Two of the Roman Republic's greatest enemies were Pyrrhos of Epeiros, and Hannibal of Carthage. The most iconic "weapon" in both of their armies, by far, was the war elephant. Pyrrhos used elephants imported from India via the Seleukid Empire in Syria, and they wreaked havoc in the ranks of the Roman army of his time. Italy had never been subjected to an assault by an enemy with war elephants, and the Romans - unsure as to what these monstrous grey beasts were - took to calling them "Lucanian Cows" after the part of Italy in which they were first seen.
By the Second Punic War, the Romans had become slightly more acclaimated to facing these great pachyderms on the battlefield. Hannibal's elephants did him little good - his first batch of elephants perished crossing the Alps, and at Zama his elephants went beserk and turned on his Numidian cavalry. In the aftermath of Scipio Africanus' campaign in Africa, the Romans managed to acquire a number of war elephants, and Carthaginian soldiers trained to ride them and fight from their backs. Alliances with Numidian chieftains like Massinissa also brought an auxiliary corps of elephants into the Roman war machine.
The Carthaginians and Numidians had used the now-extinct African Forest Elephant. The modern-day African elephant is, besides the extinct mammoths and Imperial elephants, the largest member of the elephant family in history. It is both larger and fiercer than the Indian elephant, and is impossible to train for use as a pack animal or a war beast. The Indian elephant is smaller and more docile than the African elephant, but was not so small and docile that virtually every state in southern and western Asia - and by extension the eastern Mediterranean - made use of them in warfare.
The forest elephant of Africa, however, was practically a minature elephant, at the shoulder it was only seven or eight feet tall. They were not strong enough to support a howdah with several soldiers therein, like the Indian elephant, so they were crewed by two men riding bareback. The first man rode directly behind the elephant's head and served as a "driver", though he also carried weapons to defend himself. He also carried a chisel and hammer, used to kill the elephant by piercing its brain if it went beserk and started to attack friendly soldiers. The second man on the elephant sat midway down its back and attacked the enemy with javelins and arrows.
The Numidian tribes of what is now Algeria had made extensive use of war elephants, and had captured and trained many of those used by Carthage during the First and Second Punic Wars. Numidian elephants, driven by native Numidians rather than Romans, fought in Rome's name throughout the 2nd Century BC. They played a very important - and largely overlooked - role in the climatic Battle of Pydna in 168 BC. They were used to terrify Celtic warriors in Gaul and southern Italy - who were as unfamiliar with elephants in the 2nd Century BC as the Romans had been in the days of Pyrrhos. Elephants were also used in campaigns in Spain - including at the famous Siege of Numantia in 133 BC. And, ironically, they formed part of the Army that took Carthage and burnt it to the ground in 146 BC.
Many Numidian princes began to drift away from Rome in the late 2nd Century, but when these were conquered elephants were again made available to Roman generals. Many of the great warlords of the 1st Century BC made extensive use of elephants. Julius Caesar used them as a deliberate terror weapon - Polyaenos tells us that he brought one with him to Britain and it caused the British warriors to recoil and scatter in horror. Caesar fought against Roman armies that were using Numidian elephants at both Pharsalus and Thapsus; on the eve of the Battle of Thapsus he arranged for some of his soldiers to kill some circus elephants, to increase their confidence fighting the beasts. This apparently did much for their skill and courage in elephant-fighting, as at Thapsus most of the enemy elephants were killed or captured with relative ease.
War elephants are very rarely mentioned in the battle-order of the Imperial Roman Army. Claudius brought a few to Britain in 43 AD, and rode one to a meeting with some British chieftains, in an attempt to intimidate them. These elephants may have also stayed in Britain under the command of M. Ostorius Scapula, as he fought to defeat the insurrection of Caratacos.
Two 3rd Century emperors made brief use of elephants - in 193 AD Didius Julianus drafted circus elephants into his army to make it look more intimidating - but this was to no avail, his poorly organized army had low morale and scattered before the advance of Septimius Severus' legions. Caracalla was said to have maintained a unit of Indian elephants, in a deliberate attempt to make his army look more like that of Alexander the Great. Though the Roman Army encountered war elephants in the East at least as late as the 6th Century AD, Caracalla was the last Roman we know of to make use of elephants himself.
It has been falsely claimed that the Romans never made use of war elephants. There is extensive evidence to the contrary, however; war elephants played a major role in the Republican Roman Army, and helped it win at least two of its greatest victories. In the Imperial period, however, the war elephant had declined in usage in the Mediterranean world, and had been reduced to little more than a huge testimony to a single emperor's equally colossal vanity.
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