Archaeological and epigraphical evidence, including that reported by ancient authorities and extant remains,9 corroborates the literary sources and again demonstrates that the intent to honor the dead was commonplace and almost always fulfilled. For example, Pausanias records many monuments for Athenian war-dead which show that Athens recorded the names not only of citizens who fought and died on her behalf, but also those of allies, slaves, and even foreign mercenaries (1.29). The location of the monuments, of course, varied with the city-state involved, but usually burial took place in one of three general areas: at home, on the battlefield, or in allied territory. Athenians from various battles would most commonly be buried in the Demosion Sema, but at Marathon Pausanias noted the unusual case of two separate tombs commemorating that famous battle (490 BC): one for the Athenian dead, another for the Plataians (1.32.3). Battlefield entombment, although common for the Spartans, was less so for the rest of Greece. Frequently, if it was neither practical nor feasible to bring the dead home for burial, they would be buried in regions which would treat them with respect; the Argive dead from Hysiai (ca 669 BC), for example, were transported to Kenchreai so that they could be buried in allied territory (Paus. 2.24.7).10
Cult status was also frequently accorded the dead and further reflected the concern over proper interment. Moreover, it was not even necessary that the fallen be those of one's own state; nor is this surprising, given the general panhellenic acceptance of the practices
and customs surrounding warfare and its attendant rituals. At Phigaleia, for example, a polyandrion was erected of those 'chosen Oresthasians' who helped to force a Spartan garrison from the area (ca 659 BC?); Pausanias further noted that the Phigaleians sacrificed to these Oresthasians as heroes every year (8.41.1).11 The Plataians, too, undertook an annual sacrifice to honor all the dead Greeks12 who had fallen and were buried on the field there; interestingly enough, this particular ceremony was still carried out in Plutarch's time, nearly six hundred years after the battle of 479 BC (Plut. Arist. 21). At the entrance to the city were separate graves for the Lakedaimonians and Athenians who fell fighting the Medes; elegies of Simonides were carved upon the tombs, commemorating both groups (Paus. 9.2.5).13 Thus, heroic feats on a panhellenic scale were, naturally, worthy of remembrance by all Greeks. Herodotus was proud to relate that he had learned the names of the 300 Spartans who gave their lives at Thermopylai, information which most surely must have come from the battlefield inscription detailing the names of the dead (7.224); Pausanias also related a similar story of diligent commemoration: he claimed that the names were listed on a pillar at Sparta as well (3.14.1),14 again suggesting that a careful inventory of the fallen had taken place.
Monuments, cults, and rituals such as these, of course, were intended to honor one's countrymen who died in the achievement of some noteworthy victory on behalf of the state. However, it becomes just as clear that such commemoration could also be a source of honor for the adversaries of the fallen. As Hektor's speech in Iliad 7 (89–90) shows, the surviving victorious enemy often found some pride in such a monument: 'this is the grave mound of a man who died long ago, whom once in the midst of valor glorious Hektor slew.' It is precisely for this reason that the Lakonian dead buried in the Athenian Kerameikos at a time when Athens was under quasi-Spartan rule eventually—and ironically—became a witness of Athenian valor (Lys. Epitaphios 63; Xen. Hell. 2.4.33).15 similarly, the magnanimity of Philip II was well illustrated by his return of the bodies after Chaironeia (338 BC) (Diod. 16.86.5–6; Polyb. 5.10.4, 22.16.2; Plut. Pelop. 18, Mor. 849A). Pausanias reports that the Lion monument near Chaironeia marked a common grave of the Thebans (9.40.10): 'no inscription is carved on the tomb, but a lion is placed on it, perhaps in allusion to the spirit of the men.' The geographer Strabo also refers to the 'public tombs of those who fell in the battle' (9.2.37) which were erected near the battlefield.
Whether Philip himself erected the monument out of respect for the Theban Sacred Band or allowed it to be erected by Thebes,16 his actions regarding the fallen at Chaironeia came to be counted among his own merits—at least in the judgment of the Hellenic world—and the magnificent Lion added to his own glory, as well as to the respect due the dead.
Finally, the evidence of engraved casualty lists again shows the attention given to the identification and the recording of war casualties by name and the overall importance of such commemoration in the life of the state at large. In spite of the fragmentary nature of most lists, it is clear enough that they followed the general pattern evident in the muster rolls by listing names, often with patronymics, by tribe.17 That such commemorative lists were far more than mere sources of public information is evident to any who have gazed on the black granite engravings of the Vietnam war-dead in Washington, DC, a monument whose arrangement by year of death bears a haunting resemblance to the yearly Athenian stone lists of casualties, men who likewise were killed far from home. For both such memorials it was essential to obtain an exact list of the war-dead, involving an ongoing and difficult process of identification, as perhaps the frequent additions of names on both the ancient and modern stones attest.
Just as the observance of custom and ritual for the war-dead could bring honor to them and to their states, so too the failure to perform funeral rites or to retrieve the bodies for burial could be a source of particular shame, as experienced, for example, by those generals who fought at the sea-battle off Arginusai (406 BC) and failed to bring back either the wounded, the battle dead or the drowned (Xen. Hell. 1.6.35, 1.7–30, 2.3.32, 35; Diod. 13.100–2; Paus. 6.7.7; Athen. 5.218A; cf. Pritchett, War 4, 204–6). The repercussions of such a shocking disgrace could be felt long after: in one instance, Chabrias, during a hotly contested action at Naxos in 376 BC, 'being mindful of Arginusai,' did all in his power to retrieve the bodies of his own soldiers (Diod. 15.35). Similarly, the stigma of Aigospotamoi (405 BC) apparently followed the Spartan general Lysander, not merely because he cowardly massacred the prisoners of war, but also because he refused burial to the Athenians.18 Again, we see—here by looking at infrequent occasions of non-observance of custom—the panhellenic acknowledgment that all warriors were deserving of funerary rituals befitting their heroism on the battlefield.
Failure to comply with burial rites protected under the customary
battle truce could also prove risky for the recalcitrant side. Philomelos, after he seized Delphi and plundered the territory of the Lokrians (355/4 BC), was refused the bodies of the twenty or so men he had lost in battle. The argument proffered by the Lokrians was that the dead had been sacrilegious temple-robbers; Philomelos, in turn, railed against the Lokrians' own blasphemy in their refusal of burial, and eventually he employed military force to recover his own (Diod. 16.25.2–3).
If Hellenic armies were forced to abandon their dead, the situation was always desperate: at Sicily, for example, in 413 BC (Thuc. 7.75.3) the Athenians were forced by the impending absolute destruction of their forces to neglect the burial of friends and relatives. The soldiers could see in their midst the faces of the fallen and hear too the cries of the sick and wounded who had to be left behind. It was an emotionally wrenching scene, and one which Thucydides, who took an avid interest in chronicling the increasing erosion of Hellenic customs during the course of the Peloponnesian War, no doubt deliberately employed to portray poignantly the extreme despair of the army. Indeed, whenever casualties were left unburied for any reason, Greek writers went to great lengths to explain the phenomenon, either in terms of cruelty (e.g. Aigospotamoi), dereliction of duty (e.g. Arginusai), or simply abject despair (e.g. Sicily). Thus, when an Ambrakiot herald fails to complete his mission and obtain a burial truce, Thucydides emphasizes the utter shock and horror which the herald experienced when he learned that both the initial force of the Ambrakiotes and the reinforcements had been annihilated (Thuc. 3.113).19
In spite of these rare failures, the Greeks nevertheless must have encountered certain practical difficulties in collecting a
nd identifying their dead. Not only was there the universal problem of rapid corruption under the summer sun, but the unprotected areas of the armored hoplite—in particular the face and neck—could receive disfiguring wounds which would hamper identification. That the Greeks in most cases apparently did identify their corpses cannot be disputed, but the general silence as to the exact procedures arouses our curiosity. Their methods must have been commonplace in the Hellenic world and, therefore, like so many other ubiquitous and mundane practices of the Greeks, did not require discussion in our sources.
The Athenians, of course, recognized that it was not always possible to recover all war-dead. For example, in the introduction to
Perikles' famous funeral oration, Thucydides describes the general public procession attending the burial:
The bones of the departed lie in state for the space of three days in a tent erected for that purpose, and each one brings to his own dead any offering he desires. On the day of the funeral coffins of cypress wood are borne on wagons, one for each tribe, and the bones of each are in the coffin of his tribe. One empty bier, covered with a pall, is carried in the procession for the missing whose bodies could not be found for burial.
(2.34.2–3, Loeb translation, emphasis added)
This last statement is very revealing, since it obviously implies that the Athenians at least knew for whom they were searching, and were able to compare the number of bodies actually retrieved against some master list of the original number of men sent out. Such a list was available, of course, in the hoplite katalogos which was posted at Athens by tribe, each list being affixed to the statue of the eponymous hero of that tribe (Arist. Ath. Pol. 53.7, cf. 26.1; Ar. Pax 1181–4, Eq. 1369–72). Each taxiarch would have kept the service lists for his own tribe and made out the muster rolls for each campaign from that service list. Such lists were used to call roll at the beginning of an expedition (Ar. Pax 354; Andoc. Myst. 45), and since they were in the possession of the taxiarch during the campaign (Lys. 15.5), they would have been the primary source against which to check the names of the missing and dead.20 The procedure, even if duplicated outside of Athens, was not without difficulty, however, since the process of identification and retrieval was not immune to external influences. What, then, were some of the obstacles which could hinder the collection and identification of war fatalities?
In the first place, if we concentrate on infantry casualties and lay aside the real possibility that many of the missing in such yearly tallies of war fatalities were drowned in sea battles, the initial problem in any retrieval and subsequent identification would center on the conduct of the victorious army. Each conqueror not only had control of the battlefield and the right to set up a trophy, but also enjoyed a monopoly over the fate of the vanquished dead: the exchange of bodies, then, always was predicated on the benefaction and piety of the conqueror. The usual order of events would have required the winning side to set up a trophy to claim its victory, collect its own dead, and then strip the armor and weapons from the fallen enemy. The haphazard looting and plundering of bodies by individuals in the
very midst of ongoing fighting that one can see in Homer was simply not a practical endeavor during pitched hoplite battles; true, the Spartans frequently could be found fighting a desperate battle to protect the body of a fallen king from being seized by the enemy (e.g. Xen. Hell. 6.4.13; Diod. 15.56.1),21 but this had more to do with their unique reverence for their own royalty (a holdover of sorts from the monarchy of the Dark Ages) than with any desire for plunder. Instead, in the hoplite age, looting of the dead was usually an aftermath of battle, and thus burial crews were relatively free from enemy attack.
During the time the conqueror was collecting his own dead, and viewing and plundering the bodies of the enemy,22 the defeated army would have regrouped and sent a herald to ask for a truce in order to collect its fallen. By the time the defeated force was allowed to retrieve its own men, virtually all possible identifying tokens of any value—shields, helmets, cloaks and the like—would surely have been stripped by the other side; the dead, then, were usually returned to the losing army absolutely nude, and thus apparently without specific identifying markings (e.g. distinctive clothing, jewelry, personal documents).23 It was an irony of Greek warfare that the defeated army had to rely on the good will and sense of religious propriety of its conquerors in order to collect its own dead. The victorious side, of course, because they were in sole possession of the battlefield, governed the collection of nearly all the corpses of both sides. Outside of Homer, few, if any, hoplite dead of the winners ever would have been dragged away by the defeated army in its retreat. As a result, even in the face of a technical defeat on the field of battle, the retrieval of bodies without asking for a truce signified some sort of moral victory and perhaps created ambiguity over the actual significance of the outcome as well. In a skirmish at Phrygia with Boiotian cavalry (431 BC), for example, the Athenians and Thessalians were forced to retreat, leaving a few bodies behind, but they were able to recover them on the same day without asking for a truce (Thuc. 2.22). Clearly this would have been possible only where a few died, or where the fallen could be retrieved relatively easily; otherwise significant numbers of corpses would require nothing short of another pitched battle—virtually taboo in Greek practice—to regain them without a truce. Again, the importance to the Greeks of possession and interment of the dead is emphasized: in cases of ambiguous outcomes, the technical verdict of defeat or victory frequently hinged on which side had control of the war dead.
The dilemma that this situation could present is illustrated again by the experience of the Spartan king Pausanias at Haliartos (395/4 BC): there, he arrived at the battle site only to discover that Lysander and many of his fellow Spartans had already been slain. During the post-battle council to decide whether to ask the Thebans for a truce (of course, implying inferiority, if not total defeat), or once more to fight a pitched battle, some of the older Spartans rejected outright the idea of a truce, wishing instead to fight for the body of Lysander, in order to bury it as if they were indeed victors. However, clear evidence of the superiority of the victorious Theban forces, as well as the more mundane fact that the bodies actually were close to the walls of the Theban towers, eventually suggested to Pausanias that he wisely seek a truce (Plut. Lys. 29; Xen. Hell. 3.5.22–4). Xenophon adds a wrinkle to the story, stating that the Thebans were only willing to give back the Lakedaimonian dead if the Spartans left Boiotia, which they promptly agreed to do. In this instance, one can see that the dead became part of a strategy to force the hand of an occupying army. Moreover, although both sides ostensibly followed the dictates of Hellenic custom, in the harsh reality of the battlefield and in the aftermath of the general erosion of hoplite rituals during the Peloponnesian War, any army could have its own respect and devotion for its fallen comrades turned against it. Indeed, at Delion (424/3 BC),24 the Boiotians put up a trophy, collected their own dead, stripped the bodies of the Athenian dead and put a guard over them. The Athenians, who apparently could not proceed without their fallen, were thus forced to retreat from Boiotian territory altogether in order to gain possession of their own dead (Thuc. 4.97–101). Nor is the image of corpses as hostages such an arcane notion; one need only recall in modern times the reluctance of the Vietnamese to return American war-dead or, more recently, the intense, drawn-out wran-gling with Iran over the fate of a few American corpses (from a nation of millions), that were left behind after the failed rescue attempt in 1980.
Frequently, such a strategy could work toward a virtual stalemate, if both armies were in a position to acquire some of the dead of each; that is, if no one party had absolute control of the environs of the battlefield. At Mantineia (362 BC), for example, all participants expected some final resolution to come from the battle, but the situation was such that both sides set up victory trophies, neither hindering the other; the two armies gave back the fallen under truce, both acting in a sense as victor and vanquished simultaneo
usly (Xen.
Hell. 7.5.26–7). As Xenophon tells the story
When these things had taken place, the opposite of what all men believed would happen was brought to pass…. Neither was found to be any better off, as regards either additional territory, or city, or sway, than before the battle took place; but there was even more confusion and disorder in Greece after the battle than before.
(7.5.26, 27, Loeb translation)
Diodoros tells roughly the same story and provides the telling reasons for this ambiguous outcome: the Boiotians had decided against an extensive pursuit, preferring instead to acquire first the bodies of the dead. (The use of the neutral term 'the dead,' without any suggestion of possession clearly shows the intent to recover the bodies as a means to ensure the claim of victory.) The Athenians, in turn, had bodies of their own, the Euboian dead (15.87.3), while the Boiotians had possession of Lakedaimonian corpses. In this confusing scenario, neither side would move, until finally the Lakedaimonians resolved the issue by sending a herald to ask for a general truce (15.87.4). At that point the bodies were returned to each party for appropriate burial. Thus, no clear-cut victory was apparent, in large part because each side had some of the corpses of the other, and so neither army could claim absolute sovereignty over the battlefield. Although the Spartans were the first to ask for a truce, there is no indication that either side required the other to abandon its own victory trophy. In such rare instances where hoplite fighting was uncharacteristically indecisive, there was a disruption in and, in fact, a reversal of the natural process: the return of the corpses in itself became tantamount to an acknowledgment of victory, defeat, or stalemate, rather than a mere reflection of the customary practice regarding retrieval and identification of the battlefield dead.
Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience Page 7