Did ancient Romans ride elephants? See, the Romans WERE N’T stupid enough to dismiss a armament that had worked for thousands of times by dozens of fiefdoms( ca not say the same for some chroniclers and pens on this point)
still, they were not cost effective, so they were not used in large figures.
So after defeating Carthaginian War mammoths at Zama in 202 BC, they began to employ the same Numidian abettors to supply them with mammoths. They followed Hannibal’s sound politic use of them- removing adversary cavalry defenses and attacking exposed sides
At Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, the Numidian horsewomen and mammoths snappily charged and shattered one sect of the Macedonian army. When the other locked in combat with the Romans, these forces them hit the Macedonian hand. The Greeks managed to hold them off, but it created a gap that a centurion used to exploit, leading a flanking force of Roman army to follow in.
When the Romans fought the Seleucids at Thermopylae in 191 BC, at first no Roman unit could get past the solid wall of serosae and hail of shafts. still, once the Cato the Elder took the heights, following Xerxes illustration, the Seleucids army was thrown into disarray and the mammoths forced the pass.
At Pydna in 168 BC, the mammoths acted as a screen against the Thracian and Macedonian cavalry. While the Macedonian skirmishers kept them from attacking the phalanx, it handed an reason for King Perseus ’ rebellious patricians to refuse to engage the Romans. The broken terrain disintegrated the phalanx, and the without their cavalry, the vulnerable pike men were cut to pieces by the more maneuverable Roman swordsmen.
At Magnesia in 190 BC, the African mammoths were the reserve- outnumbered 3 – 1 by the Seleucid war mammoths. They and Greek abettors came into play when Antiochus himself and his elite tableware Shields broke the Roman left wing. The Greeks and mammoths corroborated the rallying Romans, and the fortified Roman camp repulsed the king’s attack.
Without the king, the main Seleucid trouble was outflanked by Eugene’s and the Roman right, and both their pike men and mammoths were routed by confederated hunters and slingers. the volume of dumdums broke the Seleucid mammoths and when they fled they took the phalanx with them, fleeing the rout and having their conformation destroyed
As the Roman army continued to conquer, they ran into smaller Hellenistic armies. Hellenistic armies used mammoths since they gave redundant shock to their heavy cavalry, defended them from hand attacks, and delivered their own hand attacks. The slow- turning phalanxes demanded those sides, and cavalry was a critical force on the field.
The Romans really stopped fighting this type of adversary. Sure they could have had some use against the Parthians or Armenians, but the sheer logistics to address only a small quantum of creatures meant that they were not cost-effective. They did not need them. There were further wars with the Gaul’s and other Celtic soldiers, people who did not calculate on cavalry strikes or close order army the same way that the Greeks did. Roman armies had to be more flexible, more mobile, with lesser emphasis on siege rather than grand set piece battles.
They used mammoths when they were useful, and when the mammoths stopped being practical, the Romans stopped.
It’s easy to superficially dismiss them as boomeranging gimmick munitions used by backwards people in lieu of better strategy, but war mammoths had their place. After all, the Romans abandoned the Greek phalanx for centuries and it was also a veritably effective tactic. It’s just that the Romans did not need it for their style of warfare and their opponents. The mammoths did their job when they did emplace, it just was not worth doing it in every crusade or indeed utmost of them.
