Roman Prisoners of War

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We know all about the battles of the Roman Empire: the opposing sides, their weapons and incentives. But if history is written by the winners, what happened if you lost? In this episode, Dr Jo Ball, battlefield archaeologist at the University of Liverpool, helps to fill in this gap. Jo takes us through the options of the victorious army; to release, kill or capture; and then discusses the treatment of those who fell into this last category. Listen as in this episode from our sibling podcast The Ancients Tristan and Jo explore the experiences of prisoners of war in Ancient Rome, how this might differ if those taken were also Roman, and how we know anything about them at all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Downstone's History. It's that joyful time of the week where
0:04.1	when I celebrate one of the other podcasts from the history hit stable, this time it's
0:08.1	the ancients with the Tristorian, the legend that is Tristan Hughes. We know all about
0:12.6	winning battles. Everyone knows about winning battles in the ancient world. Generals went
0:16.7	through Rome, had their triumphs, all sorts of nice things like that.
0:19.5	Whatever's of you lost, what happened to the prisoners? That is the question asked by
0:24.1	Dr. Joe Ball, a battlefield archaeologist at University of Liverpool. And Joe and Tristan
0:29.6	talked to each other all about the losers, the losers of the ancient world. Winners
0:34.1	write the history books, folks, and this is what they wrote about the losers. Enjoy this
0:38.5	pod. And if you want to see Tristan action, he went into action. He went up into the
0:42.6	north of Britannia to look for the ninth Legion, the last ninth Legion. His documentary
0:47.6	is currently storming the charts on history at TV. History at TV is a digital history
0:51.8	channel. It is where you can get hundreds of hours of documentaries about all sorts of
0:57.3	wonderful historical moments, and you get all the audio to all these podcasts. They're
1:01.9	all up there as well with no ads. So just head over to history at dot TV. For a very
1:06.0	small subscription, you get the world's best history channel. It's a sweet deal. So head
1:10.1	over there and do that after listening this episode of the ancients. Enjoy.
1:14.7	Joe, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Not a problem.
1:26.0	This is a remarkable topic. Prisoners of war in the Roman world. And Joe, you do not want
1:32.4	to be a prisoner of war in antiquity. Absolutely not. I mean, we think in all different
1:39.4	contexts of all of the unlucky people that there were in the Roman world, and you know,
1:43.9	we focus on people who were born into slavery or other people who suffer into civilian
	...

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