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Considering that the materiality of the corpse played a central role in the funerary rituals of the ancient Greek world, this article explores the problems raised by the retrieval and funerary treatment of those killed in battle. It takes into account three specificities of military casualties: the unusually high number of corpses to deal with; the articulation between the crude corporeity of the dead body and its highly charged symbolic value; and the opposition between the private event of death and its collective regulation in wartime. The aim is to show how the funerary treatment of military casualties became a crucial means of negotiating adaptable modes of affiliation to the political community from the Archaic period on, and especially in the Classical period, as a reaction to the double evolution of legal statuses and military techniques that took place during the fifth century BCE. Controlling the corpses of military casualties thus became a powerful way to delimit the poleis and maintain its cohesion, not only before the enemy on the battlefield but also within the city itself at moments of high tension. By analyzing the practical aspects of the funerary management of war-dead and focusing on the materiality of the dead body, we can thus retrace the political representations of death in the city and for the city, and the mechanisms of control used in the city at war.