Romans Figure Out How to Defeat Elephants
Carthaginian war elephants also had their weaknesses, which the Romans eventually learned to exploit. During early clashes with Pyrrhus’ elephants, Rome experimented with all kinds of anti-elephant tactics, including ox-drawn wagons equipped with spikes and scythes, and poles wrapped in flammable pitch-soaked cloth that could be and thrust into the elephants’ faces.
A more disturbing tactic, recorded by later Roman sources, was to cover live pigs in flammable pitch, set them loose on the battlefield and light them on fire. Their awful squeals allegedly sent the elephants into a panic. Rawlings doubts the authenticity of the “bacon attack,” as he calls it, but admits that “anything that’s mobile and flaming and running towards you is probably something you would want to avoid as an elephant.”
During the pivotal Battle of Panormus in 250 B.C. in Sicily, the Roman general Metellus was able to repel a charge of Carthaginian elephants by raining javelins down upon them. The wounded elephants “turned on their own troops, trampling down and killing the men and disturbing and breaking the ranks,” wrote Polybius a century later.
After Hannibal crossed the Alps, he and his 37 elephants soundly defeated the Romans at the Battle of the Trebia, but the Roman generals quickly adapted and came up with strategies to neutralize the Carthaginian elephant attack.
“The elephants followed the paths of least resistance,” Rawlings says. “They went down these lanes, and skirmishers were jumping in and out and stabbing them from the sides.”
The elephants that survived the Roman gauntlet were hunted down or captured. Others, running without drivers, collided with the Carthaginian cavalry, causing further chaos. The Battle of Zama was Hannibal’s worst defeat and his last battle against the Romans.
As part of the treaty ending the Second Punic War, Carthage was forbidden from raising or keeping war elephants. While some historians have questioned the usefulness of war elephants in battle, Rawlings thinks that the Roman ban speaks volumes.
“The fact that the Romans took so much effort to deny elephants to the defeated has partly to do with the efficacy of elephants in general,” Rawlings says. “Pro-Roman sources love to characterize elephants as problematic, but the fact that they forbade elephants suggests that elephants really were a threat, even against a well-trained Roman army.”