What Would Happen To The Piles of Corpses After Ancient Battles?

The graphic cost of war

(By John Trumbull (1756–1843) — Yale University Art Gallery — The Death of Paulus Aemilius at the Battle of Cannae, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40826676)

Ancient warfare saw a number of large battles in which thousands of people were killed in a single afternoon. The Roman Empire, for example, suffered roughly 885,000 combat deaths in 900 years of warfare. The Greeks similarly suffered 305,000 casualties over 500 years of warfare. At the Battle of Cannae, a Roman army was completely annihilated leaving 50,000 men dead in the dirt. That is a lot of bodies.

This was a time long before the invention of bulldozers or heavy machinery that could be used to help clear battlefields of corpses. Any attempts to remove bodies had to be done by hand. The more time that passed between the battle and the eventual clean up efforts increased the difficulties exponentially. This leaves us with a gruesome question. What happened to all of those bodies after a climactic battle?

There were three primary things that occurred to the dead in the wake of a major battle.

First, many bodies were simply left to rot. This is a sad thing to consider, but there are thousands of people whose names and faces have been completely lost to time and whose bones were left out to be picked over by scavengers. These bodies would simply decompose in the sun and be often passed over by vultures and other carrion beasts. Unscrupulous people would also occasionally pick through the ruins of a battlefield, looking for trinkets, usable weapons, and other valuables to use or resell. Bodies were usually left because there was no one around to bury them. The Romans would purposefully leave enemy bodies out to rot as a sign to others and as a symbol of disrespect for the fallen.

The scene of hundreds of bodies lying in the mud, soaked in blood and entrails, and being picked apart by scavengers is horrifying. In some ways, modern war is much cleaner than the chaotic battles of the past. Locals would often describe clouds of awful carrion flies that would appear after battles and savage nearby towns and soon the fields were swarming with maggots. The smell alone must have been atrocious. (I have had a single raccoon die in my yard and stink up the whole block. I can’t imagine what a field of hundreds of decomposing corpses would smell like.)