"Break ranks. Deploy and kill at will!"
With the first shout that they had given throughout the battle, the Hoplites broke their rigid formation and scattered over the arena. They paid no attention to thumbs-up or thumbs-down decisions and, indeed, the crowd was too awestruck by what they had seen to make any motion. One after another, the Essedarii were hunted down and speared. Then the Hoplites re-formed and marched across the arena towards the gate, heads back, chests out, the non-coms calling the step. They would leave Rome the next day to fight in the arena at Pompeii and from thence proceed to Africa to take part in subduing a Nubian chief who had revolted against Rome.
The Hoplites' victory was not popular with the mob. They despised Greeks as effeminate, and no one likes to have his illusions shattered. Besides, the Essedarii had won the favour of the crowd because of their picturesqueness and their unusual skill with their lassos. The Hoplites with their rigid discipline and haughty airs antagonised the rabble. Taunting cries of "Dog's-head, Dog's-head!" were raised to remind the arrogant Hoplites of the great battle of Cynoscephalae (Greek for Dog's-head) in which the forces of Greece went down in defeat before the Roman legions. The Hoplites paid no attention to the jeers. Only once did a Hoplite deign to reply to the taunts. A half-drunken man shouted, "Why don't you relax, Greek? The war's over!"
A young Hoplite officer glanced up at him. "Which one?" he inquired contemptuously. Then the Hoplites marched out through the Gate of Death still holding their faultless formation.
As a climax, a fight was staged with war elephants supported by two companies of the heavily armed Samnites. Thirty elephants took part in the battle, fifteen on each side, all carrying castles on their backs full of armed men. One group was composed of Indian elephants and the other of African. To the patricians and generals in the podium, this battle was of particular interest because it would prove, once and for all, whether the Indian or African elephant was superior for warfare.
The elephants were all males and had tusks. The females were useless for warfare as they would instinctively run from a tusked bull. Curiously, the African elephants were generally smaller than their Indian cousins although a full-grown African elephant is much bigger than an Indian one. This discrepancy was because the Indian mahouts were much more skilled at capturing and keeping elephants than were the Numidian mahouts. The Numidian animals were young bulls and many of them in poor condition.
All the elephants were heavily padded for protection. Most of them came from the government herd in Laurentum near Rome. The Romans occasionally found them useful for warfare, especially against a savage foe who would panic at the sight of the great creatures. It was the policy to spare the elephants as much as possible, both for reasons of economy and because the crowd disliked seeing them killed. When Pompey first exhibited an elephant hunt in the Circus Maximus, a wounded elephant had raised his trunk toward the crowd in the same appealing gesture that a fallen gladiator used when asking for mercy. The sight was so pitiful that even the brutalized mob rioted and the hunt had to be called off. (This gesture is apparently instinctive with elephants. J. A. Hunter, the famous Kenya professional hunter, told me that he had seen mortally injured elephants make the same motion when he moved in to finish them off. His native trackers refused to allow him to shoot, saying, "The elephant is asking to be allowed to die in peace.")
However, although it was the men rather than the elephants who were to die in this engagement, the elephants like every other living thing that entered the arena had to take their chances. The crowd watched, tense with excitement, as the two groups approached each other, the elephants trumpeting as they saw what was ahead of them and curling up their delicate trunks to keep them out of harm's way.
The Indian mahouts sat astride their elephants' necks while the Numidians rode sidesaddle; that is, sat sideways on the necks. The Indians used an ankus to control their mounts, a goad with a curved end like a fishhook. The Numidians' goads were shaped like the letter L. We know these details from a study of the coins put out to commemorate the fights with pictures of the different types engraved on them.
There were three armed men in each howdah, or "castle" as the Romans called them, on the elephants' backs. As the two herds rushed together the elephants used their trunks to pull the opposing mahouts off their perches. If they succeeded, the battle was won, for an elephant without his mahout would not fight and simply turn tail. When this manoeuvre was not successful, the two elephants fought with their tusks, giving angry gurgling cries and each trying to plunge a tusk into his opponent's soft belly. Meanwhile, the men in the howdahs hurled javelins at each other or tried to pick off their opponents with arrows.
One of the young African elephants was the first to flee. Buffeted and gored unmercifully by his bigger, better trained Indian adversary, the young bull could take no more. He turned and ran, pursued by the victorious Indian bull. As he dashed around the arena in terror, the howdah came loose and the occupants were flung to the sand. Directed by his mahout, the Indian bull stopped the chase and turned on the men. Each war elephant had his own special technique for killing men and once he had killed a man, he would always afterwards use the same method no matter what the circumstances. This bull grabbed the men with his trunk and then impaled them on his right-hand tusk. Other victorious elephants were kneeling on their victims, trampling them, or picking them up with their trunks and then throwing them on the sand or against the podium wall.
Meanwhile, the two companies of Samnites had broken into small groups and were following the elephants, sheltering themselves behind the great beasts to avoid the hail of javelins and arrows as modern troops often go into battie under cover of a tank. Once the attack had joined, the Samnites went into action, trying to hamstring the opposing elephants with their swords or rush under the animals and plunge spears into their vitals. The men in the howdahs protected their mounts as best they could. Sometimes they were not successful. One elephant dropped stone dead, killed by a javelin-hit in the eye. Another bull, hamstrung by the Samnites, continued to fight on his knees, grabbing the shields of the Samnites who closed in for the kill and tossing them into the air until he was surrounded by a circle of shields. The applauding mob gave the thumbs-up signal that this heroic animal might be spared, but a crippled elephant is worthless and a well-thrown javelin finished him off.
In spite of the efforts of the Numidians, the African contingent was going down to defeat. The Indian mahouts had pulled several of their elephants out of the fight, and the elephants were picking up thrown javelins from the sand with their trunks and handing them up to the men in the howdahs. The Indians re-formed and prepared to finish the battie. But here came an interruption, the first one of that long and bloody day. Domitian, after a hurried parley with the generals who shared the imperial box, instructed the young editor to stop the fight. There was no longer any question in the minds of the high brass watching the combat that the Indian elephants had proved their superiority, and there was no point in killing more of the valuable animals. The crowd, generally so blood-thirsty, applauded the decision. The Romans liked elephants. Later, Commodus would amuse himself by killing three elephants in the arena, probably by shooting them full of arrows from the safety of the royal box, but at the time of Domitian, there was still some lingering feeling of sportsmanship, especially when it involved such a huge, noble animal.