in the Roman world but

there are a couple of exceptions and I'll ask about them now. But one that came to mind actually is not the one in Britain, which we will go on to in a second, because I'm sure you know which one I'm talking about. But it's a king of Macedon, King Perseus, who's defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Pydna. He's the last king of Macedon, this descendant of the Antigonid line, and before that, Alexander the Great and Philip II. Rather than being killed, he is taken to Italy, but he's exiled there. He's kept there until his dying days in a real, shall we say, like a cold it's a real high up prison in the mountains of Italy for the rest of his life. We sometimes do get exceptions like this. Yes, you do. And it's not always entirely clear why they decided to do this,

because they face off against an awful lot of people that they kind of respect in battle as great commanders but that doesn't usually stop them from deciding to ex-accumulate and execute them anyway so it's very strange to do that I mean why you wouldn't just execute them I don't know I understand why you would take them to Italy and put them out of reach of escape or of getting involved in these kind of campaigns again but i don't know why you wouldn't just execute them if you were going to do that it's strange you're listening to an episode of the ancients on dan snow's history it's our sibling podcast go and check it out more after this

sibling podcast go and check it out more after this land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

And so then what is the story of the other figure that we're going to talk about, this British resistance leader Caraticus yes the Caraticus he's a fascinating example really leads a lot of the resistance in the early years of the Roman occupation of Britain again inflicts some fairly brutal irregular warfare on the Romans is eventually kind of run down and betrayed into Roman captivity and he's taken to Rome again fully expecting I'm sure the same kind of treatment as other leaders I'm sure he was absolutely terrified when he was taken there but

he's taken and you would expect him to just be imprisoned and then paraded in the triumph and executed as normal but instead he manages to secure an audience with the Emperor Claudius and he says well you shouldn't execute me because look how good I made you look by my resistance and my resistance being so good because I co-ordinated and the fact that you beat me anyway shows how strong and how wonderful Rome is. And so it would be a testament to your wonderfulness if you let me live. And they fought for it and they let him live and he sees out the rest of his life in quite a luxurious life in Rome. So he's one of the lucky ones. So it turns out you just need to

butter up the emperor and then you'll survive. Yes, if only the others had taken a word out of Caraticus's book, book absolutely but that's all very interesting regarding these high profile prisoners of war i'd like to turn now to arts art of the roman arts particularly in the imperial period because we do sometimes see prisoners being depicted on roman art and roman architecture we do so it's quite a useful supplement to the historical sources which they do mention the taking of prisoners but they're often quite basic outlines of just the prisoners taken I think this is another topic where their readers would have been so well informed about what was going to

happen to these people that they haven't described the process in detail for us because it was so unnecessary so it's quite useful to have these artistic depictions as well and it's really from the Augustan period onwards that we start to see prisoners of war being depicted in public art so you do start to see them under Caesar as well on coins but it's mostly under Augustus it starts starts being on triumphal arches, on distance sculptures, on tombstones, on coins. You just start to see this iconography of prisoners in public art. And they're never shown in a particularly dignified light. So, you know, they're always shown bound. They're often shown in mourning poses, often seated below a Roman battlefield trophy, so it's quite a dehumanising portrayal really, it's meant to emphasise the helplessness of these people and the strength of Rome. And over time,

particularly from sort of the second century onward, we start to see these becoming more and more graphic and more and more brutal in terms of what we see. So you see scenes of torture of captive prisoners on Trajan's column in Rome. Gets even worse with the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome where you start to see executions and beheadings of prisoners that have been taken and this is displayed and there's no idea that this was to shock this is to reassure the Roman public that however brutal the stories that you hear of these northern

barbarians don't worry we're up to it we're conquering them people would have liked to see this which is very bizarre when we think now of you would never put an execution scene on a piece of war art in the modern era but there's no problem really with that in antiquity the only thing they don't do is they never show Roman soldiers as captives. It's only ever non-Romans that are shown in this way. We'll definitely go on to those civil wars in a second then, and what it was like when it was Roman versus Roman on the battlefield. But let's talk then about these prisoners who were not from Rome,

not from the Roman Empire, as it were. We talked earlier about how a competentant prisoner, a fighting fit, normally a young man, if they were captured and they were enslaved what kind of fates could await one of these combatant prisoners? Yeah so enslavement is probably the most common fate of captives from war in general. I think it's a little bit less common myself for soldiers that are captured on the battlefield but certainly we do see men who are captured ending up in the slavery system and it would depend really on how good fighters they were, what they looked like and how much of a threat they are. So the Romans they like taking sort of the most fearsome or the most beautiful of the

captives that they take. They'll quite happily send those to Rome and they will be part of the most fearsome or the most beautiful of the captives that they take they'll quite happily send those to Rome and they will be part of the public display and the triumph if one is held so I don't know whether that would be a good fate or a bad fate for you as a combatant prisoner you can also end up quite frequently if you're a good fighter you can end up in the gladiatorial arena which is a good way to put on a good display for your people and it's like executing the prisoners but without actually having to do it all in one go you can get there and get a good show out of it as well but it's going to be a

difficult thing because as we've already said these are an army still if you've got you know you may have hundreds even thousands of these prisoners that you've taken in theory so it's very difficult to know how safe this actually would have been for them it's one thing to say oh we've enslaved the women and the children but to say oh we're going to take these men and we're just going to take out the sword off them and then that's fine they're slaves now i'm sure slave revolts such as that of spartacus would have warned them about the dangers of having masses of fighting fit, military trained slaves out there in the system. It is a danger. That's all very interesting. So we've talked about the enslavement.

We've talked about the gladiators and what possible fates awaited those who were captured on the field and then became slaves. People who weren't Roman. But let's focus on the civil wars, the Roman civil wars now and prisoners of war in civil wars. Joe, were these prisoners treated differently? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed

not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Absolutely. You have the problem in a civil war that the slavery option really is taken off the table when you're talking about a civil war. So one of the defining quotes of this comes from Tacitus who points out that in civil wars captives are not turned to profit. So you cannot take them

and enslave them as Roman citizens. That's just not something you can do even though they are fighting on a different faction and they may be associated with an emperor that's now been deposed you can't get away with enslaving them so really you have to execute them well I say you have to so in the republican period we don't see this as much we see so in Caesar's civil wars with Pompey there's a lot more forgiving of soldiers and especially if they'll come over and fight on your side. Caesar is quite a good example of this because he does seem to offer forgiveness to Pompey's soldiers quite a lot and it's almost as though master statesman that he was. He's got one eye on what happens after the war that he wants to portray himself as

a statesman of reconciliation and he doesn't want his name to be forever tarnished as somebody who slaughtered so many other Roman citizens. But this system kind of begins to fall apart from in the Imperial period. So even by the Civil War in AD 69 you just have that they're just killed and you can't risk letting them go so you just massacre as many of them on the battlefield as you can and then quite often you leave them unburied as well just to add insults to injury so from what you're saying there joe we do have examples of them being more merciful towards roman prisoners of war in civil wars but almost as the imperial period

goes on you mentioned 69 AD then and going on from that do we still get examples of just massacres following or do we sometimes see mercy being shown you do sometimes see that mercy where they can do but it's the same situation as you have with enslaving non-roman prisoners is you've got to be sure that if you let them go that they're not just going to turn on you that just you know return back into your opposition army and come back up against you so it's a very different balancing act and you've got to try and work out all of the different possible permutations and one of the ways to deal with it in theory would be to mutilate them so to chop off their sword hand or something but they don't particularly like that idea either and you get more in the Greek sources than in the

Roman but you do find instances where soldiers would rather be executed than have their hand removed because it's just such a crippling debilitating thing so it's not actually that great of an option either but it's just very difficult in the Civil War to try and work out what's going to be the best. And especially if you win, what do you then do with all of these other soldiers that you have? If you've killed them, you've then got to deal with their families and with the sort of the longer term implications of the fact that you've slaughtered your own people. So yes, ideally, they would like to not massacre them, but that's not always an option, sadly.

You mentioned there the Greek and Roman sources. Now, for this whole topic of prisoners of war that we've been covering for the last half hour or so, how much source material do we have away from the archaeological record in the literary record for this topic? It's not discussed at length, as we say. It tends to crop up in kind of

aftermath narratives where they do mention it but it's notoriously unreliable as well because you have armies wanting to boast about how many prisoners of war they've taken on campaign so whether they're nudging the figures upwards we don't know. There are also suggestions that there may be some falsification of the records so in particular there have been suggestions that Julius Caesar omitted to mention many of the prisoners of war that he'd taken during his campaigns because if the record knew how many he'd taken then the Roman state would demand a certain proportion of the money and so he says that he massacred them instead or he just omits any reference to them at all so that he can keep

all the money for himself. So it's one of those sort of unreliable topics I think so when it does crop up you have to read it about two or three times and decide if you're actually going to trust it or not. Fair enough. We've been talking quite a lot now about prisoners of war in the roman world but let's flip the tables as it were how did non-roman forces if they defeated a roman force how did they treat any roman captives that befell into their hands now it's a very interesting subject because really we don't have any first-hand accounts of this we get this filtered through roman perceptions unfortunately with the slight exception of josephus who does give us kind of the non-roman perspective in the context of the first roman jewish war the rest of the time

we're reliant on roman sources reporting what their enemy does back in their own lines to roman soldiers that they've captured but with that proviso kind of heading it. The Romans they don't like when their soldiers are taken prisoner one little bit so even though in the context of their enemies when they say oh well what happens to you when you're made a prisoner of war it's the rules of war it's just what happens but they're very hesitant to apply that to themselves they don't just accept that as being the laws of war or the rules of war and they get quite upset about it so there's a perception quite strongly held in Roman society it seems to be that Roman soldiers shouldn't be taken alive they shouldn't ever end

up as prisoners they should fight to the death on the battlefield if that's how it's going or you should commit suicide as soon as it's clear that you are going to be taken prisoner. So there's almost a great societal shame and stigma to being taken prisoner as a Roman soldier. So there's an example that Josephus mentions of a Roman soldier who surrenders to a Jewish force because he is about to be killed. So he surrenders, they're about to execute him anyway and he manages to escape and he runs back to the Roman army and he says, oh great I've escaped, I'm coming back, I can fight in the lines again. And Titus says, nope, nope no we're not having you you allowed yourself to be captured you didn't kill yourself or fight to the death so they come very close to executing him themselves

but they decide to let him go so he can live with the shame but they throw him out of the army and they make sure that he'll never fight for the Roman army again so yes there's this big feeling that you shouldn't be taken prisoner, but still some people are. So we have one good example of this is the Roman soldiers that were taken prisoner at the 89 Varus disaster, where we have in several of the sources they mention about Roman captives being taken from there. And the Germans treat them pretty badly by all accounts. So they torture a lot of them, they sew up their mouths and they cut their tongues out and they execute an awful lot of them and dismember them and put them around sacred areas or so we're told. They evidently sell some of them into slavery as well so how long they lasted in slavery we don't know but

there's a record of an expedition that takes place in Germany under the reign of Claudius and they raid one village and evidently they find some Roman slaves that were captured at the Viagra and the Varus disaster and they've been in captivity ever since and they rescue them and they take them back to Roman territories. So obviously slavery is something that might well have happened to Roman soldiers when they were captured. Some of them later on during the second century we get some idea that maybe they're kept as sort of half prisoners, half slaves for a little

while because we see during the Marcomannic Wars we see some Roman prisoners are traded back to the Romans in terms of different peace treaties and as part of sort of negotiations during war but in most cases they don't really seem to be thinking that far ahead non-Roman forces when they take prisoners and in general it's the same situation reversed if you take Roman soldiers and you just take their swords off them and put them into slavery you're just as vulnerable to them coming and and rebellion and fighting their way out so in a lot of cases they just kill Roman captives particularly in situations where the Roman army has been comprehensively defeated so again we see this

in later battles as well such as like at adrianopol where the romans they just say no prisoners just kill all of them and it's quite a good way in some ways to keep yourself safe in sort of the short to medium term as well if you can massacre the best part of a roman army and the force that they've got to replace before they can come back and take their revenge on you well joe this has been a fascinating chat so far and you've been doing a lot of research recently on this topic. Yeah absolutely and it's one that I think is important because the face of combatants often just gets lost in the overall debate about what happens to prisoners of war in general and because they often make up quite a minimum of the actual prisoners of war that are taken overall when you factor in general and because they often make up quite a minimum of the actual prisoners of war

that are taken overall when you factor in civilians and things they often kind of get lost in the debate and you don't really see many papers or articles or presentations when they're talking about Roman prisoners of war they tend to be talking about civilians rather than combatants and a lot of the sort of the big scholarship on this it really doesn't assess the fate of combatants in the context of the battlefield it just goes the Roman preference is for making money out of warfare and you know that they go to war a lot of people are beginning to say that one of the reasons that they go to war is to get slaves and so they assume that slavery is what they will do to combatants on the battlefield as well and I just don't think the evidence supports that when you

look at it in the context of a battle that you just don't have the time or the resources to do this you are stuck often in hostile enemy territory you are potentially surrounded by other forces, you just can't necessarily assume that they will be able to put this enslavement program into place in the way that they would do after a siege, when you've broken already the backbone of the resistance and when you're talking about this I think people are just too coloured by the descriptions of these you know terrible events that happen during sieges and often we do find that they'll massacre the men in that and then they'll enslave the women and children but it's just assumed that they will try and enslave competence where they can and I just

don't think the evidence supports that it's just too dangerous from what I can tell. It is interesting, therefore, that perhaps Joey could say that at the end of open battle, pitched battle conflicts, there seems to have been quite common that there was no prisoners taken following that. I'd say for me, I think that's probably quite likely in cases where it's a resistance or a rebellion of some kind. I suspect that during campaigns of conquest, you will find them being a little bit less bloodthirsty, partly because these are going to be the population that you need for your province to be administered properly afterwards. If you've taken out all of the fighting age males from a population whilst you might be a little bit safer you're also going to have ongoing problems from

that in terms of who then administrates your province and it's not very great in terms of public relations if you turn up to a province and you say hello we've come to take you over we've slaughtered your fathers and your sons and your husbands but hi welcome us in and we're your new leaders now so I suspect that they try and be a little bit kinder when it's a case of provincial conquest and sort of Cicero would have supported that as well because he would have said they're just doing what you would expect and protecting their province but I suspect that in a lot of cases where it's rebellion or invasion of Roman territory, yes, they kill you. For me, I think.

Well, there you go. Jo, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of our sibling podcast, The Ancients, with the brilliant Tristan Hughes, who we call the Tristorian in the office.

If you want to listen to more Ancients, and I'm telling you there's plenty of them, the guy's a machine, just simply go to wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to the ancients. you