ABSTRACT
‘For many of the Trojans and Achaians alike were that day stretched out side by side with faces in the dust’ (Iliad 4.543–4). Homer’s scene, while perhaps from a context of pre-hoplite warfare, nevertheless succinctly describes the mix of bodies which would have confronted any army that fought in mass array. After the crush of battle, after the victor had routed the vanquished and taken possession of the field, after the defeated had regrouped and acknowledged defeat by asking for a truce to recover the bodies of the dead, the grim misery of sorting and identifying the hoplite casualties began. Besides the emotional pain of hoplites seeing their friends and kinsmen lying among the dead, there was the additional practical difficulty of identification to consider; in the carnage following a hoplite battle such identification could at times be nearly impossible. Xenophon, for example, described the chaotic aftermath of a hoplite battle at Koroneia (394 BC): ‘the earth stained with blood, friend and foe lying dead side by side, shields smashed to pieces, spears broken asunder, daggers drawn from their sheaths, some on the ground, some in bodies, others still gripped by hand’ (Xen. Ages. 2.14). The image, then, of tangled bodies and weapons on a field reeking of carnage is abundantly clear: corpses had to be separated and cataloged somehow, regardless of the condition of the actual remains.
