Was There Friendly Fire in Ancient Battles?

Was there friendly fire in ancient battles? This history documentary begins by explaining the three types of friendly fire in ancient battles: Collateral damage, panicked flight, and misidentification. We begin by discussion cases of collateral damage. This involves the accidental harming of friendly troops in close and ranged combat that occurred whilst attempting to target the enemy. As historical references we mention how the roman legion would often maintain proper spacing to avoid such issues. Overall though this sort of friendly fire was more of a rare, freak accident.

The next type of friendly fire from ancient battles is a result from panicked flight when soldiers flee and in the process will attack anything between themselves and freedom. We discuss how this was actually quite common and dangerous. In fact Julius Caesar was almost killed trying to hold back a routing legion. The Roman army of the republic employed forces like the Triarii to secure the backlines whilst Germanic armies were known to bring their women and children to battle to slay any cowardly men who attempted to flee.

Lastly we cover friendly fire resulting from misidentification. We provide examples of this happening with Greek army battles and Roman army battles. We also employ Total War Rome 2 gameplay to recreate a soldier's POV to better understand visibility on the ancient battlefield. The basic idea is that most of the time troops could effectively tell each other apart relatively easily using banners, emblems, equipment, passwords, and chants. Roman legion standards and shields were famously quite different which helped during cases of Civil War. Greek history tells of friendly fire occurring at the battle of Delium and during the Syracuse expedition while Roman history tells of it occurring during the siege of Jerusalem.