hannibal and elephants Part.6

Elephants participated in only one of the great victories of Hannibal following the crossing of the Alps: the battle of the River Trebbia, in 218 BCE. Most of the elephants died of the cold that winter, and none took part in the later battles of Lake Trasimene or Cannae.

The one battle in which Hannibal supposedly did have a large number of elephants was that of Zama, in 202 BCE, where Polybius and Livy claim that he fielded no less than eighty! But, as we will see, this pachyderm battalion may have been fictitious, like most of the description of what the classical sources claim transpired at Zama, as was demonstrated in a 2007 article appearing in the International Journal of the Humanities.