Inspired by the “Battle of the Bastards” episode from Game of Thrones, we are looking at ancient accounts of bodies piling up during battle.
In the first year of the Civil War, Caesar’s army met disaster in Rome’s African frontier. He was not present, but he gives a detailed account of how his troops were strung along the desert for miles with the hopes of defeating Juba I, King of Numidia.
At the Battle of Bagradas, Caesar’s commander on the ground was General Gaius Scribonius Curio. The lengthy march was the result of a ruse by Juba and his men, feigning retreat. By the time the battle commenced, Curio’s men were so exhausted that some of them just fell over without being wounded. Worse, “the wounded could neither fall out nor be transported to a safe location, because the entire line was held surrounded by the enemy cavalry” (2.41.7).
Although he had an opportunity to escape, Curio opted to die fighting, or so Caesar tells us. Juba’s use of deception and waiting to attack his opponent when he was weakest is textbook military tactics. Yet, nowhere in his account does Caesar describe bodies piling up in the heat of battle, as he did in his description of Battle of the Sambre (57 BC), a battle he witnessed firsthand.
For that type of narrative of Bagradas, we need to turn to the Roman poet Lucan (39-65 AD), who wrote a lengthy work about the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey well after the events. With great drama, he provided a vague description of the aftermath of Bagradas.
The victorious Moors did not enjoy to the full the sight
which Fortune gave: they do not see the streams
of gore, collapsing limbs, and bodies hitting
the earth: every corpse stood erect, crushed in a mass. (4.786-787)
Lucan obviously strove for literary effect with the gory details, but he also implied that corpses could stand erect, supported by the mass of bodies. With this, we have a height of the pile of bodies—the height of a man.
Lucan is the only surviving ancient work that describes a pile of bodies from this battle. Caesar does not mention it nor does Appian, what’s survived of Livy’s work, or Velleius Paterculus. Thus, it becomes temptingly easy to dismiss Lucan’s narrative as nothing more than creative. However, Caesar did describe that his troops were surrounded, which could produce a scenario where men would fall on top of each during the slaughter. In addition, Lucan did not provide this sort of detail for any other battle in his lengthy work on the Civil War.
Regardless, Lucan’s description of the Battle of Bagradas does fit our criteria of an ancient account of bodies piling up in battle.