Did Romans bury their own dead soldiers in mass graves?

[Jason Micallef]

I'm thinking about extraordinary situations when the death count of the romans is great.

Thinking of Germanicus when he found the three legions in germania years after the Varian disaster. He had the dead buried. Surely, being in hostile territory he had no time to individually bury thousands of soldiers?  Would such a situation had required a mass grave to at least give some sort of honour to the dead? With thousands of men at his disposal, surely it wouldn't have been too much effort to have a large pit dug out in a smaller area than multiple individual holes covering a larger area

[Michael Collins]

Hi Jason, just to point you in some directions for finding out more...
check out Adamclisi and the site of a large triumphant memorial to the fallen Romans at the battle against the Dacians there in the winter of 101-102 AD.
In addition to the burial of Roman dead some years after the battle at kalkriese, there was also a mound built by Nero Claudius Drusus (Germanicus) after the battle of Lupia (Arbalo) in 11 BC.
And with respect to battlefield archaeology and burial of dead in the classical world, may I recommend the work of Joanne Ball: https://liverpool.academia.edu/JoBall

[MonsGraupius]

Good question. I was looking at the battle of Mons Graupius where the army heads way up into Scotland and then fights a battle and then relatively quickly returns south. So, they had to do something with the Roman bodies. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of evidence and even if there were, there is evidence that civilian burial customs varied over time, so I would think the Military custom might change.

The problem is this. The Romans have just slaughtered a lot of ... Caledonians in the case of Mons Graupius, and part of the punishment of the enemy, is probably to deny burial rites. So, I think the enemy were left to get eaten and rot ... although that may have been not that dissimilar to the Iron age custom in Britain. But I'm pretty sure the Romans didn't respect the dead of their enemies.

However, if the Romans then neatly place their own bodies in a mound, that is going to be an obvious target for the enemy. And, indeed, if you left 300 Roman bodies, I would not be surprised to see 300 Roman skulls being displayed shortly after. So, it is pretty pointless to leave intact Roman bodies in ground.

So, that implies some form of cremation. But that in turn requires an awful lot of wood ... although the Romans could take that from those they beat. The mound would not be difficult ... after all you've got a lot of prisoners, who might be keen to show they have some use other than crow food.