Elephants and the battle at Zama

[Eleatic Guest]

This was in stark contrast to the 255 BC battle at Tunes when the Roman commander did exactly the wrong thing and ammassed his troops to counter the beast's assault.

Regulus did nothing wrong in terms of his deployment against elephants. Polybios says as much. Where Regulus went wrong is that he was not only fighting a line of elephants and set himself up for envelopment.

Polybios Book 1, chapter 33:

"In thus making their whole line shorter and deeper than before they had been correct enough in so far as concerned the coming encounter with the elephants, but as to that with the cavalry, which largely outnumbered theirs, they were very wide of the mark. "

I relied on Glover's interpretation:

This same defeat of Regulus in 235 B.C. is the classic instance of how elephants should be used and how they should not be opposed, and it is curious that the man who realized how they should be handled was not a Carthaginian, but a newcomer to African warfare, the Spartan mercenary Xanthippus.16 On being given the command, he led the Carthaginian host down from the hills where they had avoided action and sought battle on the open plain. Regulus, on the other side, was worried by the elephants opposing him, and to meet them he massed his men in depth in two heavy columns. Now, it is correct enough to mass men together to resist a cavalry charge, for a horse will not charge home against a firm body of men armed with spears or fixed bayonets if the men have nerve and discipline enough to stand their ground, but a charging elephant is another matter.

Probably no arrangement could have pleased Xanthippus more. He deployed his ninety odd elephants in line before his men and opened the battle by ordering them to charge the Roman right, combining thereby shock and concentration-the mass use of the arm in one place at one time. When the elephants fell upon the wretched Roman soldiery, the latter's dense formation, if not their courage, made all flight impossible, and, says Polybius, "knocked down and trampled upon, they perished in heaps upon the field." Such Romans as came through the terrible line of elephants alive survived only to be spitted upon the pikes of the Carthaginian phalanx which the shrewd Spartan had placed a little to the rear. On the other wing the Roman left was doing well until they were swallowed up in the disaster to their right, and from the battle only two thousand Romans escaped; the effect of the defeat on their morale was almost equally crushing.

Richard Glover, The Elephant in Ancient War, The Classical Journal, 39, 5, 1944, 257-269 (259)