As I mentioned in the last post, by the Imperial period, the Romans seem to have decided that elephants were not worth the trouble and discontinued their use.

The best way to think about the weaknesses of war elephants is to look at the question with a specific context, so we are going to narrow in on one of the two key areas where war elephants did not last as a weapon system: the Roman world (both the period of the Republic and the Empire). And next time, we’ll look at why elephants remained popular in India, despite the drawbacks we’ll discuss today. Those uses made war elephants popular not only in India, where they were first developed, but among Alexander the Great’s successors, and even as far west as Carthage. To recap: war elephants had a strong psychological element (they are very scary) and could drastically disrupt both infantry and cavalry alike, leaving them easy pickings for forces supporting the war elephant. Last time ( here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so powerful on the battlefield. Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants.

Rome total war 2 elephants