Although we may have the image of the uniform legions of the Imperial period, all clad in identical segmented armor and gallic type helmets straight from Trajan's Column, but the truth is that the Romans were practical. It was simply infeasible to let good equipment go to waste, and there is surviving evidence that equipment was passed from one soldier to the next, whether taken from a fallen comrade, traded, family heirloom, or simply recycled. For instance, this Roman helmet, recovered from the Walbrook and kept in the British Museum, has five different names carved on it saying "Property of X". The army's "uniform" varied widely from soldier-to-soldier, and their equipment was salvaged as much as possible since it was far less expensive. A helmet from 30 AD is as good as a helmet from 60 AD, even if it's a bit dinged up, as the financial costs of maintaining the ancient world's largest standing army were already enormous without the prospect of giving each soldier new equipment.

In the ancient world, stripping the dead was considered the ultimate sign of victory, stretching back to the earliest mentions in Homer's "Iliad". This is not limited to Rome either. It is said by Polybius that the army of Hannibal Barca had stripped the dead Romans' arms and armor to replace their own in the aftermath of Trebia and Trasimene, and that they themselves were nearly indistinguishable from the Romans by the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. This is very different from stripping the armor of a fallen comrade or even against enemy Roman combatants in a civil war, as there seems to be a limited response in our sources that describe Romans taking goods off fellow dead Romans. We can infer that this was the case though, as otherwise the Roman dead would have been picked apart for valuables anyways by opportunistic camp-followers and locals, and the process of cremation (the most common practice in Roman religion and for sanitary purposes when dealing with mass graves) would necessitate cleaning the body of all artifacts. Not everything would be salvaged, mind you, as seen with the corpses of the battlefield from Visby in the 14th century where heat and decomposition would turn the noses of the most scrupulous of looters.