Polyaenus (Strat. 8.23.5) and Caesar's British Elephant

Abstract

Polyaenus (Strat. 8.23.5) includes an armoured elephant in his description of Julius Caesar crossing a defended ford in Britain (54 b.c.) – something found nowhere in Caesar's own Bellum Gallicum. From looking at a range of loci in the Strategica dealing with Caesar's military exploits in Celtic lands, it becomes clear that, instead of being the remnant of a now-lost source tradition, Polyaenus either based the elephant vignette on an underlying narrative structure provided by the Bellum Gallicum, or a source using this work very closely. Given the overall unlikelihood of Caesar taking an elephant to Britain, Polyaenus probably inserted an elephant for rhetorical and/or didactic purposes and was perhaps influenced by Caesar's own non-literary propaganda involving elephants.

INTRODUCTION

One of the more curious anecdotes about Julius Caesar's military achievements is that preserved by Polyaenus in his Strategica (8.23.5).¹ At this locus, written in the late a.d. 150s or early 160s, we read that Caesar, in presumably his second expedition to Britain (54 b.c.), employed a single very large, turreted and armoured elephant to overcome the Britanni at an unnamed river crossing. Since Caesar himself makes no such claim in his Bellum Gallicum, Polyaenus’ description is usually relegated to a brief aside in treatments of Caesar's campaigns, with the authors being somewhat uncertain what to do with this information, but feeling it must be included, or at least commented on, in the interests of narrative completeness.² For instance, Kistler refers to ‘Caesar's second invasion of Britain in 54 b.c.’ as the occasion when Caesar first employed a pachyderm.³ In addition, Hawkes maintains the curious view that Caesar reported his use of the elephant ‘clearing a river’ in a dispatch to the Senate in 54 b.c., ‘which Livy can afterwards have used, Polyaenus then [sic] Livy’. According to this line of thought, the incident eventually found its way into one source tradition, such as that supposedly stemming from Livy, whose account of the time period of interest to us has been lost.⁴ Others, however, have ignored the tale entirely, presumably on the basis of its absence in Caesar's own work, or have at least cautioned us about taking the tale seriously.⁵

In any case, the locus has never been adequately explained, despite Reed's brief attempt to do so some years ago, his main aim being to cast doubt on the veracity of Roman sources dealing with the history of Britain, including Caesar, who supposedly decided to hide certain elements of his exploits for political reasons.⁶ This relative lack of discussion on Strat. 8.23.5 is curious, given that an equally puzzling locus in Cassius Dio (60.21.2), which seemingly refers to the emperor Claudius using military elephants at the time of his British campaign of a.d. 43, has crept into a good many narratives of the Claudian invasion, especially those of a more ‘popular’ nature.⁷ Some have even contended that Strat. 8.23.5 was a mistaken conflation of the two Roman expeditions to Britain, despite being some 90 years apart, since both Julius Caesar and Claudius could be called ‘Caesar’.⁸ A more frequent view, however, is that the two loci are entirely separate – a view recently demonstrated by Charles and Singleton in their discussion of Dio's tale of Claudian elephants in this journal.⁹ Indeed, the details provided by Polyaenus – as will be discussed herein – firmly anchor the vignette to Caesar's day, and so a different explanation, pace Reed, is required for this troublesome locus. In particular, limited attention has hitherto been paid to how and why it found its way into the Strategica, which, for the most part, refers to military incidents that can be corroborated in other sources, albeit often in an abbreviated fashion.¹⁰

POLYAENUS AND POSSIBLE SOURCES

Writing in the late second century a.d., Polyaenus, in Book 8 of his Strategica, presents 33 stratagems supposedly employed by Julius Caesar in his various campaigns. The stratagem of interest to us is one of the more detailed of these, and is worth presenting in full:

In Britain, Caesar was attempting to cross a great river. The king of the Britanni, Cassivellaunus (βασιλεὺς Βρεττανῶν Κασοελλαῦνος¹¹), blocked him with numerous horsemen and chariots. In Caesar's train was a very large elephant (μέγιστος ἐλέφας), an animal unknown to the Britanni. Caesar armoured the elephant with iron scales (σιδηραῖς φολίσιν), raised a large tower (πύργον … … μέγαν) on its back, set archers and slingers in the tower, and ordered the animal to step into the river. The Britanni, upon seeing the unknown and monstrous beast, panicked. Why must I mention their horses, when even among Greeks the horses take flight if they saw even an unarmoured elephant? But they did not even endure the sight of an armoured elephant carrying a tower (πυργοφόρον …  … καὶ ὡπλισμένον) and shooting missiles and slingstones. The Britanni fled with their horses and chariots, and the Romans crossed the river without danger after scaring off the enemy with a single beast.¹²

Now, no other extant source dealing with Caesar's military exploits, including Suetonius, Cassius Dio or Plutarch, who is generally regarded as having used Caesar's own writings, or even the much later Orosius, records Caesar having an elephant in Britain, or even in Gaul. Most tellingly of all, Caesar himself, who recounted his British expedition in considerable detail in the Bellum Gallicum, did not mention an elephant, a point made by Melber many years ago.¹³ That said, there are a number of aspects of Polyaenus’ description that, prima facie at least, seem to add a sense of verisimilitude to the locus. The first is the reference to Cassivellaunus, a historical figure attested by Caesar himself (see BGall. 5.11, 18–22). This detail clearly ties the temporal location of the passage to the mid-first century b.c., and makes the notion of a conflation with a use of elephants in Claudius’ much later campaign quite problematic. That horses are afraid of war elephants is, of course, a topos that occurs widely in ancient military literature.¹⁴ Yet Polyaenus also wrote specifically of chariots, which, as Caesar again tells us, were indeed in use among the Britons at the time of his expedition (see BGall. 4.33.2–3).

The equipment details pertaining to the elephant are also possible, for a statuette, now in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich, depicts a war elephant that is clearly equipped with scale armour.¹⁵ Literary references to elephants wearing armour close to our time period are not plentiful, although Livy (37.40.4) mentions elephants at the battle of Magnesia (190 b.c.) wearing frontalia, presumably a type of protection for the elephant's head, together with cristae (‘crests’). Turrets bearing missile-throwing men are, of course, commonly mentioned in the ancient military literature, such as Polybius’ (5.84.2) description of the battle of Raphia (217 b.c.), where both the Seleucid Asian elephants and the Ptolemaic Africans were equipped with such structures.¹⁶ Towers can also be seen in representational media. A well-known plate from Capena, now in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, ‘Villa Giulia’, Rome, shows a turreted adult Asian elephant followed by its calf, perhaps an allusion to a story told about one of the war elephants of Pyrrhus at Beneventum in 275 b.c. (Flor. 1.13.12), whose unfortunate calf followed her into battle and was killed.¹⁷ All of this suggests that Polyaenus need not have invented the details of the elephant's equipment by himself, if indeed the elephant is not historical, though it is difficult to associate the equipment described with any particular locus or artistic representation.

In short, there are aspects of Strat. 8.23.5 that – on the surface – appear to be quite realistic. But there are other aspects that do not ring true. The first landing of Caesar (55 b.c.) with only two legions on the Kentish coast seems ill-suited to the description of the war elephant, so let us dismiss that possibility. The second incursion (54 b.c.), with 628 ships, five legions and 2,000 cavalrymen and horses, was obviously much better planned and executed – but would Caesar really have sought an outsized elephant to accompany him in Britain? He did redesign the ships so that they could land cavalry more effectively than was the case in the first expedition (BGall. 5.1.2–3), but one wonders whether any redesign would have allowed a large elephant to disembark safely. Aelianus (NA 10.17) writes that elephants normally had to be transported by means of large cargo vessels (ναῦς φορτίδες = naves onerariae) and, because these could not venture close to the shore owing to their size, long gangways had to be provided, with branches arranged on each side to ‘trick’ the elephant into assuming that it was continuing its journey on land. To return to Caesar, it is important to recall that these were beach landings, with no kind of wharf being available, and that the ships were designed to be beached, as indeed they eventually were (BGall. 5.11.5–7). And even this second landing caused immense problems. Roman inexperience with tides and storms in the Channel meant that a large number of ships that had initially been kept at anchor became damaged when they crashed into each other and had to be repaired (BGall. 5.10.2–3, with 5.11.2–7).

There is also the question of where in the campaign the elephant would have figured. Happily, Caesar's own work preserves an instance where a crossing was attempted of a large river, possibly the Thames, as Caesar himself calls the river in question (see BGall. 5.18.1–5).¹⁸ According to Caesar's own commentary, the ford was protected with sharpened stakes, both on the shore and in the water, with no elephant in sight. It is worth looking at this battle scene in full:

Having obtained knowledge of their plans, Caesar led his army into the borders of Cassivellaunus as far as the river Thames (ad flumen Tamesim), which can be crossed at one place only on foot, and that with difficulty. When he was come to that place, he remarked that, on the other bank of the river, a great force of the enemy (magnas … copias hostium) was drawn up. The bank was fortified with a fringe of sharp projecting stakes (acutis sudibus praefixis), and stakes of the same kind fixed underwater were concealed by the stream. When he had learnt these details from prisoners and deserters, Caesar sent the cavalry in advance (praemisso equitatu) and ordered the legions (legiones)¹⁹ to follow up instantly. But the troops (milites) moved with such speed and such ardour (ea celeritate atque eo impetu), although they only had their heads above water, that the enemy could not withstand the assault of legions and cavalry (impetum legionum atque equitum), but abandoned the banks and committed themselves to flight.²⁰

This passage is remarkably similar to Strat. 8.23.5, at least in terms of the narrative's underlying structure, and is suggestive of a common historical thread. In both cases, Caesar a) wanted to cross a river at a deep ford with his army, but b) is opposed by Cassivellaunus and/or his forces, yet c) the Romans put the opposing force to flight, and then d) made the crossing safely.²¹ The main difference, of course, between our two narratives is that Caesar wrote that it was not an elephant that caused Cassivellaunus’ men to flee, but the ‘speed’ (celeritas) and ‘ardour’ (impetus) of Caesar's cavalry and legionaries. While there are no sharpened stakes in Polyaenus’ story, which could be the result of the author dropping the stakes to add a greater degree of verisimilitude, since driving an elephant against such devices might be regarded as implausible, the inclusion of chariots suggests some basic underlying familiarity with the weapons of the Britanni—and it is worthwhile to note that Cassivellaunus’ chariots are mentioned directly after the locus discussed above (BGall. 5.19.1). One is therefore left to choose between Caesar and Polyaenus, an eyewitness versus someone writing long after the fact, and not intending to write history in any case. Yet Hawkes, believing in the elephant tale and the historicity of Polyaenus’ information, tries to have his cake and eat it too by claiming that the two loci are distinct, with the elephant tale, which was ‘suppressed’ by Caesar in the Bellum Gallicum, relating to the Medway rather than the Thames.²² Once again, this seems like an effort to try to reconcile all the literary information that we have available and poses the question of why Caesar would not have used the elephant again at the Thames if it had been so successful at the Medway, even if it would have been less of a surprise to the defending Britons.²³

Despite several commentators, such as Melber and Lammert (and Geus to some extent), being firmly against the idea that Polyaenus ever consulted Latin works such as Livy, much less the Bellum Gallicum,²⁴ it is possible to argue that Polyaenus was indeed familiar with Caesar's Bellum Gallicum, either through Caesar himself, or through other now-lost works using Caesar closely as a source. Indeed, a close inspection of the material presented relating to Caesar and to fighting the Celts and Germans in Book 8 of the Strategica reveals, for the most part, close structural similarities between the two works, as will be seen in a comparison of nine related loci directly below. Note, in particular, Zecchini's view that Dio never used Caesar for the composition of his history, which, if true, certainly points to one or more sources containing information about Caesar's martial exploits being in circulation.²⁵

CAESAR IN GAUL: POLYAENUS AND THE BELLUM GALLICUM COMPARED

Other loci dealing with what appear to be parallel incidents in the Gallic Wars, i.e. from Strat. 8.23.2 up to and including Strat. 8.23.11, do show some divergence between what Polyaenus records and Caesar wrote in his Bellum Gallicum, although there are also occasions where the two versions are remarkably similar, at least with respect to their basic underlying structure. In such cases, Polyaenus could possibly have consulted the Bellum Gallicum directly, or at least a text very closely following Caesar's basic narrative – where such a text existed, of course. To shed further light on such possibilities, there are nine parallel loci dealing with the Gallic War that are worth reviewing in detail.

1) STRAT. 8.23.2 VS BGALL. 1.10

In these loci, both authors deal with Caesar responding to the threat posed by the warlike Helvetii. The response involved quickly moving as many troops as Caesar could muster over the Alps to where they could be deployed. Here, there is quite a substantial difference between the accounts, since Caesar does not mention a mist or fog obscuring the movement of his troops across the Alps. Caesar's account is largely descriptive and provided in the broad-brush strokes of ablative absolutes, but Polyaenus, always interested in the stratagem, that is, how Caesar managed to move his troops into position for the impending campaign, records a detail that Caesar neglects. While Caesar refers to the Ceutrones, the Graioceli and the Carturiges trying to stop his traversing army by ‘seizing points on the higher ground’ (locis superioribus occupatis), his troops managed to drive them off (compluribus his proeliis pulsis). In a similar manner to Strat. 8.23.5, it is not the Roman army that does the bulk of the work, but another factor, this being a fog (ὁμίχλη), a detail which clearly does not derive from the Bellum Gallicum.

2) STRAT. 8.23.3 VS BGALL. 1.12

These loci are broadly similar at first glance, but close inspection reveals startling differences. For a start, Polyaenus has the Helvetii crossing the Rhône instead of the Arar (Saône), something which seems prima facie to preclude that Polyaenus used Caesar directly for this detail.²⁶ Polyaenus records that the Helvetii were 80,000 strong, with 20,000 fighting men, while Caesar only provides figures, based on Celtic records, much later at BGall. 1.29, a total of 368,000 persons including the Helvetii and their allies, and a total of 92,000 combatants.²⁷ But, for our purposes, the most significant divergence is that Polyaenus writes that Caesar feigned weakness on the first day of the encounter, which caused the Helvetii to become over-confident by crossing the river en masse to confront the Romans, which prompted Caesar to attack these men, tired from the crossing, with full force at night. Caesar, however, provides a rather different account. Here, Caesar waits until only a quarter of the Helvetii had not crossed, and proceeded to attach these men ‘unawares’ (inopinantes), encumbered by their full gear (impeditos), with three legions. So, we have rather different information about which group of Helvetii crossed the river. In Polyaenus’ account, the Helvetii who had not yet crossed are slaughtered, whereas, in the Bellum Gallicum, the Helvetii who are slaughtered are those who cross the river to fight Caesar. In short, the message is very different: Polyaenus’ version describes the benefits of feigning weakness, while Caesar's alludes to taking apart an enemy army bit by bit, but the notion of Helvetii crossing a river remains the central thread.²⁸

3) STRAT. 8.23.4 VS BGALL. 1.50–3

According to Polyaenus, Caesar exploited the Germans’ reluctance to conduct any fighting before the new moon (πρὸ νέας σελήνης) because their seers (μάντεις) had warned them against it. Once Caesar found out about such reticence, he quickly attacked the Germans who, being perturbed with the idea of fighting at this inauspicious time, were soundly defeated. This information is clearly derived in some way from Caesar, although the precise details differ. For example, it seems that Ariovistus, the German commander, had the opportunity to press home his advantage against Caesar but failed to do so because the German matrons, who used ‘lots’ (sortes) to divine the future, had declared that they should not be victorious ‘before the new moon’ (ante novam lunam). Nonetheless, Caesar compelled the Germans to fight him. Admittedly, Frontinus (Strat. 2.1.16), Plutarch (Caes. 19.3–5) and Cassius Dio (38.48–50) provide similar details, but there is nothing to suggest that Caesar, or an author closely following him, was not the underpinning source.²⁹

4) STRAT. 8.23.6 VS BGALL. 5.48

Polyaenus writes that Caesar promised aid to his besieged commander Quintus Cicero, who was by that stage contemplating surrender to the besieging Gauls, by having a light javelin or dart with a message attached thrown at the tower of his camp by an allied Gallic horseman. The message promised that Cicero would soon be relieved, and that he should hold fast. This represents a very close approximation of BGall. 5.48, the main differences being a) the precise technical language that Caesar (tragula) and Polyaenus (λόγχη) use for the weapon in question; b) that the message was written in Greek characters as a kind of code in the Bellum Gallicum; and c) that, in Caesar's version, the message is not noticed for two days.³⁰ In both cases, however, Caesar's approach is made clear to Cicero's men on account of smoke (fumi incendiorum = καπνὸς) being seen in the distance. Whatever the case, there is clearly a relationship between the two loci, although Polyaenus simplifies the narrative to its raw essence of Caesar cunningly getting a message through to Cicero despite the odds.

5) STRAT. 8.23.7 VS BGALL. 5.49–51

Once again, these loci are broadly comparable in their basic narrative concept, but closer inspection reveals differences. In Polyaenus, Caesar tricks the Gauls to attack a fortified camp (witness χάρακα) built on a confined parcel of land by concealing elements of his force in the wooded areas above the camp, where he also placed himself. Overconfident, the Gauls attack the camp after the Romans initially skirmish with them on horseback, but soon withdraw, feigning a lack of stomach for the fight. The Gauls follow Caesar's horsemen back to the trenches of the camp, try to fill in the ditch, and even attempt to pull down the camp's palisade. Then a signal is sounded and foot soldiers pour out of the camp, while the concealed troops rush down from the hill and attack the enemy's rear, causing the Gauls to be confronted on all sides. Caesar's version retains the core elements of the story, such as the cavalry skirmish before the camp, tearing down the palisade (vallum) and filling in the trenches (fossas), but adds elements such as reinforcing the camp's defence works – presumably over and above the normal standard – to make it look as though the Romans were fearful. Yet, most importantly, he does not describe hiding a good portion of his army in a bushy area on a hill so that he could make his encampment very small.³¹ In short, much of the sequence of events remains the same, but there is no hint of Caesar and some of his army posting themselves on a hill and rushing down upon the Gauls.

6) STRAT. 8.23.8 VS BGALL. 7.27, WITH 7.28

In Polyaenus’ very brief account, Caesar was attacking a Gallic fort when it started to rain very heavily indeed. The storm forced the defending Gauls from the battlements but Caesar, taking this opportunity, ordered his soldiers to climb the undefended walls, and so took the fort. Caesar makes slightly less of the weather, and the battlements were not completely bereft of enemy soldiers, although they were ‘less carefully posted than usual’ (quod paulo incautius custodias in muro dispositas videbat), for Caesar describes his troops forcing the shocked defenders from the walls at BGall. 7.28. Caesar then goes on to describe the subsequent slaughter of the enemy in detail,³² something which does not concern Polyaenus, whose main interest is simply the stratagem of using the weather to one's advantage to surprise the enemy. In this sense, the other details are not material.

7) STRAT. 8.23.9 VS BGALL. 7.35

These loci are extremely similar. In fact, they are virtually identical to each other, with both authors providing exacting detail about how a bridge was destroyed by Vercingetorix, and then rebuilt by Caesar's men on the piles left behind – an undertaking which allowed the Roman forces to surprise the enemy by crossing the river. This very high level of similarity certainly suggests at least the existence of a work, regardless of the Latin or Greek heritage of its author, that was very much indebted to Caesar. That said, there is one substantial difference: in Polyaenus, the Romans, after crossing on the reconstructed bridge, fight the Gauls immediately, while a clash between Gauls and Romans does not take place in the Bellum Gallicum until five days had passed. Once again, Polyaenus’ eye is firmly on the stratagem being recalled, not in capturing precisely what happened, for the stratagem's impact is strengthened by Caesar surprising the Gauls and gaining an immediate victory.

8) STRAT. 8.23.10 VS BGALL. 7.45

Again, these loci are broadly similar, and Polyaenus more or less follows the basic narrative structure of BGall. 7.45, which describes moving soldiers quietly from one place to another to avoid enemy detection at the siege of Gergovia (52 b.c.), but he adds details not found elsewhere. These include: a) the Romans using shorter-than-usual javelins and swords to avoid entangling themselves in the undergrowth (as is indicated by ἀκόντια βραχέα καὶ ξιφίδια σύμμετρα, ὅπως τὰς χαμαιπετεῖς ὕλας μὴ ὑπερέχοιεν); and b) the Roman soldiers crouching instead of walking upright when they successfully stole across a forested hill beneath the noses of the enemy Gauls. As with the anecdotes discussed above, Polyaenus is keen to deal with the importance of the element of surprise, with the short weapons adding to Caesar's ruse.

9) STRAT. 8.23.11 VS BGALL. 7.77–88, AND ESPECIALLY BGALL. 7.88

This, the last of Polyaenus’ Gallic War stratagems must be regarded as something of an outlier. Here, it is difficult to draw a direct comparison between Polyaenus and the Bellum Gallicum, given that Polyaenus’ version of the siege of Alesia is very compact compared to the much more detailed narrative of Caesar, which includes a purported speech of the Gallic leader Vercingetorix. That said, at BGall. 7.88, we read of the Roman cavalry and other cohorts (cohorts aliae) suddenly attacking the Gauls in the rear after the main pitched battle had commenced (note the use of repente post tergum equitatus cernitur), an action which cut the Gauls off from any organised retreat, and thus resulted in their capitulation. Polyaenus’ main interest is to acknowledge Caesar's foresight with respect to detaching a portion of his army to attack the enemy from an unexpected angle. The main difference is that, in Caesar's account, the battle had already begun by the time the cavalry attacked from the rear, whereas in Polyaenus’ version, it was the cavalry attack that got the battle under way. Of course, an inspection of all these Caesarian loci dealing with his operations in Gaul and Britain reveals nothing quite as intrusive or divergent as a giant armoured elephant, but we have seen that there are indeed instances where Polyaenus appears to adapt a vignette from Caesar – or someone closely following Caesar – to suit his own ends; that is, conveying a stratagem. An important observation is that, while Polyaenus’ versions of events are shorter, unsurprising given the nature of his work, they nonetheless add different elements over and above what Caesar provides. These elements, however, are rarely of a random nature, but generally serve to reinforce the core stratagem at the heart of the locus in question. Thus we see, as in the armoured elephant stratagem, that Polyaenus is not really concerned with historical accuracy or even ‘doing history’; rather, the shell of the narrative that Caesar provides, either found in the Bellum Gallicum or something that is reasonably true to this source, is an armature on which to hang narrative accoutrements that will serve the intent of the stratagem being conveyed to the reader.

It seems entirely possible, then, despite the aforementioned views of Melber and Lammert, that Polyaenus did know of the story told at BGall. 5.18, either directly through his own reading of the Bellum Gallicum, or through another version of it that has now been lost, with this text having been written in either Greek or Latin. Into that genuinely Caesarian narrative matrix, regardless of its precise origin, Polyaenus might well have thrown an elephant, together with details concerning the effect that these beasts can have on horses, into what is a fairly standard celebration of Roman military enthusiasm on Caesar's part. Indeed, this brief analysis provides further cause to question Martín García's conclusion that 80 per cent of Polyaenus’ anecdotes come from earlier collections of stratagems – a concern which Wheeler has already raised.³³ What is more, if we maintain the old scholarly view that Polyaenus did not consult Caesar directly, Seel's view that Polyaenus attributed tricks to Caesar that he had found in other sources – a so-called process of Motivübertragung – emerges as a distinct possibility, with his view that a Greek source influenced the rather trite statement about horses fearing elephants probably being accurate.³⁴ In any case, it is clear that Polyaenus was already familiar with the topos of horses fearing elephants: at Strat. 4.12, we read that Perseus, the last king of Macedonia, taught his cavalry not to fear the elephants in Rome's army by making wooden models of the beasts of appropriate size and colour, with a trumpeter located inside to imitate the elephant's trumpeting.³⁵ Thus it seems likely that Polyaenus, a literary trickster who was actually writing about tricks, was wont to weave together a multiplicity of sources of various types and origins, as Pretzler has pointed out.³⁶

CAESAR AND ELEPHANTS: JOINING THE DOTS

It remains, of course, to ask why Polyaenus would have Caesar bring an elephant to Britain in the first place, and why he became so associated with elephants after his death. Perhaps the association had something to do with Caesar's name itself, with the legend, at least according to the hardly reliable Historia Augusta (Ael. 2.3), being that a Julian ancestor had once killed an elephant in battle, an animal supposedly referred to as caesai in a North African tongue.³⁷ Nevertheless, the Romans of the Late Republic generally did not favour the war elephant and Caesar, in around 55–54 b.c., was presumably lacking in any military experience with elephants – even if one might assume that he was familiar with their appearance in venationes, or similar displays in the ring. Caesar did encounter war elephants much later in his campaign against Metellus Scipio and Juba I in North Africa, leading up to the battle of Thapsus in 46 b.c.³⁸ Although these Numidian elephants reportedly did not have too much impact on the Roman forces in any of these encounters, Terry and Upton, extrapolating from a locus in Cicero's Philippics, opined that Caesar intended to make use of elephants in his projected war against Parthia,³⁹ an action which would never come to pass on account of Caesar's assassination in 44 b.c. If Caesar had indeed thought of using elephants against Parthian forces, it would add to the view that he did not completely discount the elephant's military value. Yet it is difficult to suggest, from the aforementioned Ciceronian locus alone, that Caesar had an elephant with him in Britain in 54 b.c. The argument that the elephant was there for psychological purposes, that is, to terrify an enemy who had never seen such beasts, holds little water, for elephants could have had more or less the same effect in many of Caesar's Gallic campaigns.

Moreover, if there is any historical basis at all to the armoured elephant, it is puzzling why Caesar does not make mention of his landing of an elephant in Britain and his utilisation of the beast in the Bellum Gallicum – an important purpose of which was to aggrandise his feats.⁴⁰ Surely being the first person to lead a war elephant to Britain might have rated a few lines. Gowers asserted that Caesar chose to ‘give the whole of the credit to his legionaries rather than to admit that he had made the task comparatively easy for them by scaring the simple savages out of their wits’, but this explanation does not quite ring true.⁴¹ Roman writers often remarked on victories being achieved with minimal Roman citizen losses, or through the employment of auxiliary troops, possibly the most famous being Tacitus’ (Agr. 35.2) description of Agricola's victory at Mons Graupius (a.d. 83 or 84), where victory was supposedly achieved ‘without Roman blood’ (citra Romanum sanguinem).⁴² Achieving a victory without the need to engage Roman citizen soldiers was just the sort of thing Caesar would be likely to report to his Italian audience – a triumph of his ingenuity and tactical nous.⁴³ Stevens, however, contended that Caesar chose not to mention the elephant because Domitius Ahenobarbus, grandfather of one of his political rivals in the mid 50s b.c., rode on an elephant's back after his victory against the Transalpine Gauls (Suet., Ner. 2.1–2), whereas, because Caesar did not conquer Britain, such an action would have made Caesar look foolish.⁴⁴

All this suggests special pleading, as does the contention, also advanced by Stevens, that a certain coin type of Caesar (= RRC 443/1) showing an (unarmoured and turretless) African elephant on the obverse crushing a snake or dragon – assumed by Stevens to be a symbol of ‘Ocean’ – recalls the armoured elephant in question.⁴⁵ The coin, often referred to in Caesarian studies as ‘the elephant denarius’, cannot be dated precisely, but most likely dates from the mid 40s b.c., or perhaps more precisely from 49 b.c. according to Nousek's comprehensive study of this coin type.⁴⁶ Connecting it to the British campaign seems the most unlikely of all the options available.⁴⁷ Nousek has argued that the coin type in question is a Caesarian appropriation of a traditional emblem employed by various political rivals.⁴⁸ In particular, the elephant was associated with the Metelli, the Ahenobarbi, and Pompey the Great, with the snake possibly alluding to tales of the ongoing struggle between elephant and serpent found in sources such as Pliny the Elder (HN 8.33) and Lucan (9.727–33).⁴⁹

Overall, the elephant tale conveyed at Strat. 8.23.5 is indeed unpersuasive in historical or military terms, with a turreted and armoured war elephant seemingly having been stretched over the armature of an actual river crossing recorded by Caesar in his own work, or a later version of that incident. It remains to be asked: what was Polyaenus attempting to do at this locus? Polyaenus’ Strategica was not intended as a history, but rather presents brief historical accounts that are illustrative of particular stratagems, although some sections seem to have more of the flavour of ‘interesting anecdotes’ than actual military ruses. Polyaenus was, according to the much later Suda, a rhetorician, so whatever he writes must presumably be taken cum grano salis.⁵⁰ In any case, the rhetor Polyaenus could, as Krentz and Wheeler pointed out as an overall observation of the technique employed in the Strategica, be ‘adapt[ing] an historical exemplum to suit his own purposes’.⁵¹ This is also more or less the view of Zecchini, but where our assessment differs is that he sees ‘tali varianti’ as being ‘prive di fondamento storico’ and thus complete fabrications on the part of Polyaenus. In contrast, we have argued that such episodes, which ostensibly have no connection to what other sources tell us – like the appearance of an elephant in Britain crossing a deep, protected ford – are based on some sort of underlying vignette, be that either in Caesar or a work following Caesar.⁵²

In this case, therefore, the very idea of using an armoured elephant of immense size bearing a tower to scare an enemy was deemed by Polyaenus to be more important than whoever used it. By extension, the target and indeed veracity of such an action was also deemed to be of lesser importance compared to the overall didactic message.⁵³ While Caesar, at BGall. 5.18, largely attempted to extol the morale of his troops, this being a product of his own charismatic leadership, Polyaenus seems to have used an existing Caesarian narrative as a vehicle to point out something that he felt was necessary to convey to his readers. Such a message might simply be that enemy soldiers can be terrified by that which is unfamiliar to them – which makes our vignette a useful exemplum for any aspiring general, or indeed any rhetor looking for colour in his work, with Wheeler noting that ‘a military treatise [such as the Strategica], not a rhetorical manual, was the proper place to discuss stratagems’.⁵⁴

Moreover, Caesar was to become quite closely associated with elephants, not only on the aforementioned coinage, but also in propagandistic displays held at Rome. For example, there is the story of 40 torch-carrying elephants forming a colonnade through which Caesar passed during his triumph in 46 b.c. (Cass. Dio 43.22.1; Suet., Iul. 37.2), together with (presumably the same) 40 elephants taking part in a mock battle in the Circus in the same year (App., BCiv. 2.102; Cass. Dio 43.23.3; Plin., HN 8.22; Suet., Iul. 39).⁵⁵ One might immediately presume that these animals had been captured in the wake of Thapsus – Caesar's ‘elephant battle’ – although this is doubted by Jennison, who has argued that those animals were insufficiently trained for use in displays.⁵⁶ Whatever the case, stories might have circulated that Caesar not only used elephants in triumphal displays, but also used at least one of them in the field to terrify an enemy. Therefore, there might well have been a broader association of Caesar with the elephant in antiquity, particularly in the decades after his death. This seems the best way to explain what Polyaenus presents at Strat. 8.23.5. Of course, the use of elephants in triumphs, and in a games setting, is very different from the use of elephants in a Roman military setting in the age of Caesar. But Polyaenus, in light of the other apparent fabrications that we have witnessed pertaining to Caesar's Gallic campaigning, might indeed have performed the leap of imagination necessary for the appearance of an armoured elephant in his Strategica. In short, that which might well have been purely ideological in its inspiration, e.g., the appearance of elephants on Caesarian coinage or the appearance of such beasts in Caesar's triumphs, was lifted and placed onto the pages of the (ostensibly) historical.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In sum, Polyaenus’ reference to an elephant of Caesar in Britain remains a tale to be treated with caution. It follows that there is no need to divine some sort of now-lost source tradition to support the locus, such as the now-lost books of Livy that might have captured information that Caesar had dispatched to the Senate, but did not appear in his own published writings. Importantly, the locus serves as a reminder of the difficulty of constructing overarching narratives from various sources of unequal verisimilitude, and with differing literary intents. Simply put, inserting an armoured and turreted elephant into any broader narrative of Caesar's operations in Britain – especially the fording of a river – would appear to be unwise when Caesar, a man not shy of associating himself with elephant imagery, as we have seen with his coinage and spectacles, wrote absolutely nothing of the sort. Regardless of whether Polyaenus ever read the Bellum Gallicum or relied on a source that closely reflected Caesar's writings, be that a source written in Greek or Latin, our analysis of Strat. 8.23.5 suggests that he was not averse to hanging a military lesson on a narrative hook that had very little to do with the message being told. This analysis therefore allows us a clearer insight into Polyaenus’ way of working, and emphasises that his overall goals are generally far from historical. Rather, we have seen, particularly in our comparison of Caesar's words and the corresponding stratagems of Polyaenus, that Polyaenus was wont to add in extra detail not recorded elsewhere, or change elements of the chronology in order to serve his prime intent. To conclude, Wheeler's observation regarding ‘stratagemic doctrine’ is particularly apposite in this case: ‘The trick's the thing, not the historical details’.⁵⁷