The Ancients - Roman Prisoners of War

Episode Date: April 22, 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 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, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we're covering a really interesting, extraordinary aspect of ancient military history, but also one that, as you're about to find out, can be very gruesome. We're talking about prisoners of war, particularly in the ancient Roman world. Now we're

going to be looking at prisoners of war in regards to enemies of Rome who were captured by the Romans what would happen to those figures but we're also going to be looking at when Roman soldiers were unfortunate enough to be captured by their enemies and what could happen to them then. Now rejoining me to talk through this topic I was delighted to get back on the show Dr Joe Ball from the University of Liverpool. Joe has been on the podcast once before to talk about that infamous clash in 9 AD, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest and that of course will get a bit of a mention in this podcast don't you worry. So without further ado, here's Jo. 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. Oh, 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 confidence 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 competent figures in this discussion and they're captured on the open field i mean what are the main types of competent capt captives in the Roman period? I mean, really, we get three major types that kind of come through. So we see the men who are

taken captive because they've been wounded on the battlefield. And so they're unable to resist anymore. 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 they're 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 Two 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? Would they have their hands above their heads or do we have any idea what they would do? Sophia, would 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. But 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 Jo, 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 that 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 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 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 that are 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 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, 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 kind of the marcomannic wars and things or alternatively in long-running difficult wars so where there's been ongoing like tapharinus's 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 prisoner, 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 cassiberlornis 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 bastion he's now a prisoner of war would antiochus or Cassibilanus, would he have retained any rights in Roman eyes now that he was a prisoner of them? Absolutely not. And in 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 on to 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? Will we benefit from it? And they see that as being sufficient. But Cicero actually tries to work out some of the, 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.

OK, 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 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 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 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 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 Teferinus 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 Teferinus and his men. They go crazy. They slaughter everybody.

And what they would have done to Tacferinus, 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 revolt 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 into 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, 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've 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 exhumate 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. And so then what is the story of the other figure that we're going to talk about, this British resistance leader, Caraticus? Yes, 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 coordinated 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, 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 being on triumphal arches on distant 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 that 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 on

where 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 combatant 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 public display and the triumph if there 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 sp 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. Jo, were these prisoners treated differently? 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 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 Pompeii 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's 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, 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, Jo, 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 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, 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 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 of 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 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, 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 Adenine virus 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 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 via during the Varus disaster and they raid one village and evidently they find some Roman slaves that were captured at the via during 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 Adrianople 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, Jo, 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 Yeah, absolutely. And it's one that I think is important because the fate 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 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 colored 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 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 joe thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.