Phalanx vs elephants

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Did any greek armies encounter war elephants? Aside from Alexander's conquests that is? And how did the phalanx do?

[Anonymous]

Alexander set a fashion, and elephants became de rigueur in Hellenistic warfare. They feature in all the battles of the Successors, if I remember rightly.

[M.H. White]

The army of Macedon encountered some elephants when they fought the Romans (oddly enough) under Quinctius Flamininus in 197 B.C. at Cynoscephalae.

He sent his elephants against the Macedonian left, which wasn't formed up yet, but apparently they didn't fare too well. The left fled the field and left the right wing out to dry.

[hoplite14gr]

After the Succesors wars elphands became part of the Arsenal.
Macedonians and Epirotics were th fisrt to use them.
The "Elephantry's" main role was to cover the flanks of the phlanx and to terrorize enemy cavalry.
Elephants were expensive and were not used against pikemen that the only thing they had to do was to remain steady.
Elepands like horses usully have more sence than humans and avoid nasty pointed objects.

Kind regards

[L C Cinna]

Yup, agree with hoplite14gr.

Elephants were mainly used against cavalry as horses don't like them too much.

Elephants were common during the hellenistic period but there's only one incident where they are actually successfully used against a phalanx and that's at the battle at Cynoscephalae when the Romans used them as described above. The important thing here is that the only time we hear of elephants successfully breaking an infantry unit the infantry was not yet properly deployed!!!!

In all other cases where elephants were successful against infantry it was when the enemy had not had any contact with elephants before like the celts for example or the Romans first encounter with Phyrros.

in all other battles BCE where elephants appear you could say as a general rule that the side with more elephants lost lol

(the Romans used them sometimes e.g. Cynoscephalae, Scipio against Caesar,...but gave up on using them quite soon...Claudius took 2? with him to Britannia but they were not used afaik)